How do I improve the upload resolution of images?. Images are fuzzy after uploaded.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

At what image format is your original image saved at?  For the best resolution possible you have to keep any saves from the creation of the image to the final save of the image in lossless formats.  For SL that would be TGA, PNG or BMP.  Those formats can be uploaded to SL (though once they are uploaded the SL format for images/textures is JPEG200 which is a lossy format.  The goal is to keep all saves at lossless formats so you never loose any more detail that is absolutely necessary.......in the perfect world that is the format that the LL servers save and store the image.  But nothin's perfect as you know.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

At what image format is your original image saved at?  For the best resolution possible you have to keep any saves from the creation of the image to the final save of the image in lossless formats.  For SL that would be TGA, PNG or BMP.  Those formats can be uploaded to SL (though once they are uploaded the SL format for images/textures is JPEG200 which is a lossy format.  The goal is to keep all saves at lossless formats so you never loose any more detail that is absolutely necessary.......in the perfect world that is the format that the LL servers save and store the image.  But nothin's perfect as you know.

[Freecilla Kuhn]

Upload jpeg images for solid images and png for images with transparency in them. Keep the longest size, (height or width) at either 512 or 1024 and make sure the other direction which will be a lower number is an even number. Try not to use too many images in one area that are 1024 or loading times could take a while, (laggies).

[Rolig Loon]

Recent upgrades of the V2 viewer have had some blurriness issues.  From what I hear, these have been resolved for the next upgrade, so you may want to use either a previous version of V2 or one of the third party viewers until then. 

If you are talking about textures that you made yourself and have uploaded to SL, however, the problem is likely to be something you did.  For example, if you created a texture with dimensions 400 x 175 pixels, SL would automatically change those to 256 x 128 pixels on upload.  (Textures in SL must have dimensions equal to 32, 64,128, 256, 512, or 1024 px.) If you stretch that image back to the aspect ratio that you intended originally, it will look blurry.   There are several other possibilities like that.  Take a look at the tutorials at >>> http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Texture_Tools 

[Peggy Paperdoll]

I'm not trying to be nick picky here but, as a read Faubio's question, she was asking how to improve the resolution of an image and not the demenson of the image for upload.  The powers of 2 has nothing to do with the quality of the image if the image is of low quality to begin with..........a low quality image/texture and the proper power of 2 demenson will remain a low quality image/texture because the pixels are not quality.  Compressing an image/texture will reduce the quality......once it's been reduced it cannot be retrieved.  If you take a picture with your digital camera and your camera saves the images at JPEG, you've lost quality on the very first step.  If you edit that image with an editor and in the process of your editing you make 1 or 2 additional saves to come to your final image to upload to SL and those saves were also at a lossy format (such as JPEG) you'll lose quality at each of those saves...........the the SL software is going to introduce one more lossy format on it's save to the servers.  You've lost a bunch of quality and sizing the image (or cropping the image) will not recover it.

 

Maybe I read the question wrong...........Faubio?

[Rolig Loon]

It will affect the image quality in the example I gave, Peggy. If you start with an image that's 400 x 175 and it's downsized on upload to 256 x 128, it has changed aspect ratio from 1/0.43 to 1/0.5, squishing it more in one dimension than the other. If you or I had been making the texture, we would have known to make its aspect ratio 1/0.5 to start or, even better, to make it 512 x 256 px. When OUR well-made textures were uploaded to SL and stretched to fit a prim, they'd already have the right aspect ratio. If the poorly-made one were uploaded, we'd need to stretch one dimension more than the other to get it back to 1/0.5, and we'd make it blurry in the process.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Yes it will. The deminsons are important on upload as you stated..........both width and height must be at one of the accepted powers of 2. And what I'm saying (because that's the way I read the question) is the resolution of the image is low quality. There was nothing about distortion..........which improper deminsions will introduce. JPEG's are nice and small.............they are very good for what format was invented (Web pages). If anyone is looking for quality (and that is primarily a resolution thing) you will need to save every pixel you can during any save you might do before uploading to SL. Upon any editing you do and save the deminsions don't have anything to do with quality, The powers of 2 is an SL requirement for their saves to their data drives. If the image has been saved at every step of whatever the person does to it before uploading is at a lossy format, regardless of the deminsions, it will be poorer quality than if the person saved everything at a lossless format.

