Hi all. I'm working on series of panos at the moment. The original shots are crystal clear ( 3 shots) stitched together and reduced to fit the Web there seems to be a loss of detail. Am I doing something wrong? or will this always happen? The attached pano is my 3rd attempt. Any suggestions will be appreciated. Steve

P.S. Workflow, open New image over 9000 pixels, copy all 3 shots into new image (seperate layers for adjustments) at full size. Save as PSP image, Blooming big file, PC nearly gives up!!!. Reduced to 3000 pixels as .psp file. Reduced again and saved as jpeg. Steve

I suppose it all depends on what the photo consists of. Ive stitched together panos thats been 12-15000 pixels wide and when ive saved them for web at a size of 1000 pixels wide ive gotten a filesize of 100 kb, but the next time it might be more than 500kb. I suppose its like it is with any other shot...depends on what the subject is. I noticed that this one is 1400x316...and the filesize is only 76kb....im not surprised it seems to lack quality. Im not familiar with PSP, but dont you have some kind of quality-slider? A pano like this....that big...should at least be 3-400kb big in filesize i would think if you used decent quality-settings. Another little pointer that you might wanna consider whenever making a pano...try to have something in the foreground. A tree or something, to really to really give it some "ooomph". Beautiful scenery by the way. #:O)

Cheers Andreas, I will attempt version 4, 'Quality slder'? I will search the help files in PSP. The other thing I just thought might be the pixels/inch on the new image file(200 ppi at the moment) not sure if that will make a difference. I will check that out as well. Off to work...Thanks Steve.

don't know for sure steve, but you might have less loss of detail if you saved it as TIFF. might be worth a try. i use PSP, steve...i don't know what a quality slider is. how are you reducing it? i usually reduce mine bicubic resize at 90%. Takes a bit longer to resize that slowly, but i certainly noticed a big difference once i started doing it that way. i don't lose detail. i've never done a pano before though. gorgeous scenery and you did a fantastic job stitching! :)

Good looking panorama - doesn't need anything in foreground as it has shore line there, and well composed for it. I don't know the file format .psp is it lossless? I use .tif files for my panoramas as it is a lossless format, even if compressed. Panoramas are big, and the only real way around this is more RAM or less detail from smaller file sizes unfortunately. If you are saving and compressing for web, which means .jpg of course you loose quality as it's a lossey format. Photoshop has a 'save for web' function that many don't realize to use, it gives compression in 1% increments, perhaps something similar lurks in PSP? For print however, keep your ppi to 300 if possible and the largest size you can handle. Also one thing to check with that program is if a scrach disk can be set for images - where it puts the undo's, temp files - and if so move it to a drive that doesn't have PSP .exe on it. This is how Photoshop should be set for speed and large files so.... Cool landscape btw. tim

Thanks Shelia and tim. Tim, a .psp file is the same as a .psd file in Photoshop, i believe. I will check the rest out. The photos are raw files taken direct into PSP therefore not file save as TIFF. Version 4 coming when time permits at 300 ppi, see what happens. Also check out save to WEB function, I think PSP also has that. Thanks, Steve

scaling an image inherently introduces fuzziness. You'll need to use a sharpen filter to correct that. First resize then sharpen. Took the liberty to sharpen it a bit. Ofcourse the jpg artifacts are enhanced too because it's not the original uncompressed file, but you get the idea

3Dguy, wish ithought of that, mmmm. Thanks. Intresting how the file size has gone at least 10 fold in size. Steve

10 fold? It's gone from 76kb to 92kb. That's hardly 10 fold. And that increase is due to the fact that I used the high setting when saving for web.

Just wanted to add my 2 cents worth. I find .tiff files to be very stable and do not convert to anything else till time to post to web. They are also usable in both programs. I have ps7 and psp9 and i don't think psp has a convert to web feature like ps. The quality settings are selectible when you save the file. Dpi and quality settings can be greatly different depending on how the image will be used. Web requirements are a lot less than those for print.

Message edited on: 11/22/2005 15:37

Thanks again all. @3dGuy, my mistake, sure there was another zero there last night. Must get more sleep,,,,,, Steve