The downsizing challenge - Part 1: The Problem

[esym]

Fred Miranda makes an excellent tool for downsizing.

http://www.fredmiranda.com/WP_Pro_Plugin/

It's available for Mac and PC. 

[Andrea B.]

Thank you for all the comments. And also to Werner for his good examples.

My initial two tests were simply to show what a baseline photo would look like with only resizing and no additional sharpening. We need an unsharpened Resize for comparison purposes.

The third test was to show that crude "aftersharpening" is not desireable.

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Andrea Test Four:  Converter Plays No Role in My Resizing Problems

Now I'd like to begin to turn to a finished result from my typical Photo Ninja conversion and enhancement procedures so that I can show you my resizing difficulties. I'll just stick to the D810 photo on this or we will get bogged down in too many comparisons.

First of all, I want to say that the actual converter used plays no particular role in any resizing problems. So let's show that quickly.

Here is a comparison of a Nikon NX-D conversion and a Photo Ninja conversion. NO EDITS were applied in either of these conversions except for proper colour balance. When using Nx-D, any in-camera sharpening would typically be retained, but I removed it here in order to keep the two conversions as equal as possible. When using Nx-D, distortion control will be applied to any recognized Nikon lens. I removed that also for the sake of equal comparisons. You will see some very small differences in how the two converters handle highlights and colour. This is expected between any two converters - especially if one of them cannot fully read any in-camera settings.

(1) Nx-D Conversion with No Sharpening
(2) Photo Ninja Conversion with No Sharpening

[Andrea B.]

To further show that both converters render details equally, here are some unresized crops ("100% crops").

Yeah, stuff looks terrible with no sharpening when viewed at full size.

[Andrea B.]

Andrea Test Five:  Finally!! The D810 Resizing Problems

I edited my photo in Photo Ninja and applied my typical enhancement procedures. If it is of interest, I can later describe my PN settings in detail.

• Highlights were pulled back a bit but not fully because it would have looked wrong. The strong morning sun to the left combined with some cloud scrim would naturally cause the upper left portion of the sky to be very bright. Midtones were pulled up fairly strongly to show the morning light as I saw it. Shadows were opened up a small amount for no particular reason except that I like that "look".

• The Detail slider was set to 15. The Sharpening slider was set to 75/.6.

Here are how the two detail excerpts above looked after the various corrections & enhancements. Looks better, doesn't it now?

BTW, IMHO - there is a "art" involved in viewing unresized photos at full size. They never look as good to me as the resized versions do. Viewing distance becomes very important (circle of confusion and all that) and I typically fail to compensate and look too closely!! 

[Andrea B.]

[Note from Andrea:  I have to break up the presentation because photos get clumped together at the bottom of a post which makes it difficult to write about them and keep the writing near the photo.]

Andrea Test Five - Continued

Photo Ninja offers a 1/8 resize option (among others) which resizes the original D810 7360 x 4912 px photo to a postable 922 x 616 px. Thus I am going to use a 922 pixel width for these next 3 resizes.

(1) Photo Ninja 1/8 Resize of the Edited, Sharpened Photo.
Problem: looks quite crunchy and blocky. It would seem that PNinja applies further, quite crude sharpening and perhaps contranst to the resized photo. Not good. So, to compensate for that in the next resize attempt, I removed the original sharpening.

(2) Photo Ninja 1/8 Resize of the Edited, UNsharpened Photo.
I removed both the PNinja Detail setting and the Sharpening setting and then made the same 1/8 resize in PNinja. Problem: Not as bad as the preceding, but I think that PNinja's resizing "enhancements", whatever they are, have ruined some of the brighter areas. And the photo doesn't look sharp to me. Where did all that lovely detail go?

CONCLUSION 1:  Do not resize in Photo Ninja ??
Too bad, because I really do love the way it converts.

(3) Photo MECHANIC 922px Resize of the Edited, Sharpened Photo - with NO additional sharpening.
Problem: This resize might be a bit better than the two preceding, but does not seem optimal. Or particularly sharp.

(4) Photo MECHANIC 922px Resize of the Edited, Sharpened Photo - with PMechanic default sharpening.
So this one has a double dose of sharpening. The PNinja sharpening edits were not removed and the PMechanic default sharpening was used.
Problem: Not sure. My eyes have gotten tired, but this one seems somewhat better than the preceding 3 efforts. I'm sure it is not optimal.
What do you think?

CONCLUSION 2:  I need to refine my Resize & Resharpening techniques & apps for the D810.

(5) Capture Nx-D Conversion, Edits and 922px Resize
Problem: Everything. I am simply unable to achieve the edits I want in this app. I think it has actually made the D810 raw conversion look worse than the in-camera JPG whose edits Nx-D supposedly preserves!! But here is my effort anyway just for the record. And so that we can compare the Nx-D resize to the other resizes.

CONCLUSION 2:  I need to refine my Resize & Resharpening techniques & apps for the D810.

(6) Capture Nx-D Conversion, Edits and 922px Resize - followed by resharpening in Nx-D using USM10-5-5
I was not sure how much to push the resharpening? I hope this looks better.

