Un-vive la différence

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.

Various napaJapan Link Image Sizes...

The time has come to make link images. I had made one, but wasn't very happy with it. Also, considering the variety of blog designs out there, I figured it's best to be flexible. One size does not fit all. So, I scanned a few blogs to see what sizes their columns were. Most are around 220 or so. Some are smaller - about 150.

Never Ready For My Closeup

I'm more of a background kind of person. Except not making them; I suck at that. But backgrounds are important! They need to be there to give the foreground some support. They need to look good without drawing attention. That's a tough task, especially without talent or knowledge. That's why I created about 30 potential background for napaJapan.com and ended up scrapping all of them in favour of one that Dennis had. It's just not my forte. Hell, I don't even have a forte and that one sticks out as being particularly NOT.

So now I've figured out a few things about the Blogger template and I've uploaded several backgrounds to the napaJapan server to be used here. I did another jumble of products, but I made them tiling, then I faded them to almost black and put some blue over top. It's like a nice dark blue background, but with Kit Kat!

Oh, and completely unrelated, but I made an poster-style image of a Majesty Ukulele for Yusuke. It's one I took of Virginia's custom "hummingbird" model a few years ago. I masked it out and laid it on a bed of hydrangea ("ajisai" in Japanese, which also happens to be a great sushi restaurant). I think it looks pretty good. He may disagree, but I'm guessing he's too busy and too tired to care enough to complain at the moment.

That ukulele, by the way, is one of the nicest sounding ukes I've ever heard. Loud, rich, clear tone and a very sweet sound. It blew me away when I heard it last month. I thought my ukulele was in a league of its own and I thought it was mostly because it's a tenor, but apparently I was wrong.

UPDATE: I was right. Yusuke didn't like it.

UPDATE 2: After sending a version without the logo or background, he changed his mind!

UPDATE 3: The photo is on the MusicFair website.

It's Not As If I Have Anything To Say

But that's irrelevant, really. Even if I did, who'd want to read it? No, I'm just making this blog so I can know how they work. I want to make a template for Jason's napaJapan candy blog. If I can get that looking all fancypants, it would make me happy. Also, it would mean I know how to make blogger blogs look good.

Well, different.

Anyways, let's load up a few images...

Hmm... that didn't end up where I thought it would. I thought it would be down here, where I has started the process. Oh well. It's more interesting than this writing, so why not leave it up there at the top?

That's it. My first post is done.