Photobucket/Flickr To Hose The Photo Competitions?

Hi how is everyone doing,

After the image quality thread i have being thinking how i can help out to stop any off the issues raised in this thread,

And one thing that i see that kept coming up was the like off Photobucket/Flickr to use as a hose,

As the members that wants to send in a photo and upload it to this and then send me over the link in a email this was the image quality that is uploaded from the members is what i get over and there is no resizing or have to reduce the image quality from the email as it seems that when i get the image that when it is sent in the email it is getting re-sized/reduced in quality.

Just looking for ideas as i don't want to go down this way if it is going to be more effort for all the members, as it is hard enough to get numbers in for the photo Competitions i don't really want anything else to add to it.

So just looking on your views and by if everyone is up for it and doesn't mind uploading to ine off the above before sending it over to myself we could try it out on a trial basis.

I am not to sure how it will go on my side off things as it might not even work when i go to add them to the forum but sure we can see how it goes and hopefully i can get it to work into the forum?

So your views/ideas would be great,

Thank you

Sean

Hi.

Maybe we could use both ways, old and new?

I wouldn't go to the n-th degree on this to be quite honest.

Although changed quality is a concern, there are going to be problems with any method.
Things can get too convoluted.

I would not be convinced that quality is reduced within the transport via e-mail itself.

Flickr only gives correct reproduction if you pay for the professional account, for example. The amount to which that is noticeable depends on the original photo file.

The reality is that the jpeg conversion process decides itself how to set the image....which bits to reproduce correctly and which bits to digitise and which bits to soften or give other artifacts.

BUT, jpeg is the universal file format......so the forum cannot demand using TIFF or other higher quality formats simply because the lowest common denominator has to be the benchmark (ie jpeg).
It is easy to convert a RAW or lossless TIFF file to JPEG but it is simply impossible to convert a jpeg to TIFF with TIFF quality (don't try it as you can make the TIFF file, but it is still a JPEG).

If the forum wishes anonymous photos put up here, then it is going to have to go via a central point (BlueRam) to deal with the photos. That is quite a responsibility and would assume that that central point has the appropriate software to faithfully reproduce a converted (re-sized or whatever) image.

Now, the 'sizing' bit.........that IS a problem.

re-sizing means dimensions and file-size.
The rules of the competition state a file-size limit, but the dimensions limit is ambiguous.

The forum engine itself may add constraints on dimension sizing.....I have had problems with some of my photos in recent times in that I have had to re-size my photos on photoshop to get them to fit here (and I simply do not wish to re-size my photos else I end up with a copy of a photo for each forum or web-site I use).

A 1 megabyte photo from my mobile photo is enormous in dimensions, but a 1 megabyte photo from the DSLR cannot be any bigger than postage stamp (which if expanded to be seen is just a big digital block), and pictures from a compact camera lie somewhere in between (ie users of lower end compact cameras have a massive advantage over users of pro-DSLRs or mobile phones).

That cannot be resolved so easily, and hence is the convoluted effort worth it?
These are not photos intended for print reproduction afterall.

But, never say never.

ian

Thanks very much ian i do see who you are coming from

I have just being thinking from reading your post if it is done this way and i get sent over the links if this link is posted to the forum will it not show the users account/username on photobucket?

It would more then likely have to be saved on to my laptop and again this could cause some quality or sizing issues?

Ian just out off the blue you wouldn't by any chance know any good software out there that could be used on my mac to deal with this as i seen you say you are not sure if it is cause off the email?

i was looking into this yesterday and i seen that when a photo was sent to me it was only 28,18KB but when the OP sent it over it was near the 201KB mark so from his laptop to the email to me receiving the email it changed in size?

Sean

It would be unusual for the saving of the file to cause any loss in quality.

If, however, the file were sent in a zip file (or similar) then that could cause some loss in quality (depending on how it was compressed in the first place and on the decompression).

With jpeg, the file on the computer may say "200 kbytes" but if you open a jpeg in, say, photoshop then it may show the file to be 3 megabytes......that is because jpeg is a compression format anyway.
The software used to open the file also introduces loss in quality if its decompression engine is not up to scratch.....and then when that is saved, it will be a permanent loss of quality and so on and so forth with the photohosting site adding its own mess and then the forum engine here also trying mess with the file.

