It would be ideal if every image we took could be displayed as a fine art print on somebody’s wall. These days, however, most photographs will be viewed on a screen via a website, so it is important to prepare our images for optimal viewing on the web. Unfortunately many websites, such as Facebook, further process the images we upload, compressing them and causing loss of detail and sharpness and introducing glitchy artifacts. Dedicated photography sharing websites, like 500px.com and WhyTake.net, handle our images with much more care, but the bottom line is that once we upload an image to any website other than our own, how it is processed and displayed is beyond our control. For this reason it is even more important that we do as much as we can to optimize our images before posting.

One of the most frequent questions I receive is how I get my images on the internet to look as good as they do. Various talented people, none of them me, have developed a variety of excellent techniques for preparing images for the web. Thanks to them, people like us are able to feel confident that the images we share look as good as they can. Sizing, sharpening and using the correct color space are the three most important elements of prepping images for optimal web viewing. I cover this topic in some of my tutorial sets, but it comes up enough that I wanted to address it on the blog and my YouTube Channel. In the following video tutorial I cover several techniques for sizing and sharpening images for the Internet. Some of the techniques can be easily accomplished on your own in Lightroom or Photoshop. Other techniques involve very advanced, multi-stage sizing and sharpening algorithms programmed into actions, scripts or plug-ins. In the notes below the video I include links to all of the web sizing/sharpening apps I demonstrate in the video. If you have a web prep technique or app that you would like to share, please comment in the blog comments or on the YouTube page. Sharing is one way we all progress.

Apps I reference in the Video:

Web Sizing/Sharpening Examples

(Click on images to accurately display size and sharpening)

Sized to 1050 pixels with no sharpening.

Sized to 1050 pixels with no sharpening.

Single sizing/sharpening pass, sharpened with Photoshops Smart Sharpen filter.

Single sizing/sharpening pass, sharpened with Smart Sharpen filter in Photoshop.

Sized and sharpened with TKActions Web Sharpening

Sized and sharpened with TKActions Web Sharpening.

Photo Cascadia Logo

Keep in touch with

Photo Cascadia

Join the mailing list to receive the latest news, articles, events and workshop updates from our team. We publish one newsletter every two months.

Thanks for subscribing!

Pin It on Pinterest