Creating a montage w. high-res photos

[trinityaffinity]

Hi everyone,

 

Using Affinity Photo, I am trying to make a 637x325 montage of 6 pictures. These pictures are high-res and large (3146 × 2106), but whenever I try inserting them into the montage (either by copy+pasting or using the "Place" function in Affinity) and resizing them, they look incredibly pixelated and low-res.

 

I have tried everything from first reducing the image sizes and then placing them into the montage, rasterizing the images, but nothing works. My question is very similar to the question asked here, and I have also tried the suggestions in that thread (switching from Nearest Neighbor to Bilinear), but again, I can't seem to get the images to look okay.

 

I am new to Affinity (and have never used Photoshop before), so I would appreciate any help. Thanks in advance!

[Madame]

Hi.

 

Have you checked the resolution on the background? Just a thought.
 

[trinityaffinity]

Hi.

 

Have you checked the resolution on the background? Just a thought.

 

 

Hi Madame,

 

Do you know how I can do that?

[MEB]

Hi trinityaffinity,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

You are reducing the size of you images considerably so it's natural they will look a bit blurry after the resize and may need some sharpening.

Regarding pixelation, are you seeing them (your montage) on your screen at 100% zoom level? That's how they will be exported and how you should evaluate them. 

Any chance you can post a screenshot of the montage at 100% zoom so we can see what are you dealing with?

Thanks.

[trinityaffinity]

Hi trinityaffinity,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

You are reducing the size of you images considerably so it's natural they will look a bit blurry after the resize and may need some sharpening.

Regarding pixelation, are you seeing them (your montage) on your screen at 100% zoom level? That's how they will be exported and how you should evaluate them. 

Any chance you can post a screenshot of the montage at 100% zoom so we can see what are you dealing with?

Thanks.

 

Hi MEB,

 

Thanks for your response. Even at the 100% zoom level, the montage's images still look pixelated. You can see a screen shot of the montage (again, at 100% zoom) below. Keep in mind that all of the images in the montage are very high-res photos taken w a DSLR.

 

[crabtrem]

Forgive me, but I am unclear on what your final result is supposed to be.  Are you saying that you are making a montage from high res images into a composite that is 637x325 pixels total?

[trinityaffinity]

Forgive me, but I am unclear on what your final result is supposed to be.  Are you saying that you are making a montage from high res images into a composite that is 637x325 pixels total?

 

Yes, exactly.

[crabtrem]

I would say your problem is inherent in the total size of your montage.  No matter what you start at, you are reducing the pictures down to approximately 100 pixels or less in dimensions.  And that means your detail will be degraded no matter what you do. You may try to reduce the size down using various resampling methods for each picture on their own to try and get a better result.  But I am not sure you will get results much better.  Pixel counts are absolute to the final file and the resolution detail available.  All I can recommend you do is to try and increase your total pixel size of our final montage if possible.  You may want to try a very large composite to begin with, and then begin to export your final down to various sizes trying various resampling methods as you go.  There will be a point where you just won't be able to go any smaller for the detail desired.  

Of course these are only my personal observations, and may not be complete.  But I feel that it is the crux of your problem.

[trinityaffinity]

I would say your problem is inherent in the total size of your montage.  No matter what you start at, you are reducing the pictures down to approximately 100 pixels or less in dimensions.  And that means your detail will be degraded no matter what you do. You may try to reduce the size down using various resampling methods for each picture on their own to try and get a better result.  But I am not sure you will get results much better.  Pixel counts are absolute to the final file and the resolution detail available.  All I can recommend you do is to try and increase your total pixel size of our final montage if possible.  You may want to try a very large composite to begin with, and then begin to export your final down to various sizes trying various resampling methods as you go.  There will be a point where you just won't be able to go any smaller for the detail desired.  

Of course these are only my personal observations, and may not be complete.  But I feel that it is the crux of your problem.

 

Hi crabtrem,

 

Is there a specific resampling method that you would recommend? I have tried all the settings offered (Nearest Neighbor, Bilinear, etc.) but none of them really make a substantial difference.

 

Also, as I mentioned earlier, I am new to Affinity/photo-editing, but what you're saying sounds very counter-intuitive to me. A 637x325 montage of images could never appear to look sharp under any circumstances? I am making this for a website banner, so I cannot increase the size at all--does that mean that it will be impossible for me to get the pictures to actually look decent?

[mac_heibu]

Is this that difficult to understand?

Imagin, you have a person's portrait in 5000 x 5000 pixels dimension and you shrink it to 10x10 pixels – what do you think, the eyes look like? How many pixels can be used for one eye in the first, how many in the second case?

[R C-R]

What crabtrem means is that you can't "shrink" the pixels in a large, high resolution photo to fit into a smaller number of pixels. A pixel is the smallest unit of color information in a photo (or any other kind of bitmapped) image -- each pixel can only have a single color value. So when you reduce the size of a photo by resampling it, regardless of the method, pixels must be discarded as part of the resampling process.

 

So for example, if your photo is 3000 by 2000 pixels (6 million pixels total) & you reduce it to just 200 by 150 pixels (30 thousand total), 99.5% of the original number of pixels must be discarded & the remaining 0.5% can be just one color each, regardless of how many colors there were in the original pixels each of them replaces.