Hi everyone. I'm back with the new PC running smoothly :) I had a couple of days of hard work re-installing everything, had to dig out the licences of my job softwares, etc, but today I was able to catch up with the galleries at last! I took some 300 images in a session and was really marveled by the high quality of some, left lots of comments and I noticed again that the "excellent" ones are more and more by the day... plus, seeing them on the big monitor instead of the old 15" is pure heaven! So, now I'm running to complete my challenge entry... luckily, tomorrow is Sunday so I have all day to work on it. Sheesh... just in time! :) So, I pester y'all with a veeery-newbie question: now I have this wonderful 1280x1024 res. Great. But: the proportions are different from the usual 4:3... this will cause some problems in viewing (doesn't seem so) and posting images at 800x600, 1024x768 and so on? And vice-versa? (example: if I render an image at 1280 __ likely, as I like to have them as wallpapers __ people using the 4:3 ratio will have some problems in seeing it?) I know this sound stupid, but... for me it's the very first time I go over 1024... Have a nice Sunday Stefano

I usually post at 800 x 600 but if you look in the Fractal Gallery, you will see all sorts of sizes! Post what you like! Tres

What will happen is that people with the smaller screens, their browsers will show the image as is but will have scrolling bars for virticle and horizontal scrolling. If you ask most people, they find that to be a pain in the butt when it comes to viewing an image they would like to enjoy in its' entirety. So most people upload images that are large enough to offer good clear resolution but small enough to fit entirely in most of todays screen sizes, that being within either 640x480 and 800x600 range. The most popular screen sizes today are 1280x1024, 1024x768 and 800x600. This being the case, logic dictates that 800x600 (4:3 ratio) should reasonably be the largest image size for comfortable viewing. BTW, good luck and enjoy your new rig.

I also use a res of 1280x1024. Normaly the change between 4:3 and 5:4 isn't really a big problem. You don't really notice 4:3 image as squashed or the other way around. I usually render at a res of 1280x1024, and if people want to view the image as a whole they can always take it in a 2D-program and size it down. My browser (IExplorer) also lets me fit the image inside the screen if I give a direct link to the image.

I render at 1280x1024 (my screen res), postwork, then store the resultant file as a LZW tiff (for my usage). I then resample to 1024x819, apply a bit of adaptive unsharp filter, then cut paper size to 1024x768 and export a jpg copy to my uploads file folder. Then another resample down to 200x150 and resave into thumbs folder.

Thanks a lot, people :)