 

My example. Some takes a snapshot in world and saves it to their hard drive...............the format that person saves that snapshot at is very important. Save it as JPEG and it's really a crappy looking picture even if deminsioned properly and you won't be able to improve it no matter what you do. Save it at TGA , PGN or BMP and keep it at one of those formats throughout any editing and crop or size to one of the accepted powers of 2 you'll have as much quality as SL can produce.

[Rolig Loon]

Yup. I think we're approaching the same answer from two directions, Peggy. It's easy to mess up image quality with a few poor choices -- either in making the image in the first place or in uploading it.

[Chic Aeon]

I do photography here for a "living" here in SL and have done lots of experimentation.  Here is what I have found.

If it is an inworld photo like a vendor photo. Take a HIGH RESOLUTION version (this is a choice you check on your snapshot pane at least in most viewers). Do everything you want to do to said photo at a large pixel size (doesn't really matter too much , whatever you are comfortable with)  and THEN crop and resize.

If you are making a custom texture to put on a building, furniture etc. the same rules apply. Start with a larger than needed size and then resize at the end.

It really does work out best if you keep to the SL standard sizes, so 512 x 512 or 512 x 1024 (not much reason to do 1024 x 1024 unless you are putting it on something REALLY large as the rezzing time for a 1024 x 1024 is four times that of 512 x 512 (obvious when you do the math).

If you need your texture to be other than a 1:1 or 1:2 format, then take your graphic (say 768 x 512) and resize it to (512 x 512). Don't let SL do it as it adds one more opportunity for fuzziness.

 

Here is the important part: After you have resized and before you upload SHARPEN your image. How much you sharpen will depend on your software and the look you want.

Many third party viewers (Imprudence for sure and I think Phoenix) will let you upload a temporary texture and see how it looks. It will not work for long, but you can check for clarity before spending money to upload. Imprudence will even let you bypass the temp upload and check from the file on your computer (yeah!).

There is really no way to get a fantastic texture inside SL for now. It degrades quite a bit over the version you save on your hard drive. I usually use TGA by the way, but I can see no difference with PNG files. The best you can do is try and keep things as high resolution and sharp as you can before you upload.

 

You are not alone. We all have this problem .

 

 PS. You want to save the file to your hard drive of course, not save to your inventory and then save it out to your hard drive. That seems pretty obvious, but just sayin' *wink*

 

[bee Baroque]

yes, phoenix has the temporary upload feature - as well as the local browser.

i love that feature - use it all the time \o/

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Faubio, I see a difference in deminsion between the two images.  I can't be sure (due to my having to mentally upsize for downsize one of the images vertically), but the PNG image looks like it is a slightly higher quality. 

 

I'm assuming your are more interested in those artifacts.  I can't imagine what would cause that unless you saved the image at a 16 bit color depth.......like GIF format images.  What image editing software are you using?  I can possibly help if it's GIMP and I know Rolig can if it's Photoshop.  And, I'm sure others can help too.

 

Edit.........cancel my bit depth comment.  I see what you are saying.  I'm with Rolig, if both images were at the same deminsion I don't think you'll see any difference.

[Rolig Loon]

Nice chicken, Faubio!  :smileyhappy:

Yeah, it looks like a combination of the issues that Peggy, Chic, and I wrote about in our replies.  It looks like it's partly the file format (JPG) and partly the change in aspect ratio on upload. 

[Rolig Loon]

@Faubio -- I just sent you a copy of your chicken in world. Saved it in Photoshop, cheated a little bit by padding out top and bottom with a few pixels to make it a square image, reduced it to 256 x 256 px, saved it as TGA, and uploaded to SL.  It looks as good as the original image you posted.

[Bozz Larsson]

I have had this problems as well recently. Hate it. But if you have a pic - lets say ending up with 998x886 - then i get best results by - Squeeze it - or rather scale it down to 512x512 in PS/Gimp or other. Maybe first cut original down to 886x886.

The scaled picture will keep more details when its uploaded into automatically 512x512 inworld SL.