question about quality

Okay, I have a header/banner on one of my sites that's a .jpg - appears with a clean, crisp quality.

Now, I visit this frequently, and after a while the face gets all blurry and looks really bad.

My questions are - 1)what's causing this 2)do my visitors see the same 3) how do I fix it?

Also, would a .png take to long to load?

 

An image shouldn't change no matter how many times you visit... I don't quite understand what you are talking about

 

image doesn't change no matter how long or how much you load it. you might want to visit your doctor

 

Seeing an image in my site with the face changing and getting all blurry would sure make me crap my pants...

 

if you are viewing your site via aol or some dial up providers they compress the images and decrease the quality, to decrease load times

that is usually what they are doing when the "accelerate" a dial up connection

 

Ah... that would be it. Dang dail-up. (no highspeed in my area )

Thank you much.

Now, for the few of the other dial-up, would making this file a png do any good, or is there nothing I can do?

 

no, jpeg or gif are th best to use for banners, pending on use of colors etc.

 

jpg inherently hurts the quality of an image. png is best. But, nevertheless the image will not look worse on a webpage than it does solo unless it's getting resized on the page.

 

You should also keep the filesize in mind imo, seeing that aol and dial up hate big pics, and if you have a colorfull image to compress .png sucks compared to jpeg

 

Absolutely. You can get pretty good image quality with a jpg with a smaller file size. As a dial-up user, you'll appreciate trying to get total page size (including graphics) as low as possible. Ask yourself this: if you were a visitor instead of the site owner, would a possible small increase in image resolution be worth an extra couple of minutes for the download? or would you rather havbe the page load quickly and get to the content faster?

 

If you have the image the correct size when you add it to the site and not resize it to fit you can optimize your jpg for 56k. But a png or gif are always smaller and load faster. So if you do not want people going off to the doctor ..after visiting your site on dial up..maybe you should change your file type.

 

this is not true... jpg is good for photo-type images while png/gif is good for images with clean lines (e.g. cartoonish type images). all image formats have their strengths and weaknesses...

 

Corena, you're saying png is smaller than jpg?

I suck at graphics generally but I thought it was the other way round...

 

no one can answer this question because the answer is: it depends on the image...

if you take a photograph (e.g. at the beach), jpg will almost always be smaller than gifs or pngs (at the same quality settings). however, if you have an image of logos (where it's mostly vector-like lines), gifs and pngs will almost always be better of in terms of size as compared to jpgs (at the same quality settings)...

 

I meant for the same image - I guess I should have specified that.

For "graphics" and logo type images, I almost always use GIF. For photos, almost always JPG. That's what I was questioning because it sounded like Corena was suggesting that the PNG format would be better for photos than the JPG.

Thanks.

 

nope... pngs and gifs are about the same in terms of strengths and weaknesses (i personally think png is better than gif)...

the png format was developed because a company surprised everyone by claiming rights to the gif format and wanted to charge money for its use...

 

png. and gif's do not show the photo images as well..you lose color information. That is why you should always look at the image in a photo editor and have it the correct size...before you place it in the site. If you resize in a site editor..like a wysiwyg html editor..the images become pixelated and mis-shapened.. In a image editor you can decide which is better ..faster loading smaller file or a smooth edged image..jpegs will give a smoother more colorful image..but you give up load speed.

Sorry took me so long to answer.

 

Could be simple: do not use progressive compression on jpeg files. If you noticed there are jpeg files that while loading they come sharpner, Starting with blured and in phases they are filled with details in horisontal lines.

Problem could be that your browser loaded once partial jpeg and since then in your cache is that version - partial and blured.

Anyway, do not save jpeg as "progressive"..

 

seems very strange..

 

It's been awhile since I used AOL but this can be diabled so you will see graphics properly.

This page will show you step-by-step (pictures) how to turn it off.

http://www.saratogahosting.com/aol/

It used to annoy the heck out of me too.