What monitor resolution you prefer for editing images

[aarif]

Hi the reason I'm asking is I got a new monitor that goes up to 3840 x 2160 and the images look much smaller than before, so I'm confused as how to resize my images for web viewing.

Not sure if anyone else had an issue like this but love to hear your thoughts on this

 

[AlbertTheLazy]

Hi the reason I'm asking is I got a new monitor that goes up to 3840 x 2160 and the images look much smaller than before, so I'm confused as how to resize my images for web viewing.

Your title and the body of your post ask two different questions.

For editing I'd like as high a monitor resolution as possible. Even full screen your new monitor could only show a 16MP image at about 50% but that's enough for most editing and you can always work on sections the wat we always have.

As for resizing for the Web, your monitor size has nothing to do with it. Choose a size that you think will fit into a web page on most modern monitors and just set your resizing to that. Typically this could be anything from 600x900 up to about 1,000x1,500. Doesn't matter if that looks too small on your screen because most people's monitors don't have more than 2,000 pixels on the long side and it's your audience that's important.

 

[aarif]

Hi the reason I'm asking is I got a new monitor that goes up to 3840 x 2160 and the images look much smaller than before, so I'm confused as how to resize my images for web viewing.

Your title and the body of your post ask two different questions.

For editing I'd like as high a monitor resolution as possible. Even full screen your new monitor could only show a 16MP image at about 50% but that's enough for most editing and you can always work on sections the wat we always have.

As for resizing for the Web, your monitor size has nothing to do with it. Choose a size that you think will fit into a web page on most modern monitors and just set your resizing to that. Typically this could be anything from 600x900 up to about 1,000x1,500. Doesn't matter if that looks too small on your screen because most people's monitors don't have more than 2,000 pixels on the long side and it's your audience that's important.

 

[AlbertTheLazy]

Hi the reason I'm asking is I got a new monitor that goes up to 3840 x 2160 and the images look much smaller than before, so I'm confused as how to resize my images for web viewing.

Your title and the body of your post ask two different questions.

For editing I'd like as high a monitor resolution as possible. Even full screen your new monitor could only show a 16MP image at about 50% but that's enough for most editing and you can always work on sections the wat we always have.

As for resizing for the Web, your monitor size has nothing to do with it. Choose a size that you think will fit into a web page on most modern monitors and just set your resizing to that. Typically this could be anything from 600x900 up to about 1,000x1,500. Doesn't matter if that looks too small on your screen because most people's monitors don't have more than 2,000 pixels on the long side and it's your audience that's important.

thank you

well what I meant is now the images that I have edited look much smaller so should I keep with that size or change.

They only look smaller to you because you have a bigger, higher resolution monitor. I don't!

Did you read my last paragraph?

I haven't changed the size of my monitor, so anything you put on the web now will look the same size to me as something you uploaded before you got your new monitor, if you save them at the same pixel resolution. If you resize your pictures to get them bigger on your monitor they will be bigger on my monitor, but I won't have enough pixels to fit everything in.

I am using a monitor with resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels. That's a fairly common resolution for laptops.

If you size one of your images to 1920 x 1080 pixels it will appear to you to fill one quarter of your screen at that resolution. It will be bigger than my whole screen at the same resolution.

--
Albert
(The one in France)
Every photograph is an abstraction from reality.

 

[aarif]

Thanks

 

[Brian]

Hi the reason I'm asking is I got a new monitor that goes up to 3840 x 2160 and the images look much smaller than before, so I'm confused as how to resize my images for web viewing.

Not sure if anyone else had an issue like this but love to hear your thoughts on this

 

[Mark S Abeln]

well what I meant is now the images that I have edited look much smaller so should I keep with that size or change.

As others have mentioned, resize your images to maybe something like 1000 pixels on the long edge. You can do what I do, which is edit these small images at 200% magnification, which will give you a much better impression of how most monitors will display your image.

 

[Carey Brown]

Hi the reason I'm asking is I got a new monitor that goes up to 3840 x 2160 and the images look much smaller than before, so I'm confused as how to resize my images for web viewing.

Not sure if anyone else had an issue like this but love to hear your thoughts on this

I stay away from high resolution screens because the available software has not been updated to scale things very well. I have a QHD (2560x1440) screen on my 14" laptop which is too high of a resolution if the software doesn't scale. Lightroom scales nicely but Photoshop CS6 does not, the icons are way too small. I would say that QHD on a 27" monitor might be very nice, but 4K, even on a 27" monitor would suffer from the scaling issue. When I jump into 4K video I'll be looking for a 4K monitor but I'll be looking for a 30"

You didn't say what your monitor size is.

