By monkfish4d on

Hello,

I'm fairly new to Drupal and have worked with another developer to help me get started... Here is the home page of the site so far: http://79.170.40.246/spinninghat.com/

Please note quality of the images, especially the Plug Mug - it's rather 'grainy' .

I'm using the Image widget on my Ubercart product node which as I understand uses the Image Cache module?... is that right?

Under Modules > Image Cache, I've got the following installed...

* Image API
* Image API GD2
* Image API ImageMagick
* Image Cache
* Image Cache UI

1). admin/settings/imageapi it shows that "ImageAPI GD2" is ticked so I guess I'm using that engine? And the JPEG quality is set at 75%.

2). admin/build/imagecache I have 5 presets:

* product (scale = width:100, height:100, upscale:no)
* product_list (scale = width:100, height:100, upscale:no)
* uc_category (scale = width:100, height:100, upscale:no)
* uc_main_image (scale = width:270, height:270, upscale:no)
* uc_thumbnail (scale = width:35, height:35, upscale:no)

I am not sure how to find out which of the presets I am using? I think because the URL is http://79.170.40.246/spinninghat.com/product/plug-mug I'm using the "product" preset but what one is being used for the home page: http://79.170.40.246/spinninghat.com/ ? Thanks? :)

My main question though, is how can I improve the quality of the thumbnail images? The mug plug on the home is very grainy don't you think?

Thanks very much in advance for anyone's help... I think I'm getting there! :-)

Cheers,
Nick

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

monkfish4d’s picture

monkfish4d commented

Ok, so readin this thread: http://drupal.org/node/174174

and learning from others, it seems it's best to use PNG's instead of JPEGs and also use ImageMagick instead of GD2...

hope that helps someone else... :)

dman’s picture

dman commented

You've mostly got a handle on the right parts.
The simple place to start is that (intuatively named, no?) 'jpeg quality' field.
75% is 'adequate' for image gallery photo thumbnails, but for feature or high-contrast images, you should try just bumping it up to 85% or so.
Yeah, imagemagic has a slightly better rep (I can't see it myself) and PNGs are sweet, but (under current PHP toolkits) come with a not-insignificant size hit.

Note that you won't see the results right away due to imagecache's um, 'caching' features. So remember to click on 'flush cache' within the appropriate imagecache preset setting.

.dan.
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.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards