I was wondering if I'm saving my file incorrectly as it's looking very soft. I"m choosing a max file size of 250K and the longest edge as 1024 pixels, as per the rules. Pixels per inch is 250.

When I view it in LR it's pretty small but at least fairly sharp at that size. But when I upload it to the competition it shows it much larger on the screen, and consequently it looks much softer (pretty crap actually).

Am I doing something wrong or is this just the way it is? If the latter, do we need to take sharpness with a pinch of salt when assigning a score?