As I said, for many images that is not going to make much of difference...but for some images the compression software will get confused.

I don't want to go into the maths of why this all happens as that is simply too much for here on a sunday morning though

In looking at a photo, for example one recently in question by Melander, if that were taken on a pro DSLR using lossless RAW or lossless TIFF then it would be the standard size of the cameras file.
But, when converted to jpeg it would compressed to a much smaller file that would be, say, the winning photo if taken on the same camera.

However, when the software to open Melanders photos decompresses the file it will give a much bigger actual size but with failures in the decompression algorithm.
The result of that would be a softening of the edges and murkiness creeping into the predominantly dark background.....ie the jpeg algorithm would 'guess' the colours and make a average because much of the photo is much of a muchness wrt backgound.

Now, I'm not saying it is because of a dark background....but a file having large amounts of area that are effectively similar will cause a jpeg compression to do more averaging of the background.

In conventional photography, black backgrounds are also a problem for a different reason (and that same reason is seen in photos on lossless files).....you don't get true blacks if you don't zap the photo with loads of intense light (low-light causes loss of black and that will cause a different problem in digital photos....but that is another story).

As for Mac software.......I don't know what is free and what is available.

I use a mix of Nikon Capture Editor and Photoshop.
But, the Nikon software is a rip-off as you still have to buy the full version of the software to use it with the expensive camera you've just bought, and photoshop costs a small fortune.

I do quite a lot of photo conversions for printing, and some submissions are just not workable if the person has taken them from their own Flickr or Photobucket account.
For the printing I use, I need to set a certain contrast level and convert files from RGB to CYMK.....but the distorted pixels from Flickr or Photobucket really mess up that ability.

ian

I'm learning allot today.

It does however sound that it could be quite complicated to solve and I think it could get messy having people upload their own photographs. I'm fine leaving it as is unless there was a simple solution.

Sean is right though, the distortion seems to happen even before the photo is uploaded to photobucket. I have checked my hotmail outbox and it says that the attachment was around 201Kb but when Sean receives the email its only 28Kb.

The photo in question was taken with a DSLR camera in RAW format; the only editing that was done was cropping, resizing and then saving it in jpeg.

Melander

What about setting up email address say in gmail or the likes, for users to send their photos?
This way it would be very easy for any member to just wack it on to the email and done.
I know photos still have to be processed, but at least they would be processed by one person on one pease of software, which would make it more fare from quality perspective, say for example if someone could unintentionally mess up his own photo by trying to reduce the size of the file..

As for Ian's comment regarding zip.. Not sure if there is much point to do a zip on jpeg, since jpeg is already archived image and its done a lot better that zip could, especially that you are saying that after unzipping, picture might come out as it was before.. Simple way of explaining jpeg maths me explaining maths here it combines areas.. Or colours. So if you take a picture that is all black or all white.. RAW or BMP would be same size as any picture of same dimensions would as it has stored colour of each pixel, but here come jpeg. One colour picture in jpeg will take next to nothing in space and image will take a lot more space, as its able to combine the are of one colour as one colour, this way taking very little space.. Then there are tolerances in colours combined, which I think is classed in compression levels.. In Nikon cameras you have 3 of them if I remember correctly. You can loose a lot of detail by converting to jpeg, especially cramming it in to 1MB. It's just not fair to someone, using DSLR, where RAW file can be 16mb or a lot more.

Hope some of it is understandable

smitas5 wrote:

What about setting up email address say in gmail or the likes, for users to send their photos?
This way it would be very easy for any member to just wack it on to the email and done.
I know photos still have to be processed, but at least they would be processed by one person on one pease of software, which would make it more fare from quality perspective, say for example if someone could unintentionally mess up his own photo by trying to reduce the size of the file..

