Noisy Desktop Background

[enVision]

Hi team,Normally once I've processed a photo in CS5, and then save it as a .jpg, when I open the file in Windows Photo Gallery, the photo looks fine.A couple of times, I've wanted to set one of my photos as my desktop wallpaper. However I've noticed that when I do this, the photo becomes extremely noisy. So I'm curious as to know why, when I set the photo as the wallpaper does it appear so noisy, compared to when I just open the file and it looks fine? I've added a desktop screenshot below so you can see what I mean...

[junqbox]

Don't know, windoze has all it's own way of seeing the world. Nice pic though.

[ameerat42]

?Monitor display settings? (Is it set to at least 24-bit color?)
?The original is rather small and pixelates on magnification? (Try using one that's the same width as you monitors native display, eg, 1920 pixels wide.)
?Am?

[fess67]

^^^ what ameerat said.

Make sure you save the jpeg with the same dimensions as your desktop and let us know how it looks then.

[enVision]

Yeah thanks guys. I resized the image so the long side was 1366px wide. Fixed the problem. Photo looks fine now.

Thanks all for the quick replies

[arthurking83]

yeah, if the actual image used for the desktop display is smaller than the native resolution of the screen, it may be set to fit the image to the screen and hence possibly some form of interpolation.

if your screen has resolution of x pixels across and y pixels vertically, just make sure that one of the resolution figures of your images equals the x o y values of the native screen resolution.
if the image is saved at a resolution that's larger than that of the screen, the OS will down scale it to suit.

I have no display issues on my Win7 or Win XP PCs ... even tho all three or four PCs all have different resolutions. And screen quality on all machines are not really high end screens either.

[enVision]

Yeah, I realise that now haha. The image was always saved at a much higher resolution (6600px wide), and so when the image was set as the wallpaper, the computer obvioulsy scaled it down, but I think in doing that, it made the image look funny.

In photoshop, I clicked 'Save for Web & Devices'. In there, I set the image to 1366px (which is how many px wide my screen is), and set it to save as bicubic - sharper. This seems to have worked perfectly.