Something has been bothering me for a while. Resized photos on the napaJapan website look a little fuzzy and a little dirty. Take a look at the two photos above (Winter Strawberry Kit Kat, in case anyone is interested). The one on the left was resized (from 498x498 to 210x210) using AspJpeg from Persits. The settings are bicubic interpolation and 90% quality. The one on the right uses almost the exact same settings (80% quality bicubic) in Photoshop, but it looks beautiful; crystal clear.
What's Photoshop doing to make it look so good? More to the point, what's AspJpeg not doing and how can I get it to do that? Admittedly, the uglier image is about half the size (13k versus 33k) of the nicer one, but neither is huge. I'd be willing to sacrifice a little speed for beauty. The site in question is trying to sell the product. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing people are a little less excited to buy products that look like they've been run through an uglifying filter.
I could be wrong, though. I was wrong about people using IE6 to buy something from the site. I thought IE6's own special brand of website uglifying filters would chase them all away. These days, to test IE6, I need to install and run a virtual computer. For less than 10% of just the IE users, it's not worth it. I'm sorry, but if you're using IE6 your browser is broken.
