Website image quality issue with Publisher 2007

[ildra]

I created a website with Publisher2000 which includes a lot of
pictures (inserted jpg files). The website <http://cat-book-
collection.pagebooks.net/ >looks great at least the quality of the
images is great. Recently I acquired Publisher 2006 and published my
website with Publisher 2006. This website <http://
www.pagebooksprivate.net/> looks perfect except that every picture
looks slightly fuzzy. On closer inspection I can see a faint uniform
pattern that covers each picture. This offensive pattern is not
present in the original jpg images and not present in the
Publisher2000 version of the website. All the picture frames in the
originating publisher document are completely isolated from other
objects so the jpgs are being uploaded to the server as jpgs.
Can anyone suggest what my mistake is? Thanks

 

[ildra]

Addendum: I mistakenly wrote Publisher 2006 in the above message. I
meant Publisher 2007.
Sorry

 

[Rob Giordano [MS MVP]]

They don't look bad online. But, what I suspect you have scanned the images
of the book covers? If so, what you are seeing are the screen dots that make
up the printed images. You have to de-screen them first, some scanners have
a de-screen option built into their software, if yours does you need to
experiment with that. If it doesn't you can fix it in Photoshop by applying
various amounts of Gaussian Blur & Sharpening (not always so easy). Other
image editing software may have built-in descreen or generally include
Gaussian blur filter too.

Scanned photos do have this problem.

 

[Eric James]

Your basic mistake is in using Publisher 2007 - you'd be better off sticking
with Publisher 2000.

The actual problem is fairly complex and mostly a result of Microsoft trying
to be clever in Pub. 2007 and causing unpleasant side effects.
There are two causes for your fuzzy pictures - one is that for browsers
other than internet explorer the page code is actually displaying a 'gif'
version of your images made by Publisher. Gif images can only contain 256
colours so there is a nasty banding effect visible in gradients and some
colour tones. Secondly, in internet explorer a better quality jpeg image is
used, but unfortunately the code generated by Publisher is telling the
browser to display the image at a slightly different size to the raw image
as supplied - this causes the browser to perform a resampling operation
which results in a visible blurring, which you can see if you compare the
image in the page with the file in your index_files folder.
Someone else may be along shortly with a long-winded work-around, but the
best plan would be to stick with Pub 2000 as it generally does a much better
job. Even better though would be to not use Publisher at all, as it is
generally a pretty terrible tool for making web pages for reasons which may
not be immediately apparent but will quite likely cause you lots of pain
later.

 

[DavidF]

You have discovered that Pub 2007 handles images different than Pub 2000. I
could get into a long winded explanation as to the differences, but unless
the subtle difference is really important to you, I would suggest that you
just live with the difference. Unless you compare the two side by side, you
can't really tell the difference. If you really want a full explanation, I
can get into it, but even the way you processed the images in Pub 2000 was
not optimal.

The one thing I would suggest is that you 'compress' the pictures as per
this article so that you also get a reasonably good version of your images
in FireFox and other browsers.

Reference: Compress Pictures dialog box (2007):
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA100363901033.aspx?pid=CL100605171033

I think you will have reach the point of diminishing returns after
compressing the pictures of your site...you can probably get a bit better
quality, but it will take a lot more work.

DavidF