Why is this image big and low res?

[bcys1961]

This was my entry to the "Get your Geek on" comp.
Feel free to cc the photo if you wish but my main concern is why when I posted , it came out so big and looking low res.

It did not look like that when I was working on it in Lightroom.

My basic workflow is that :

I use LR for my post processing and then export the files using the Export function.

I exported as jpeg , tick the box "Limit file size" and set this to 250k , and also tick "Resize to fit" Long Edge to 1024 pixels. Sometimes the photo's come out looking good and similar to what see in LR ( like this weeks ANZAC day photo ) and sometimes they seem to come out bigger. This one seems to be Low Res and out of focus but it looked much better in LR .

Any clues on why and if I am doing this correctly would help.

[ricktas]

Are you shooting in RAW or JPG? My thoughts are that somewhere along the way you maybe resizing a photo for another site, at say 800pixels on the longest side, and then when you go back to re-edit, you are accidentally grabbing that version, and when you resize to 1024, you are actually increasing the image size and thus loosing detail, definition etc? This is only a possibility as I try and think of a reason for your issue occurring.

[bcys1961]

Hi Rick,

This one was shot in raw . I checked and it is not a resize of a resize as you suggest. Looking at the metadata and also looking at it 1:1 in LR it just seems to be a big photo so maybe even after resize it was still bigger than normal.


Some of the data is :



Focal length :26mm
ISo1600
Exp: 4.9 sec at f13
Dimensions:3456 x 4608

It was tripod mounted , but quite dark in the room as I wanted to get the reflection of screen in the glasses and also have the computer screen as main source of light. Maybe , even with tripod asking someone to sit still for 5 sec is too long and even though it looked OK in smaller size at 1:1 it doesn't look so good.

It's a shame as I was hoping it would go better in the geek comp!

[fillum]

Brad, firstly the image size is correct here. You specified 1024 on the long edge and that is what LR has done - in this case the long edge is the vertical as it is in portrait orientation. I use the resize to "Width & Height" option (usually 1000 x 800 pixels) which means LR will output the largest image possible that fits within those limits regardless of shape of the image frame - if the image is portrait orientation it will be output with 800px vertically (using my settings).

Regarding the 250k limit, I think that the amount of detail in the image (the shirt in particular) means that LR has to use a very low 'quality' value to get the image down to 250K. If you want to check this you can try exporting the image at different quality settings and see what setting is needed to get the image to 250K.


Cheers.

[bcys1961]

Thanks Phil ,
that would make sense , if it has to get the image down to 250k it it will sacrifice resolution? I will try a few different settings.