The First Step

[sambam]

[Daisy Mae]

Andrew's comments on your other thread 'Beauty Through Movement' are even more relevant here.

I don't think any of us can properly critique your work until you have addressed the Artifacting, that has to be your first priority.

[sambam]

I don't know what to do! I shot them in raw. They look fine on my laptop, then I upload them and they are bad

[RustBeltRaw]

Web-based downsizing methods are often designed to be fast at the expense of image quality. The best way to avoid this is using Photoshop or a similar program to reduce your images to the size they'll be displayed at online. Tricky, since many sites (Tumblr and Facebook included) dynamically resize images these days. CiC's most meticulous uploaders create versions of their shots at a forum-appropriate size (800x600 or so), then sharpen after downsizing.

[sambam]

Is Elements not supposed to work?

[Andrew76]

Sam, Elements works just fine - in fact quite a few members here at CiC us it as their sole editing software.

What Lex was trying to convey was that when you export your files from Elements, it would be a good idea to export them as a size that the forum (or the entire interweb for that matter), can handle. Say 800 pixels x 600 pixels.

If you do NOT do that, then you are leaving the sizing (and how it's done, usually through mutilation), up to the software provided by the application. In the case of CiC, we use TinyPic.

Does that make anymore sense to you? If you need some help in learning how to resize with Elements, I can help you out with that too, just let me know.

[Lon Howard]

Is Elements not supposed to work?

Elements works just fine for resizing, Sam. For sending to CiC via Tinypics I go with 1200 pixels width on landscapes and 800 pixels height on portraits, accepting the default for the other dimension. Make sure Constrain Proportions and Bicupic is checked.

Taking those pixels away softens the image so then one must re-sharpen just a little before sending ... you can experiment to find the right amount. I recommend creating an action to do all this, it'll save a lot of time. Then save as a jpeg (highest quality).

I have recently noticed that for me, the version that appears on CiC is slightly softer than my re-sharpened and saved jpeg that I uploaded. So ... I am slightly over-sharpening ONLY the version I send to CiC (I do that before image downsizing). After sending I trash that version so that it doesn't show up and confuse me later. That seems to have cured that issue for me.

This should optimize your image for sending via Tinypics but I doubt that it is a factor in the artifact issue that others have pointed out. I have been through this myself, and I can say with certainty that in my case, the artifacting was caused by my efforts to create special effects to somehow make the image more than it was in the first place. Re-creating all your processing steps to sniff out the culprit is something you could try.

[sambam]

Thank you very much