 

[DMKAlex]

Actually this pose raise an interesting question about what exactly dpi and pixel dimension we should compile our image for public viewing.

Carrying from the old CRT days, I think 72 dpi was the standard and 800x600 was the max. But in this day of age, who is still using CRT monitor? People, like the OP, is starting to use 4K monitors. It will become more prevalent as price of a 27" drops below the $300 (by the middle or end of this year). 24 to 27" 1920x1080 are close to $100 today. Most laptops, even older ones, are 1366x768.

The old screen standard issue would like quite small on most people's screen.

I've compiling my web images at 1008 pixels horizontally, and about 750 vertically.

Interested to know what's your rule in compiling for web viewing.

 

[Carey Brown]

Hi the reason I'm asking is I got a new monitor that goes up to 3840 x 2160 and the images look much smaller than before, so I'm confused as how to resize my images for web viewing.

Not sure if anyone else had an issue like this but love to hear your thoughts on this

Other posters here mentioned a web size of 1000 pixels, which seems like a reasonable size. I post my to fit 1920x1080 because I want people to be able to download them for their desktops or screen savers. My site is visited by mostly friends and family and hasn't gone viral yet. Most web browsers will scale images for display but you still have the bandwidth cost of the higher resolution images.

http://inasphere.com

 

[crashpc]

4K monitors will not be standard for many years. I guess about 5-6 years. Good 4K monitor is for $600+ in middle Europe, and you also need to add capable graphic card and interconnections to run this at usable 60Hz. So you go closer to $800 for good setup. Yes, there is solution for about half price to get to 4K, but it sux.

In the meantime, FullHD will stay as standard for years to come. Therefore I would not optimize my photos for 4K viewing. I´ll just prepare these for 4K, and use FullHD for display.

But as I jumped to 2560x1440 with not really bigger one, I see your issue. Now your camera doesn´t make absolutely huge photos anymore, and you miss all those big pixels

Get over it. The whole image is what matters.

 

[rj conklin]

4k on a benq bl3201ph monitor.

 

[Rick Knepper]

if you want those images to fill the complete dimensions of your new monitor (making an assumption here). If I were you, I would recommend redefining web viewing as 3840x2160 and let the laggards struggle.

So, to explain what I mean, I upgraded my NEC 2690 to an NEC PA322. It was not just the number of pixels I had to change, it was the aspect too. In my case I went from 1800x1200 @ 3:2 to 3600x2160 @ 9:15. My cam makes 3:2 images, so nearly every image I shoot gets cropped to 9:15 which is usually not a problem because I shoot 99% landscape and I can give up a bit sky most of the time, but, sometimes I keep it at 3:2 if I framed the shot perfectly while in the field. This results in approx. a 3240x2160 image.

Hi the reason I'm asking is I got a new monitor that goes up to 3840 x 2160 and the images look much smaller than before, so I'm confused as how to resize my images for web viewing.

Not sure if anyone else had an issue like this but love to hear your thoughts on this

 

[jackalopemaui]

Hi the reason I'm asking is I got a new monitor that goes up to 3840 x 2160 and the images look much smaller than before, so I'm confused as how to resize my images for web viewing.

Not sure if anyone else had an issue like this but love to hear your thoughts on this

Other posters here mentioned a web size of 1000 pixels, which seems like a reasonable size. I post my to fit 1920x1080 because I want people to be able to download them for their desktops or screen savers. My site is visited by mostly friends and family and hasn't gone viral yet. Most web browsers will scale images for display but you still have the bandwidth cost of the higher resolution images.

http://inasphere.com

1000 pixels is too small.

Facebook's native photo resolution is 2048x2048 pixels, so I export pictures from Lightroom at 2048 on the long side for Facebook.

For my website (on Photoshelter) I export full resolution pictures. Any modern website will resize images for the browser, so the resolution shouldn't be set to some arbitrary number that you think most screens use, and certainly not some small resolution that will look terrible on modern tablets and high DPI screens.

Case in point-- The OP Just got a 4K screen. Websites with fixed size 1000px images look like crap to him even though in 1999 they may have looked great. If he views my website, the full res pictures will scale down just fine to his high DPI screen.

In 10 years people will be using 8k screens possibly, and my pictures will still look as good as possible. If I had uploaded at 1000px or even 2048px I'd have to reupload every picture every few years to keep up with technology. That's a waste of time and effort

 

[aarif]

thank you

 

[peripheralfocus]

I've compiling my web images at 1008 pixels horizontally, and about 750 vertically.

Interested to know what's your rule in compiling for web viewing.

I used to keep my web images to about the same dimensions as you do, but I recently raised my limits to about 1330 pixels horizontal and 885 pixels vertical.

