I've often found that a nicely defined, crisp image becomes noticeably soft once uploaded...Has anyone else noticed this? If so, why's it happening?

Can't say I have. Could it be something to do with the resolution?

Might be..."Fury" in my gallery is noticeably softer than the original JPEG on my desktop. Maybe it's because in the gallery I’m only viewing it at 1024x768, but that's what my monitor is set to, and the original file is displaying at that same resolution...and it's sharper!

My guess is that it's due to Caedes.net's resizing to different resolutions. The quality of the JPEG's might be affected, and you lose a bit of sharpnes. I've had a similar problem with my site, but it's necessary to keep file sizes to an acceptable level.

I've noticed it too on "Angel of Death." The original was clean and crisp yet when I uploaded it it softened somewhat. It's the first image of mine that I've noticed doing so.

I've had this happen with a few of my images in the past - not so much now. I've always wondered why that happened.

maybe it's the size? the jpeg format compress the image a lot. what's the minimun size of your pics when you upload them? mine's usually are 700 kb

The average size is 1.3-1.5MB per image. They must be heavily compressed once uploaded. Going from 6-9MB per image out of the camera to 1.5 at the time of upload, and then cutting that in half once uploaded must be the cause of the loss of quality.

Well, I have always reduced my image quality to match the max. size for upload which I thought was 500Kb. Is that just a suggestion?

Maybe the image gets reduced to that size anyway. Probably safer to reduce it yourself, at least that way you can attampt to control how the image is affected.

When uploaded, the images are re-compressed to ensure that they aren't too large (bytes-wise) and that they are the standard JPEG format. This accounts for the slight blurring. We also save the originaly uploaded image unaltered, and in the future I'll enable the download of that as well.

Thanks Caedes for clearing that up.

It's also worth checking your ISP settings, I had the very same problem and realised that there is a little option within my ISP settings where you can compress all web graphics. This irritated me for some months and it irritated me even more when I found out it was something so simple!

I almost never upload an image in JPEG format. An image compressed twice is sure to lose alot of quality!, Some of my images were over 3mb in size! So the quality to my pics are altered only slightly. Almost unnoticable for flame fractals.

I dont think it would make much noticable difference, if any difference at all. Unless you heavily compress your original submission.