Saving photos: what format need help

[loveofdrawing]

Hi all. I wanted to ask you how you all are saving your photos. Mine look great in photoshop but when I upload them they get fuzzy and desaturated. Should I save them as jps at 300 dpi? Should I use a different program? What am I doing wrong? I have a great camera, slr and it takes nice shots.

Thanks!

[Former_Member]

save as jpg 72 dpi thats the typical screen resolution. 300 dpi is for printing

They don't seem fuzzy and desaturated to me

Gary

[Former_Member]

If you're talking about the pictures you have in your shop, they look nice and bright to me.

[loveofdrawing]

Ok great guys thanks! Maybe I'm being a perfectionist. Other people's photos always look brighter to me. Thanks! :)

[Former_Member]

To me they look TOO bright but then it depends on the screen one has and how it's calibrated!

[TerraRhapsody]

I initially save in photoshop to a .png from my DSLRs .RAW images. I would love to use those all the time, but they're huge files that take ages to load compared to their .jpg counterparts. I get a bit annoyed when converting them, but just try to ensure you've got the best quality .jpg you can get.
Your photos look great from here!

[PrairiePrimitives]

I would save them as jpgs. 72 dpi is all the web can read, so saving them at a higher res will only make the file (much) larger.

I'm on my phone and your pics are soooo bright they almost hurt my eyes. Seriously. I was not inclined to look at the pics long enough to even see what you're selling.

[Former_Member]

I save mine as pngs, but they're lower-resolution - listings only show 570 pixels-wide photos anyway, so you don't need a huge high-quality picture - you can have small high-quality pictures instead. ;) All my item photos (the ones that aren't saved at 500 pixel width so they look good on wordpress and tumblr as well) are in the 600 to 800 pixels width range. 72 dpi.

Your pics look really bright to me, too, with yellowish highlights. Maybe your monitor is darker or has bluer highlights.

[loveofdrawing]

Thanks for your help. I will adjust them :)

[PiecesofMeCardsnMore]

The blue & green cat cards are very bright on my monitor. I thought it was my laptop because depending on the angle I set it and the lighting around me, things can look brighter or darker (it's a challenge to get my own photos right because of that).

I set my images at 1200-1500 pixels. I want them larger when someone clicks the zoom button to get a better look. Etsy recommends 570-1000 pixels. I've noticed that if it's too small and I click the little zoom button, it doesn't look any larger than what already appears in the listing. That can be pretty frustrating when I want to get a more detailed look at something.

[Former_Member]

JPGs are a good format, flexible. I save two versions of my better photos, a 300dpi and a 72dpi, so that I have some printable images on hand, but can also use the small files online.

[StuckOnSilver]

Danielle, maybe you could save several photos of the same item, post them, and see if there is a difference. I think your photos are unsaturated and do need to be reworked. Good luck!

[Former_Member]

Ouch. Looks like they are brightened way too much, and likely due to an effort to overcompensate for a poor lighting environment in which the photos were taken. You may actually like to reshoot these with more natural lighting and try to avoid the flash.

Another thing that is possible is that your monitor is not set to view well and you may be adjusting them with a monitor that displays too darkly — thereby, brightening too much. Try viewing these images on another monitor and see what you think.

[loveofdrawing]

Thanks everyone!!