How do I smooth out "fuzzy" pics?

[girlee32114]

I'm not sure if i'm in the correct forum but i need to know, why is it that on some websites their graphics look kinda fuzzy (for want of a better word)?? While on some, the graphics are extremely smooth. How can I prevent this fuzzy look? Any suggestions?

[girlee32114]

I'm not sure if i'm in the correct forum but i need to know, why is it that on some websites their graphics look kinda fuzzy (for want of a better word)?? While on some, the graphics are extremely smooth. How can I prevent this fuzzy look? Any suggestions?

[stlewis]

If the images are jpg's, then they are compressed to make the file sizes smaller. If the compression is aggressive, then 'artifacts' get more noticeable. This often shows as a 'bloom' round shapes.

The solution is not to have too many graphics on a page so that you can afford to have one good quality but large image without making the page too slow to load.

Or use gif images which are ok for flat colour but not compressed.

Here is a VERY compressed jpg. Uncompressed it was 5703 bytes, compressed to maximum in XaraX it is down to this yucky 863 bytes:

www.bricksandbrass.co.uk

[BobInce]

girlee, are you an AOL user?

AOL try to save bandwidth by sending requests for images through a proxy cache that also compresses GIF and JPEG images more than they are already compressed. This achieves a marginal improvement in speed at the cost of terrible-looking images.

You can turn this feature off from 'AOL Internet Properties'->'Web Graphics' as a user, but if you're a webmaster and you don't want your images mangled for the majority of AOL users who have not turned it off is to use an image format that AOL's proxy doesn't undersrtand, such as PNG, or animated GIF.