As for Ian's comment regarding zip.. Not sure if there is much point to do a zip on jpeg, since jpeg is already archived image and its done a lot better that zip could, especially that you are saying that after unzipping, picture might come out as it was before.. Simple way of explaining jpeg maths me explaining maths here it combines areas.. Or colours. So if you take a picture that is all black or all white.. RAW or BMP would be same size as any picture of same dimensions would as it has stored colour of each pixel, but here come jpeg. One colour picture in jpeg will take next to nothing in space and image will take a lot more space, as its able to combine the are of one colour as one colour, this way taking very little space.. Then there are tolerances in colours combined, which I think is classed in compression levels.. In Nikon cameras you have 3 of them if I remember correctly. You can loose a lot of detail by converting to jpeg, especially cramming it in to 1MB. It's just not fair to someone, using DSLR, where RAW file can be 16mb or a lot more.

Hope some of it is understandable

Wow, yes it's understandable but i doubt i'll remember half of it, thanks.

In the last competition we email our photos to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., would this be different from a set up gmail account for instance?

Cheers,

Melander

@JohnH......me thinks that Circles of Confusion, Transfer functions and Hyperfocal length are the next topic for discussion.

If you thought those topics were bad enough in normal film cameras, then they get even trickier in digital.

Fortunately, though, many lenses for digital cameras are poor quality.....if they were not such poor quality then the photos would be almost unusable unless the camera has software to deal with high quality lenses.

When I stick my proper Nikkor Lenses on a modern digital, all the flaws of the digital system are shown up.
Lower quality lenses work as an anti-alias filter to soften the blow.

As Smitas says, there are different levels of jpeg. Some cameras also have different colour space choices, and if the software does not recognise those colour spaces then pixel detail will be lost or incorrectly interpreted (this being especially so with jpeg compression that attempts to look for 'similar patterns' to compress the file).

Zipping is just adding another compression to a compression and then another decompression level....so many jpeg do not zip well any and there is the potential for file corruption.

I do, however, have multiple files sent to me in zip folders (for convenience of the e-mailing), and have not really found any problems....although I usually ask for either an original tiff or raw if available.

ian

Melander wrote:

smitas5 wrote:

What about setting up email address say in gmail or the likes, for users to send their photos?
This way it would be very easy for any member to just wack it on to the email and done.
I know photos still have to be processed, but at least they would be processed by one person on one pease of software, which would make it more fare from quality perspective, say for example if someone could unintentionally mess up his own photo by trying to reduce the size of the file..

As for Ian's comment regarding zip.. Not sure if there is much point to do a zip on jpeg, since jpeg is already archived image and its done a lot better that zip could, especially that you are saying that after unzipping, picture might come out as it was before.. Simple way of explaining jpeg maths me explaining maths here it combines areas.. Or colours. So if you take a picture that is all black or all white.. RAW or BMP would be same size as any picture of same dimensions would as it has stored colour of each pixel, but here come jpeg. One colour picture in jpeg will take next to nothing in space and image will take a lot more space, as its able to combine the are of one colour as one colour, this way taking very little space.. Then there are tolerances in colours combined, which I think is classed in compression levels.. In Nikon cameras you have 3 of them if I remember correctly. You can loose a lot of detail by converting to jpeg, especially cramming it in to 1MB. It's just not fair to someone, using DSLR, where RAW file can be 16mb or a lot more.

Hope some of it is understandable

Wow, yes it's understandable but i doubt i'll remember half of it, thanks.

In the last competition we email our photos to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., would this be different from a set up gmail account for instance?

Cheers,

Melander

No mate this would not be the case as i have ot setup that when a photo is set to that email it comes into my own hotmail account so would be the same as sending to a gmail account

Ok lads i do see a lot off points here and a lot off great info thanks to you all

But i have being thinking about it all day today and have came up that i know some photos lose a bit off quality but not to much to stress over and at the end off the day every photo that is put into the photo Competition is done the same way so i think this is fair and since now all seems to goes well

If we can come up with a simple fix by all means ill do it but i think the case comes to mind if its not broke don't try fix it

I hope all is with me on this?

At the end off day we are a fishy forum that is trying to have a bit off fun and to make it fair for all people off all photos standards

Hope i am not upsetting anyone by this as this is the last thing i wish to do

Sean