I made a discovery this week which might be a bit boring for you. I decided to share it as some might still find it useful, but I promise to be short.

Today I figured out why the picture of a lighthouse I took last Christmas looked so horrible when I printed it.

I took this picture with my older camera which is a lovely hybrid Sony Nex-3. This is a lighthouse in upstate New York in the Thousand Islands area. This place is quite special for me, so I bought a nice 11×20 frame and decided to give an entire wall for the photograph in my kitchen. The resolution was large enough to print a good format poster out of it, of that I was sure.

As I didn’t have much experience with printing vendors in this country, I choose the most convenient option I found at that moment – to order a print through Photobucket as I already had an account and had this picture uploaded there already.

The print I received from Photobucket looked as if I printed it from my Facebook profile picture. It was awfully pixilated, it was obvious that the resolution was not good enough for a print of this size, but I could not understand why as I knew my picture was a good quality one and I uploaded it as is, without changing the size.

I hung the print anyway, but every time we had guests, I was trying to prevent them from getting too close to the picture.

Last weekend when I was playing with pictures of Byoung in Photobucket, I downloaded one of the pictures on my computer and realized that the downloaded version had a much lower size and quality, although, again, I didn’t change the size when was uploading it. This is how I realized that Photobucket compresses the images when you upload them, even though you don’t ask it to change the size. I decided to test the theory by printing the same image elsewhere. I did some research and chose Mpix. The print from Mpix came today. It is a fine quality print, nice fresh color, and no low resolution artifacts. It proudly replaced the one produced by Photobucket, eliminating the need for me to keep my guests on a safe distance from seeing the low quality print on the wall.

Sorry I could not keep my promise of being brief. But next time I will try to post something really interesting. Maybe I will show you the pearl embroidery of a Mickey “Scull” Mouse I am currently working on for a gothic beach dress.

Hope you are having a nice week and enjoying the summer. Here in Washington the weather is quite generous this early June.