Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
I'm a bit confused. You say "not upscaling" but then also "when you zoom in". If you are zooming in only enough to get to 1:1 then sure, I agree that the image should have been created to look clean at that level. But after that you're upscaling with all the inevitable issues.
But that's not something I've ever noticed on covers unless it was undersized and so required upscaling - in which case I'd blame the image size rather than JPEG compression. I do see plenty of undersized covers. If they're JPEG they go blotchy in the solid colours, if they're PNG they just go pixelated, and neither is attractive.
This all makes me think of those TV shows where they're showing surveillance footage and they manage to blow up three pixels into a clear image of a face and then they pick out the reflection of the killer in the person's eye or something.
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IME, I've found that there are innumerable instances of self-pub DIYs that end up putting thumbnails of their covers--seriously, say, 200px x 300px--in their eBooks. Now, at Amazon, they've tried to stop that, but having a separate cover upload, but some people upload books without a separate cover, so the renderer uses what's available.
I've also found, over the years, that there's just...people don't understand size versus resolution, pixels (PPI or DPI) versus inches, etc. It's a bit of a hopeless battle. Those that don't understand it rarely have enough interest to pursue it and many who would be interested don't have a math brain and thus, kinda get it but don't.
What's killer is that for an ebook reader/device, anyway, it's not even that damned hard to figure out--take a glimpse at the average pixel dimensions of the screen and use something close.
(sigh).
Discrete and discreet are a pair of my bugaboos, too. But...my take is, those of us who care are dying out and being cheerfully replaced by cavalier users, so in maybe a single generation, we'll simply be gone and happily forgotten.
Hitch