Ok, so you have a 8mp RAW image and you’ve imported it to CS and your done tweaking (curves, dodge, burn etc). Now you want to ouput the image for web display at say 800pixels.
Here’s what I do.
1) Sharpen the image at full size using your preferred sharpening method.
2) Resize the image using bicubic sharper
3) Convert the image to 8 bit
4) Convert the image profile to sRGB.
5) Saveas a jpeg with quality adjustment to yeild ~250k file size.
Here’s what they do:
Step 2) Reduces the image but keeps it crisp without introducing over shaperned halos.
Step 3 & 4) enables a colour consistent ouput for the web
Step 5) Retains EXIF data
A colleague tried this method a couple of days ago and was amazed at the quality difference. Try it and let me know what you think!
On the flip side of this, if you want to upsize your image, don’t sharpen it first. Use the bicubic smoother algorithm to upsize and then sharpen afterwards.
