Photos look clear on camera but fuzzy on phone

LawofFashionLawofFashion
edited April 2016 Posted in » Nikon D3200 Forum
I'm shooting in manual, JPEG, small image size and I've noticed that the picture looks very clear on the camera, but when I try to look at it on my phone, the clarity is lost. I've tried both transferring the DPI from 300 to 72 and then sending it by email and I've also sent the picture directly to my iPhone untouched and they always lose clarity. Any suggestions?

Comments

  • brutobruto
    edited April 2016
    Guessing here, as I don't have an iPhone.

    Have you downloaded a picture to a computer screen and looked at it there? If it's clear on a computer screen at least you can be sure it's not the fault of the picture. It can be hard to evaluate an image on the camera's little screen.

    I don't know how an iPhone processes images, but would suggest for starters that you use the largest and least compressed JPG file to start with, to minimize the cumulative compression. JPG images are re-computed and compressed every time they're resized.
  • LawofFashionLawofFashion
    Thanks! They're pretty clear on the computer. I went from using large photos in raw to small in jpeg and it didnt seem to make a difference.
  • brutobruto
    edited April 2016
    I'm guessing that this is a compression problem. Can you zoom in on the iphone images? Excessive compression will often show up as visible artifacts, especially at edges, that can be seen to be different from plain old blur. You may also see that solid areas look blotchy.

    I hope some iPhone expert can chime in here, as I suspect there may be an option for how the phone treats images. Some computer programs that convert to JPG have a choice of algorithms, and it makes a huge difference in quality.
  • LawofFashionLawofFashion
    I can zoom in but they definitely look fuzzy on the iPhone.
  • brutobruto
    edited April 2016
    Well, I am unsure what to suggest next except to do some more research on how files are processed. As an experiment, I dug up a shot with some pretty sharp elements in it. The original 24 megapixel Raw image was extremely sharp. I reduced it to 700 pixels wide, a radical resizing, but did this in two forms. The left is the best JPG algorithm I have (Lanczos2) at 100 percent quality, and then a tiny bit of sharpening to restore some of what was lost in the downsize. The right is the same shot, also reduced to 700, using a poorer algorithm, at about 20 percent quality level. The file size of the first was 640 KB, the second about 28KB, a radical difference. But you can see how much the low quality save has degraded it.

    http://jmp.sh/nxB0gHC

    Note, by the way, that the sharper JPG is still considerably less sharp than the full sized image was, though it's not too bad. The viewer her has a zoom function, and if you zoom in on the right hand image, you will see the kind of artifacting that is typical of a low quality JPG save.
Sign In or Register to comment.