Panorama Photo

Every year, the city of Terneuzen holds its Havendagen (Port days) on the last weekend of June. In 2019, this fair started in the afternoon of Friday 28th with a tug parade. Like every year, several tugs from the Rotterdam museum were present: Dockyard III and V, Hercules, Saeftinghe (built 1937).

Canon EOS M6 with EF-M 18-150 mm, 9 p RAW, 40 mm (64 mm KB), iso 100, f 9, 1/200 s, PTGuiPro 20423x3867 318.3 MB TIFF, downsized 2641x500 532 KB JPEG

ATTENTION, ATTENTION

You know I have expressed my annoyance many times about this downsizing to a 500 pixel height. This results in an extremely low quality especially when a lot of small details make the scene for instance a starry sky, city lights at night or even the tugs on this pano to name a few. This always looks fuzzy even after sharpening which by the way is destructive.
To be clear, I have an iMac 27 inch and the 500 px height panos have a height of 13.2 cm on my screen.

I think this downsizing to 500 px is totally archaic today and it is sad to see the good work of many photographers to end up in a very low quality presentation. Maybe the file size was and still is a reason for that.

I think an increase of the height to a 1000 pixels should be introduced. This almost completely eliminates the need for destructive sharpening which by the way also increases the JPEG file size quite a lot. Of course a 1000 px height quadruples the amount of pixels but this doesn’t mean a quadrupling of the file size is necessary to have a nice and much more detailed presentation on this site.

I did the following. I exported a 1000 px height JPEG from a downsized 1000 px height TIFF, without sharpening and with a considerable reduction of the quality.
So from a 5282x1000 15.9 MB TIFF, I made a 5282x1000 775 KB JPEG ( 6.7 MB at maximum quality) which resulted in a SUPERIOR quality compared to the 2641x500 532 KB JPEG fuzzy pano here above.

I also did the same with a starry sky pano and indeed obtained a superior view for only a slight increase of the file size compared to the sharpened 500 px.



As a conclusion. With about the same file size, one obtains a far better quality with a quality reduced, non sharpened 1000 px height compared to a maximized (to the site limits), sharpened 500 px height panorama. Do the test yourself, you will see!