Help! I've got "artifacts" around the text & image on my cover

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Chiquita Banana

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Hoping someone will know what I can do about this.

I've been posting my new cover a few different sites and in some cases the thing becomes totally distorted. Facebook is the worst. I've been uploading altered versions and they look okay for a while but then they get all splotchy around the text and image (almost watery looking before it goes dark) and it seems to be getting worse. I'm calling it "the cover that eats itself". And it's not just on FB. Same thing with one of the guest posts I did: http://lost-in-lit.blogspot.com/2012/12/guest-post-unmasking-maya-by-libby.html Scroll down about halfway - the book cover is just below the guest post. And it's even distorted here on AW. Just take a look at my three covers at the bottom of the post. :(


I just conversed with someone who said this:

I see some odd light blue artifacts around the text and elsewhere.

The fact that they are also in the crook of the woman's arm suggests that they are in fact artifacts, possibly derived from compression.



Here's how this book cover came to be: I ordered an image from one of the big image sites. The girl was in front of a pink city skyline. So I went to Kinkos and created a blue background, placed her on top and proceeded to remove her original background. Tried a bunch of different fonts, nothing worked, so I sent the file to a graphic designer who added the text in fonts I liked.

Since I noticed this weird corruption/artifact issue, I've been changing the image's size, format, etc. but nothing is working. Any advice would be greatly appreciated! It looks so weird and unprofessional to have it be all wonky. :( Would this be resolved if I went back to Kinkos and redid the whole thing, saving it in a different format from the start?

Thanks!!!
 

alleycat

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Have you tried logging off, cleaning out your cookies, prefetch files, temporary Internet files, and cache, and then logging back on? It's easier if you have a cleaner to do it.

I don't see anything wrong with the covers in your signature here or on the link you posted.
 

alleycat

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Medi, could this be some kind of Mac or browser issue. I don't see anything wrong with the link you posted (no extra blue dots or anything). I don't have my glasses on at the moment, but I don't think my eyes are that bad.
 

Chiquita Banana

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How incredibly bizarre that the image looks fine on your end, Alleycat. I swear, this whole thing is just insane. Well I do have a Mac.

I'm afraid I have no idea how to go about this:

Have you tried logging off, cleaning out your cookies, prefetch files, temporary Internet files, and cache, and then logging back on? It's easier if you have a cleaner to do it.

I don't live far from the Apple store. Maybe I should take my computer in and see if anyone there knows what to do?
 

alleycat

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Let's see if anyone else sees the image with blue dots.

Don't worry about what I posted earlier. If Medi is seeing it as you do it's something else.
 

alleycat

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What browser are you using? Safari?
 

Kerosene

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I'm with Medievalist. I see it as overly or badly compressed.

It really does look like JPEG artifacts. But I'm unsure if this is true in the version you have, or the ones we're looking at.
 

Chiquita Banana

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I usually use Safari except for Facebook author stuff. I use Firefox for that. Actually I just checked out my FB author profile using Safari (via my personal FB profile) and sure enough it's a problem on both browsers.

I put up the original image without text, thinking the simpler one might be better and this one is slower to corrupt, but it's corrupting. Yesterday there were only dots around her fingers and today they're surrounding her.
 

Chiquita Banana

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It almost looks like the whole thing is under water, the water is rippling above text bits and around the girl. On some of the FB pictures, pretty much all the blue area is filled with dark spots. And on the little image of the book in my signature here, it looks like the view of several lines of ants marching all around the text areas. Totally freaky.

WillSauger, do you know how to get rid of jpeg artifacts?

Thanks so much for your help, guys. :)
 

benbradley

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For what it's worth, I'm using Firefox 17.0.1 (the latest, it says it's up to date) on Windows 7 and all these images look fine to me.

When you post about what you see (or even afterward, in a later post), please also post the name and version number of your browser and your OS. This information may turn out to be helpful.

I recall the dialup days, there were "web speedup" programs/services that would proxy everything, and send you lower-resolution pics than were actually on the webpage you were seeing, in order to load the webpage faster than could otherwise be done. This makes me think of that, and I wonder if something similar could be happening here.
 

alleycat

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I'm using Firefox and Windows 7 as well.
 

LBlankenship

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I'm occasionally seeing an echo-outline on the logo, but that shade of blue is grating on my eyes so I'm not real eager to stare at it. I'm also seeing noise in the gradient of your logo. The Facebook cover is a slightly different shade of blue.

Personally, this is why I don't like JPGs. It's a lossy compression, and once that data's gone it ain't coming back. The best way to fix it is to go back to the original, high resolution file and create a new JPG.

Failing that, some of the smart blur filters in P'shop can help with JPG noise. It depends on the picture, though.
 

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This is not a browser issue.

Download the image from the static link I posted and look at in the image editor of your choice.
 

alleycat

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I downloaded the image from the link you posted and viewed it using a couple of different viewers. It's looks absolutely perfect on my computer.
 

