LR3, Sharpening, Noise and Resolution

[RobertBoire]

OK, so this is probably an amateurish question but here goes...

I have a couple of images taken under low-light conditions (ISO 800, ISO 200) that I have modified in LR3 including some modest sharpening and noise reduction. They look fine on the screen in LR3.

I export them to jpg for display on screen. They look fine in any viewer.  However if I save them as the background image on my desktop they look quite noisy and crunchy.  Low res version of the same photo look fine.

What I am missing?

Thanks

[BartvanderWolf]

I export them to jpg for display on screen. They look fine in any viewer.  However if I save them as the background image on my desktop they look quite noisy and crunchy.  Low res version of the same photo look fine.

What I am missing?

Hi Robert,

Have you resized the image to your display resolution and colorspace? If not, then the display driver will do that for you, and it may not be an optimal resampling, depending on your display driver settings. Also check if your display settings are at 32-bit colordepth.

Cheers,
Bart

[RobertBoire]

Hi Bart,

Yes, its exported for sRGB and the display driver is set for 32 bit color-depth.

I did not resize the image for the display. Th actual size of the image is much large than the display and so I though that it would not be necessary.  In fact the appearance improves if I resize the image to a lower resolution.  This is counter-intuitive for me. I would have expect the hi res image to be better.

Another wierd thing, is that it only happens when I use it as my desktop background. If I open the image in another viewer it looks fine.

I am missing something.

Thanks

[Schewe]

I did not resize the image for the display. Th actual size of the image is much large than the display and so I though that it would not be necessary.  In fact the appearance improves if I resize the image to a lower resolution.  This is counter-intuitive for me. I would have expect the hi res image to be better.

That is to be expected...when you set an image to be a desktop image, you would be best served by downsampling and sharpening for the EXACT size needed for the desktop–otherwise, the image will be downsampled by the OS which, as you've found, can suck.