Why do pictures look terrible?

[mjstrand]

I am having visitors tomorrow, and have put their names and logo up on page 2 of my screens. Called “Welcome”. Can you take a look for me, cause the logo looks blurry, what can I do to fix this? I asked my marketing people and they started on things like hi res, low res pictures/images etc etc. Didn’t help. I know you will tell me in plain English!!

[mjstrand]

yes, your marketing people are right. I will try to put it into English and give you some alternatives to have it look better.

If you click on the thumbnail of the image (when you are signed into your account), a new window will pop up showing image details. The logo you are working with is 132 pixels wide and 88 pixels high. Your screen is 1366 pixels wide and 768 pixels high. So, the image is a very tiny portion of the screen (11%). Images can be shrunk very well by computers, but when they are magnified, it just magnifies each dot (which is a square dot). I suspect that you got the logo from a web site - which usually have small images so that they load faster.

The closer you can get to the 1366 x 768 screen resolution (or bigger), the better it will look. Sometimes you can find alternate images by searching the company name. Also, lots of larger companies have a press (or media) area that has high resolution images available. Another idea is to actually contact the company marketing staff ahead of time and ask them to email a high resolution logo. Every company has it available and it is a 2 minute thing for them to email it to you.

I hope that helps.