Steve (Another View)

[Lara]

Here are the photos where I am having the jaggy lines by cropping and doing a little color and light adjustments. First one is untouched, just resized. Any ideas why the ropes are jagged in the second?

[Chunk]

Here are the photos where I am having the jaggy lines by cropping and doing a little color and light adjustments. First one is untouched, just resized. Any ideas why the ropes are jagged in the second?

Here's an image that contains 3:1 enlargements of both your shots. You can see that the lines are jagged in both shots but in the lower one the lines are outlined with lighter color.
This can occur from using unsharp mask on an image which lightens the pixels along edges to make them seem sharper.

[Lara]

Thanks.

Okay Chunk, so what is causing the lines to be jagged? Is it settings, camera shake, or just the nature of the photograph?

[Todd Patten]

Lara -- what is the original pixel resolution on this image? My first guess would be to say that the jagged lines are caused by a limitation of the digital resolution.

[another view]

This is what I was picturing when you described it in the Help Forum. I've seen this when looking at a small version of the image in Photoshop - say 20% on screen so you can see the whole thing. In that case, the 100% looks fine and prints are fine too.

Here, I'm not really sure. Did you up-size it, or what has been done to it? I think - like Chunk says - that over sharpening can make the problem stand out more, but it's not causing the problem. Maybe a good one for Trevor/Steve (Asylum)/Sebastian?

[Lara]

The original, untouched has absolutely no jaggie lines. It looks fine. I didn't upsize at all. The first shot is just downsized, untouched otherwise to fit on the site, resolution changed to 72 for the web. The cropped one is jaggie no matter how I look at it.

Todd the original resolution is 180.

Thanks everyone

[Chunk]

Thanks.

Okay Chunk, so what is causing the lines to be jagged? Is it settings, camera shake, or just the nature of the photograph?

A digital image is made up of horizontal and vertical rows of square pixels. A slanted line can only be shown by a series of vertical or horizontal straight lines that are offset from each other. When the line thicknes is close to the size of a pixel this appears jagged. imaging software will usually soften this effect by using tones halfway between the value of the line and the background in the corners where the line segments meet. This is quite an oversimplification. Keep your resolution high so that thin elements are many pixels thick and your jaggies won't be noticeable.