Export Photos as JPEG and they result in blurry pixelated photos

[Rachel75]

I'm a complete newbie when it comes to playing around with images in affinity but I was trying to make a collage for a Pinterest cover photo and the pictures were pretty small so I’m pretty sure they weren’t being enlarged. It was 15 different photos on a 800x450 pixel document. On affinity the pictures look great, but after they are uploaded as a JPEG and I open the file it looks terrible. What am I doing wrong? It also looks horrible saved as an affinity file. I’ll also attach a screen shot of what it looks like before it’s saved or exported. Should I be saving this as a PNG instead? If so, wouldn’t a PNG take up a lot of space on a website and slow it down? I’m asking because I also plan to use these photos on a blog I’m creating and I don’t want to slow the speed of the site. Every JPEG I’ve exported, even outside of affinity, looks terrible and it didn’t start that way. 

 

 

reaping-revival-pinterest-cover.afdesign

[NotMyFault]

Designer has multiple view modes, in the navigator panel on the bottom right side.

By default it uses vector mode, giving the impression of unlimited resolution for vector layers. Placed images are vector layers with a bitmap fill.

Choose view mode pixel to get a more realistic preview how the exported versions will look.

You would need to increase the document resolution (in px units) to reduce the blurriness or pixelation.

[Rachel75]

Thank you for the explanation. So for the Pinterest cover photo they recommend that it be at least 800 x 450 pixels so that’s what I made the document size as. Should I have made it much bigger that way it would be shrinking down once I uploaded it to Pinterest, or are you saying I should increase the DPI? If I should make the document bigger, how much bigger would you recommend? If I should make the DPI higher, how high would you recommend?

[Rachel75]

Or what if I saved it as a pdf or svg, would that even work? Also, if it would work, would it be a big file size that could potentially slow a website down?

[GarryP]

39 minutes ago, Rachel75 said:

If I should make the DPI higher, how high would you recommend?

Ignore DPI; for on-screen stuff that’s mostly irrelevant and makes no difference.

35 minutes ago, Rachel75 said:

Or what if I saved it as a pdf or svg, would that even work?

Forget SVG and PDF for this; you are exporting rasters (bitmaps) so adding the extra SVG/PDF ‘wrapper’ would not be of any use.

The image you are creating only has 450 pixels vertically so that’s the number of pixels you have to ‘work with’ when you export as a bitmap – it’s not very many so you need to be able to see the pixels you will be ‘working with’ to understand what will be exported.

So, as mentioned above, switch to Pixel Mode to see the actual pixels which will be exported.

As you can see in Not My Fault’s example above, each of the bees in the original image is only about 5×2 pixels in your document so you will get pretty-much no detail at all – the software cannot create ‘sub-pixels’ for more detail as no normal screens can display ‘sub-pixels’.

Imagine trying to make a bee out of 1cm × 1cm coloured paper squares but you only have 10 of them and they must be in a 5×2 arrangement. (That’s not a perfect analogy as it doesn’t cover instances where the bee is at an angle, where the problem gets much worse, but it should give you some idea of what you are trying to do.)

Basically you are trying to show too much in a small (pixel-dimension-wise) space and you will either have to put up with the loss of detail or remove some of the images.

There may be tricks to getting the exported image a bit ‘clearer/sharper’ but if the possibility for detail isn’t there and it can’t be created then there’s little you can do about it.

[Rachel75]

That’s disappointing. I’m confused because I see pictures on other websites and blogs that are of great quality and I don’t understand how they are getting that. Thank you @GarryP and @NotMyFault for taking the time to answer my questions, it’s very appreciated.

[GarryP]

You're welcome.

Without seeing an example I can’t say how they might have achieved that but my guess is that they are displaying different images (of the same subject) at different resolutions under different circumstances – similar to clicking on a thumbnail image to see the full image, i.e. getting served a different image depending on how you’re viewing it.

Note: This isn’t a limitation of the Affinity applications, it’s just how pixels work everywhere; they are ‘finite self-contained things’ which can each only show a single colour with (possibly, depending on file type) a single opacity.

Edited November 11, 2023 by GarryP
Added note.

[NotMyFault]

1 hour ago, Rachel75 said:

Thank you for the explanation. So for the Pinterest cover photo they recommend that it be at least 800 x 450 pixels so that’s what I made the document size as. Should I have made it much bigger that way it would be shrinking down once I uploaded it to Pinterest, or are you saying I should increase the DPI?

Simply make a bigger document with much more pixel.

There are countless websites explaining which size, aspect ratio, and other parameters should be used to optimize for upload to Pinterest. As these recommendations change overtime, please search on your own as any advice given here may become outdated very soon.
Search for: pinterest image size guide

[NotMyFault]

48 minutes ago, Rachel75 said:

I’m confused because I see pictures on other websites and blogs that are of great quality

If you find an image of better quality, inspect it what format, size etc is used and try to create the same.try to use the maximum allowed resolution, not the minimum.