Hi, is there any way to reduce the level of compression that Auctiva applies to image quality? The heavier compression of jpeg images currently being used has the effect of making colours less defined, accentuating saturation of certain colours and making images appear less sharp.
Please note, I am not referring to the size (pixel dimensions) of the images - I am talking about the level of jpeg compression currently in place. I am experienced with photo quality levels and have been noticing a stronger compression rate in recent times. As a result, I cannot show my images on ebay at the quality they are produced originally. I am going to need to look into another image hosting site if I can't get this resolved.
Could you please implement an option to allow users to turn off - or at least considerably reduce - compression, at the expense of their personal bandwidth/storage limits. I understand that Auctiva is compressing in order to save storage space and bandwidth on their site.
The problem for me is that I sell some rare and high value items which customers need to see in accurate detail. I spend a lot of time taking and refining my images to truthfully portray the item, and prove its quality and condition. But my Auctiva images appear over-saturated, less sharp, and with incorrect overall colour reproduction. Therefore the items appear in worse condition than they really are. A lot of people don't understand this compression process, and so when they see a poor quality image they just presume the item itself is in lesser condition.
Jpeg compression groups colour information together - the result being to have less information contained within the file, and therefore a smaller filesize. For example, instead of a hundred possible shades of a particular colour, it gets reduced to ten shades. So that colour starts to look more uniform and like a block, without definition. It's very similar to mp3 compression in audio terms.
So the subtleties of colour shading begin to disappear. A more specific example - with increasingly heavy compression a photograph of a piece of grass starts to look like painted concrete instead. The loss of shading means that edge sharpness is affected also. My original images that I shoot and refine with Photoshop are far clearer and sharper than my current Auctiva displayed images, and it's becoming a problem. I am now uploading my images at a smaller physical size, because at the larger size I used to use, they look terrible. They still don't look very good at a small size... It really is becoming unusable for me personally.
Thank you.
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