[Hermann]

Well, I'm still pretty much a beginner when it comes to raw converters. However, I personally like to resize in NX-D after doing my usual enhancements. The results are pretty good, I think, and I also quite like NX-D in its latest incarnation. I always remove any in-camera sharpening  before resizing, convert to a jpg of the size I need, and then sharpen, often just using USM in NX-D.

If it's a shot that really matters I use other software for sharpening, usually Gimp.

Pretty simple workflow, but it's fast and straightforward.

Hermann

[Andrea B.]

Hermann, I'm relieved to hear that Nx-D is working for someone. My effort above was a disaster!! I'm not sure why I am so bad at using Nx-D. I've tried but I just do not do well with it.

[charlie]

Facebook's max pixel size is 1.600 or something (they change it regulary) I would suggest to make the file smaller around 1200-1400 region when using it for FB. I never mess with the percentages (because I don't know what actually is 'changed'  and always keep it at max.

Charlie, Simone, John and John, thank you for the advise given so far. Downsizing to 2048 and providing a JPG at 80% or a PNG will be the next things we will try.

Perhaps the facebook specific sub topic should be its own thread so we don't convolute this thread to much?
That said I just found this on facebooks website: https://www.facebook.com/help/118731871603814/


How helpful did you find this answer?
How do I upload high-resolution photos?
For better quality photos, check the High Quality box when you create an album.... then it goes on to say how to do it...


How can I make sure that my photos display in the highest possible quality?

We automatically resize and format your photos when you add them to Facebook. To help make sure your photos appear in the highest possible quality, try these tips:

Resize your photo to one of the following supported sizes:
Regular photos:   720px, 960px, 2048px (width)
Cover photos:   851px by 315px
To avoid compression when you upload your cover photo, make sure the file size is less than 100KB

Save your image as a JPEG with an sRGB color profile
You can also set it so that your photos are uploaded in HD by default.

[Andrea B.]

Andrea Test Six:  Converted (PNinja), edited (PNinja, includes sharpening) photo resized in Photoshop Elements.
No resharpening is added after the resize because this test is simply to judge the basic qualities of these PS tools.

Later I'll run a test on the PS resizer using the UN-sharpened version of the photo converted in PNinja.

We already know that a couple of the 5 possible resizing choices are not going to look good, but I'll include them for the sake of completeness.

(1) PSE Nearest Neighbor
(2) PSE Bilinear
(3) PSE Bicubic
(4) PSE Bicubic Smoother
(5) PSE Bicubic Sharper

CONCLUSION:  I think it is obvious that the (5) PSE Bicubic Sharper choice is the correct one for this landscape photo. This is, of course, absolutely no surprise. 

[Andrea B.]

Andrea Test Seven:  Using Photoshop Elements Bicubic Sharper resizing tool, apply it to both a pre-sharpened and an un-sharpened version of the photo. Show results first with no resharpening, then with some light resharpening.
I'll use the same PNinja conversion as before. In that conversion I applied Detail = 15 and Sharpening = 75/.60.

(1) PSE Bicubic Sharper resize applied to PNinja converted, UNsharpened photo. No further re-sharpening.
(2) PSE Bicubic Sharper resize applied to PNinja converted, already sharpened photo. No further re-sharpening.
I think that (2) looks best. But that's not to say that (1) might not look good after it gets some re-sharpening. Given that I'm not sure what kind of resharpening to use and that I do not have Big Photoshop, I might not get this quite correctly done the first time.

(3) Resized #1 sharpened photo with resharpening: Adjust Sharpening 25/1.
(4) Resized #1 sharpened photo with resharpening: High Pass Overlay 0.5 px.
From this set I think that I slightly prefer the High Pass Overlay sharpening in (4). But then an adjustment of the other sharpening tool might be called for? The problem I see is that some colour artifacts have been introduced in both. Look on the fence on the left side. Perhaps I need to sharpen only on the Luminance layer? This is harder to do in PSE, but can be done.

(5) Resized #2 UNsharpened photo with resharpening: Adjust Sharpening
(6) Resized #2 UNsharpened photo with resharpening: High Pass Overlay 0.5 px.

[Andrea B.]

Suggestion: pick ONE version from each post which looks best. The compare your choices.

I think I like this one but I'm no longer sure because I have stared at this photo all day. I'll look again tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone who is participating. I am reading all your comments and suggestions about various ways to downsize.

[simsurace]

Thanks Andrea. This is a lot of data to look at. I will need more time to come back with any meaningful feedback.

[Andrea B.]

Simone S:  So far, using a D810 landscape, I have illustrated downsizing using PS(E), Photo Ninja and Photo Mechanic and included downsizing with no resharpening before and/or after.

Maybe the conclusion here is that such detailed D810 landscapes cannot be downsized in a way that preserves as much detail as we would like to see?

I need to evaluate how much my Retina screen is or is not "getting in the way" of evaluating these D810 photos. I currently have it set to "Best for Retina" display.

[esym]

Andrea,  Here's a version downsized from the (4912 x 7960) .tif file -- no adjustments.  I used the WPP tool with no sharpening and then added a trace of smart sharpening (18% 0.2px).  File saved at 600 x 900, Jpeg quality 7 (240 kb).  The WPP tool uses a stair-step reduction process but also uses a custom (linear) gamma during the reduction process which preserves the look. 

[Andrea B.]

Thank you Bill. We'll add this to the evaluation.