Trying to put scanned cover photos of my books onto a website, and they look great on my computer, but when I copy the them and open it on another PC they look really “grainy”. I have a good Canon Scanner, and use the photo option. Any thoughts on why they are turning so bad?
What does this have to do with (X)HTML? 
Sorry, wasn’t thinking…the scan was related to my website that’s all.
You may need to describe in more detail what you are doing to these images. When you view them on your computer, do you mean on the web? What do you mean by “copying” them? Do the other computers have a different screen res, or different OS, or…?
I suspect you will need to alter your Scanner ‘Descreen’ to ON if you don’t already. That probably will make a huge difference with colour photo-like scans.
Or do you mean ‘after you have saved them into JPG format’ that on other computers they look wrong?
Also are you referring to the images within a Browser or Image Editor?
I have scanned the colored covers of three books, and they all look great when viewed on my PC/Monitor. I copied the website folder I am working on so I could see how it looked on my wife’s and daughter’s computers. The scanned photos look extremely grainy, and not at all useable. I have a 22 iinch monitor and they both have 17 inch. I realize the resolution may be slightly different, but the glaring difference in the clarity of these scanned images baffles me. I will try to scan them again, and work out the problem.
I would suspect the color depth of your wife/child’s computer is probably set at a lower bitrate as well.
I assume you are using a web browser to view these images on the other machines (but not coded within a web-page)?
So that you can get an “unbiased representation” of how they will look. Because if you are using an Image Editor (to view them) they may differ more between the different machines. Thus you can get more variation depending program on settings. It could be colour settings, etc.
A web browser has no concept of dpi thus it will appear different to say Photoshop (where you can see print and actual size, etc.) As far as the browser is likely to be concerned anything over 72 dpi is meaningless anyway (or for that matter so is 72 but that’s another story).
So what I am saying; since you want them to be displayed in a web browser you should be only using a browser on each PC to compare the final results. Obviously you will be using copies not the master files themselves.
If what you’re describing as “grainy” is what I’m suspecting is jpg artifact, we could tell if that’s it (I believe) if you were to use printscreen for both versions, and post those images on your server (then you can post a link here in this thread without waiting for mod approval like attachements have) and we can take a look.
Should this thread get moved over to graphics, or the main “webdesign” catchall area instead?
The guys in graphics may know exactly what this is right away.
Okay, photos look great on wife’s new laptop. Not grainy at all (IE8) When I check my website (work in progress) with the Firefox browser on my PC they look grainy. Can’t seem to figure our the variances, but I will, and let you know what my problem is (other than my stupidity).
I was going to suggest similar to Poes, and you upload just the “web ready” images since the master files would be ridiculously too large. So if you got the images below say 300 KB and online and gave the image address (i.e yourwebsite.com/image1.jpg) we could see if; we could recreate the problem.
I assume you are viewing the smaller “web ready images” at 100% from within the browsers. Because if they are scaled lesser (such as 90%) or within a webpage and HTML code fixing their dimensions that will alter how they appear.
When I use my Netbook images will usually look sharper than on my desktop PC due to the dot-pitch and the fact they are rendered smaller. What we are trying to determine is whether it’s the images or the setup of your machines.