Chiquita Banana

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Thanks so much for chiming in everyone. I really appreciate it.

LBlankenship: I would be happy to start over again (well, not exactly happy at $0.42 a minute) but how can I be sure that I wouldn't have the same problem all over again?
 

Chiquita Banana

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How bizarre that some of you can see the distortion and some of you can't.

FWIW, I have a Mac OS X Version 10.6.8, but I don't know where to find the information about Safari & Firefox.
 

alleycat

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Browser information is in the Help (About) dropdown menu.

It probably isn't the browser if you see it messed up in both Safari and FF.
 

Allen R. Brady

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Hi Chiquita. Two recommendations I would make would be to convert your original image to Indexed color, rather than RGB color. Also, you'll probably have better luck exporting it as a GIF, rather than a JPG. RGB color and JPGs are well suited for photographs, but for cartoons with a limited color palette, an Indexed GIF would likely work better.
 
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Alessandra Kelley

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I have looked at this with both Safari on an iPad and Firefox on a Mac. The artifacts are there in both cases, although because of the colors it's subtle (humans are really bad at differentiating shades of blue).

No offense, Ben, but possibly it's your eyes.

Chiquita, do you think your images are actually getting worse overnight, or is it possible that once alerted to the artifacts you are seeing them more and more?

At any rate, they look to me like the sorts of artifacts that show up in jpegs. Because of the way jpeg compression works, areas adjacent to areas of transition (like the smooth blue just around your figure and lettering) tend to fare the worst.

What's more of a bother is that pretty much every time one saves a jpeg file one gets another iteration of compression artifacts. In that sense saving one's work as jpegs is a little like photocopying; every new jpeg saved is like making a new photocopy from the previous photocopy, so that each new image is that much farther away from the original in terms of crispness and quality.

Chiquita, I'm wondering what you mean by going to Kinko's to work on this cover. What imaging program did you use to work on this, how did you use it, and how did you save it?

See, I've noticed some imaging programs when saving seem to default to a "medium" quality jpeg instead of a "maximum" (which is always what you want for cover graphics) and it would take only one of those somewhere in the middle of your work to cause something like this a few steps down the line.

The point of jpegs files is to produce a passable image while saving file space.

Unfortunately, the way jpegs do that is with clever algorithms that can play merry hell with carefully crafted images.

When doing important work I think it's generally better to save it in the .tif format (if available) than .jpeg, since .tif files do not lose information. Tif files are bigger than jpegs, but that's what's needed to keep the graphics quality high. Once the project is finished it's easy to make a .jpeg version of the final .tif. A "maximum" quality jpeg is still a smaller sized file than a .tif of the same image.

Might it be possible to go back to an earlier version of this cover to see at what step the artifacts were introduced?
 

frimble3

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I'm using Internet Explorer and Windows 7, and when I look at the large images straight-on, they look fine. If I change the angle of my screen (tip it back so it gets darker) I can see the 'watery' border effect. No idea what it is or why it happens, but it may depend on the colour intensity settings (I don't know if that's even a 'thing').
 

Chiquita Banana

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Alleycat: I'm on 5.1.7, but yeah. Probably not the issue.

Allen R. Brady: Thanks for the suggestions. I'll try converting to GIF and upload a new one to FB. It would be so great if that worked! As for converting to Indexed color rather than RGB, I'm assuming that would need to be done on Photoshop, no? I use Preview for quick jobs but I don't see anything on there about indexed color. If you would just let me know how to get there I would really appreciate it. (click on file, this, that, whatever) I used to have a 2003 version of Photoshop but haven't had it on my computer for years so I'm not super familiar with the program anymore. And the folks at Kinkos don't seem to know anything about it. Guess they use a Indesign or something.

Thanks so much!!
 

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I can't help you fix the problem, but I can see the watery ripples in the blue around the images and words. It's real light and at first not noticeable until you take a closer look and even look at it at different angles. I'm using Chrome on Windows 7 on a Toshiba laptop, if that matters at all. Hope you figure out how to fix it.
 

Chiquita Banana

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Allesandra: Sorry, I don't know how I missed your post. It really does seem like the images are getting worse. I scrutinized the one from yesterday pretty carefully because I went back to Kinkos and redid a lot of it. And the small book cover images further down the FB page that are paired with links are just hideous. I know they didn't look like that a few days ago.

Well, I don't have earlier versions per se. I spent about 1.5 hours creating it (most of which was spent trying out and then rejecting fonts). And I'd be willing to bet money that all the files were saved for "maximum" quality. Unless it autosaves "medium" as you go along. After I was done, I emailed them to myself. A few different files because I had some fonts that I thought were okay. Decided the font was too lame so I mailed one of them to my guy, he added the cute fonts and sent them back - very large jpegs files through the whole process.

Looks like my best best is to go back there tomorrow and create a tif? I can do that. I've GOT to fix this issue.

Thank so much for your help, Alessandra and everyone! I'm so glad I mentioned Absolute Write on the acknowledgements page :)
 
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