I raised my limit because the average screen pixel dimension in use is slowly getting bigger. My web images were looking small on high-dpi screens and desktop monitors bigger than about 23 inches -- even on high-DPI tablet screens.

I did some googling to get current figures for what size screens people are currently using on the web (in pixels). The distribution is trending up, as you would expect. My larger web images, if viewed 1:1, will exceed the typical browser window size of a lot of older laptops, but those laptops are slowly but surely cycling out of the greater web population. So I decided that the drawback of too-large images on low-pixel screens was outweighed by the benefit of bigger images on the increasingly common larger screens. Even 7-inch tablets can easily display my new image size at full resolution, if they have a high-DPI screen. (My iPad Mini 2 has a 2048 x 1536, 7-inch screen.)

I expect that in 3 or 4 years, I'll raise my limits again, as high-DPI screens become more and more common.

 

[jackalopemaui]

I've compiling my web images at 1008 pixels horizontally, and about 750 vertically.

Interested to know what's your rule in compiling for web viewing.

I used to keep my web images to about the same dimensions as you do, but I recently raised my limits to about 1330 pixels horizontal and 885 pixels vertical.

I raised my limit because the average screen pixel dimension in use is slowly getting bigger. My web images were looking small on high-dpi screens and desktop monitors bigger than about 23 inches -- even on high-DPI tablet screens.

I did some googling to get current figures for what size screens people are currently using on the web (in pixels). The distribution is trending up, as you would expect. My larger web images, if viewed 1:1, will exceed the typical browser window size of a lot of older laptops, but those laptops are slowly but surely cycling out of the greater web population. So I decided that the drawback of too-large images on low-pixel screens was outweighed by the benefit of bigger images on the increasingly common larger screens. Even 7-inch tablets can easily display my new image size at full resolution, if they have a high-DPI screen. (My iPad Mini 2 has a 2048 x 1536, 7-inch screen.)

I expect that in 3 or 4 years, I'll raise my limits again, as high-DPI screens become more and more common.

1:1 is irrelevant because modern content management systems resize images to the size of the screen. That's why you should upload full res

 

[aarif]

I've compiling my web images at 1008 pixels horizontally, and about 750 vertically.

Interested to know what's your rule in compiling for web viewing.

I used to keep my web images to about the same dimensions as you do, but I recently raised my limits to about 1330 pixels horizontal and 885 pixels vertical.

I raised my limit because the average screen pixel dimension in use is slowly getting bigger. My web images were looking small on high-dpi screens and desktop monitors bigger than about 23 inches -- even on high-DPI tablet screens.

I did some googling to get current figures for what size screens people are currently using on the web (in pixels). The distribution is trending up, as you would expect. My larger web images, if viewed 1:1, will exceed the typical browser window size of a lot of older laptops, but those laptops are slowly but surely cycling out of the greater web population. So I decided that the drawback of too-large images on low-pixel screens was outweighed by the benefit of bigger images on the increasingly common larger screens. Even 7-inch tablets can easily display my new image size at full resolution, if they have a high-DPI screen. (My iPad Mini 2 has a 2048 x 1536, 7-inch screen.)

I expect that in 3 or 4 years, I'll raise my limits again, as high-DPI screens become more and more common.

1:1 is irrelevant because modern content management systems resize images to the size of the screen. That's why you should upload full res

but the Auto resizing is not that good, makes the images soft

 

[peripheralfocus]

1:1 is irrelevant because modern content management systems resize images to the size of the screen. That's why you should upload full res

As aarif pointed out, an automatically resized image doesn't usually look the best. One reason is that the resizing is often crude, but a bigger reason is that to sharpen an image properly, you need to sharpen it after resizing, not before. I also find that brightness and contrast occasionally need to be tweaked when an image is downsized.

I realize that caring about these relatively small nuances in the way the picture looks is a little (or maybe more than a little!) persnickety, but there it is -- I'm persnickety about it.

Of course, a bigger problem is that even if I upload an original at a size that can be viewed easily in a typical full-screen browser window at 1:1, there's no guarantee whatsoever that viewers will actually do so. Lots of them will have their browser window sized smaller than their screen, or some other variable will undermine my grand plan.

With those significant problems acknowledged, I still would like to provide the easiest and likeliest possible opportunity for anyone viewing one of my images to see it in a form that I was able to carefully preview and optimize.

 

[aarif]

totally agree with you. more and more people are starting to use better monitors with higher resolution so I'm rethinking my old re-sizing way.

Here an example of what i used to resize my images to but look quite small now of course I can see it at 200% now and will still look good but this option probably will not be available to others