Why do photos look better after they've been uploaded to Flickr?

[Jeff7]

I downloaded the pictures from Flickr and from yllus.com and checked the checksums. The files are 100% identical.

That was for the original, full size images, which I now assume you're not talking about. Oops.

Anytime I view images on Flickr, the first thing I do is click "All sizes" and select "Original."

 

[dman]

A little early for Halloween parties, what's the occasion?

 

[Aluvus]

Originally posted by: MrPickins
The original sizes look identical to me. Maybe Flickr uses a superior resizing algorithm?

Winner.

For grins I tried resizing the original image at max quality settings in Photoshop 7. The 195 KB result looked better than the OP's 99 KB image, but not as good as Flickr's 126 KB image.

 

[skulkingghost]

Or perhaps your gallery has a poor resizing algorithm versus flickr's resizing algorithm?

 

[E equals MC2]

WITHOUT A DOUBT Flickr is sharper. Look at the train sign hanging from the roof in black writing. 1st one is all grayish and Flickr is far crisper with clear white color.

 

[91TTZ]

Yeah, it's different. They ran a sharpen filter on the picture.

When I resize my photos, I run a sharpen filter on the resized photo, otherwise it looks dull. I made a droplet in Photoshop to do it. All I have to do is drag/drop the folder containing the pictures onto the droplet, and all my pictures get resized to the resolution that I set, they get resized, and they get saved under an appended filename.

 

[SSP]

I agree with the masses... looks like a sharpen filter on flicker image. I dont see any contrast/brightness changes, which is good cause that would be a shitty thing to do by flicker.

 

[yllus]

Originally posted by: dman
A little early for Halloween parties, what's the occasion?

A parade for the sake of having a parade. No permit, no reason, just straight up pointless parading. Was a lot of fun to photograph.

 

[Throckmorton]

Originally posted by: Steve
Oh wow, the ol' TTC trains. Haven't seen those in almost 20 years. I remember seeing red ones once in a while.

Is that girl supposed to look like Alizee?

Anyway, to answer your question, I think they have CSI's Enhance filter.

She doesn't look like Alizee at all. Do you think that every short haired white girl looks like Alizee?

 

[ViviTheMage]

what's this train ? looks like a lot of elaborate looking people.

 

[Shawn]

uhhhh, it's all in your head.

 

[Q]

I think it looks a tiny bit better on flickR

 

[yllus]

Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
what's this train ? looks like a lot of elaborate looking people.

It's the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) subway. Yonge/Bloor station, to be specific.

Originally posted by: Shawn
uhhhh, it's all in your head.

It most certainly is not!

 

[GoingUp]

On my dell 2405, the flickr photo is definately clearer.

 

[Utterman]

It wouldn't surprise me if flickr does something like facebook with their image processing. I found this from facebook's blog:

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2406207130

(For you sharp-eyed geeks out there, we actually store four image sizes for each photo, so if you want to know how many files we have, multiply the photo numbers by four. That's right, we're adding a quarter billion files every week.)

And that's just the storage side of things. We also have a fleet of servers who receive your photo uploads, happily scrubbing out EXIF data and tweaking the quality settings so your photos look their best. Another fleet of servers and caches who feed images to our CDN (content delivery network) partners. And hey, if we feel like it, we can serve some of the photo traffic directly ourselves too.

We have also developed our own specialized web servers that are tuned to serve files with as few disk reads as possible. Even with thousands of hard drive spindles, I/O (input/output) is still a concern because our traffic is so high. Our squid caches help reduce the load, but squid isn't nearly fast or efficient enough for our purposes, so we're writing our own web accelerator too.

 

[n7]

Wow, flickr's version is much sharper.

Interesting.

 

[Eli]

Everyone that said they notice no difference is blind.

It is quite obvious that the picture n flickr is sharpened. Pick any point and watch it as you flip between the two.

 

[imported_LoKe]

Big difference.

 

[NoShangriLa]

Flickr image has gone through a sharpening process, and contrast enhancement.

 

[LordSnailz]

Anyone know if there's a CS script that does a similar sharpening and contrast enhancement?

 

[TruePaige]

They put it through a sharpness filter and auto-balanced the contrast levels, and the colors are a bit more vibrant as a result of that.

That's what I see anyhow.

 

[QED]

I doubt Flickr does any sort of auto-contrast on uploaded images. Otherwise, you'd see a difference in the photos at their original sizes.

What wouldn't suprise me though, is using a sharpen filter as part of their resizing algorithm. It's pretty well known that resizing an image results in a loss of apparent sharpness (which is why almost all scalers in high-definition TVs use some form of sharpening even when you set Sharpness to 0).