But that is not the case, because the right-click save-image-as version of that photo is not blurry. So it can't be the Picasa Web servers - it must be Chrome. For comparison, I made a screenshot and cropped the contained photo to it's visible borders - and guess what? The saved photo is one pixel higher than the version on screen. I checked and double-checked. It's true. I tried Firefox then, and when I had the Firefox window at the size where I would get the 1152 pixel version of my photo, I compared again - and the photo is not blurry in Firefox either.
Chrome does something weird to photos. It does not display the photo in the size that the Picasa Web server delivers it to me, it scales that (already scaled) image again - by one pixel! And that makes the whole photo blurry.
But that's not all. Chrome also does something terrible to the colors, and I stumbled upon it while making the above comparison with Firefox. In the past, I blamed the sRGB color space for that, but it's Chrome! I export all my photos directly from Lightroom to my Picasa Web Album and use the sRGB color profile. However, in Firefox the colours (especially blue!) appears exactly as it should be, but in Chrome, it's simply way off.
Here are the two screenshots (just click on the for the full size file, both files are about 1.7MB) as lossless PNG files, first Chrome:
And now Firefox. Look at the blue of the sky:
What can I say... Google delivers an excellent photo hosting service that gives us ultra-fast navigation, biiig photos, and lots more, but the appearance of the photos sucks when you're using Google's own browser. That's quite a pity, isn't it? I love Chrome, but I wonder how many photos I looked at were the colors where not what they should be. Ouch, that really hurts.
Addition on 18-Sep-2010: Please read the Post Scriptum follow-up, too. :)
I can't see a difference between the two screenshots, neither in chrome nor in firefox (viewing on EIZO 24"), but well, my eyes are probably not as trained as yours.
ReplyDeleteThe difference may be subtle in this photo, but it is visible: the Chrome rendition of the photo has a more saturated blue in the sky and it is lacking a slight shift of hue into magenta that is visible in the Firefox version.
ReplyDeletePlease read the follow-up "Post Scriptum" article on how to make Chrome at least respect the local color profile for your monitor.
I totally agree. I spent hours trying to figure out why my photos appeared so lossy whenever I uploaded them online. Finally figured out that the problem was actually with Chrome, not with the compression techniques or with the post-processing.
ReplyDeleteI can't see how Chrome would alter the appearance, other than the color. If your photos appear "so lossy", the browser maybe simply scaled them down to fit the window size? I once accidentally had it set to zoom to 90% or something and was wondering why all the photos looked crappy.
ReplyDelete