Help! Pictures blurry in iPhoto on new monitor.

[nickn]

I just got a new monitor for my 07 Mac mini. It works great and has excellent picture quality for everything except for all of my iPhoto pics. In any mode, including full screen, all of my shots are now slightly blurry. If I press one or two on the keyboard to zoom in, in full screen mode, the zoomed in shot then becomes clear. If I click zero and display the whole photo it becomes blurry again. I can right click on a pic and click show in finder and then open the photo in preview fine. The pictures then look tack sharp as they should. My old monitor didn't do this, all of my photos looked sharp in iPhoto and the same in preview. The new monitor isn't at fault since preview will show the pics sharp on it. What can I do here to fix this? I am currently running the latest version of iPhoto 8 on 10.6.8. Would upgrading to the new iPhoto version fix this issue?
thanks!

Edit
I would also like to add that photos now have a different color tone. A photo displayed in preview that is pure white shows up as creamy white in iPhoto. I can place the same image side by side while open in preview and iphoto and can clearly see the difference. Again, none of this happens when my old monitor is used.

 

[nickn]

One other odd thing I have found is that many of my cropped photos are displaying sharp. A few are not but the rest all look good, and also have the proper color tone. I really don't understand my problem or what to do to fix it. Any ideas? Thanks!!!

 

[thekb]

What resolution is your monitor set at? What is the size (in pixel dimensions) of the pictures you are viewing?

It sounds like when iPhoto resizes the photos to fit the screen it is producing jaggies?

 

[nickn]

My new monitor is set at its native resolution of 1920x1080. My old monitor was set at its native of 1440x900. All of my pics in question are 3872x2592 from a Nikon d3000

 

[thekb]

Well, that doesn't sound like it. Can you take a screen shot of what the blurriness looks like?

You could try exporting some pictures to 1920 x 1080 and seeing if that solves the problem for those pictures.

 

[nickn]

I took a screenshot of a photo displayed in iPhoto using grab. The screenshot also came out blurry, even when opened in preview. I also did export a couple of images to the size of 1920x1080. They seem to be even blurrier then the now blurry originals displayed in iPhoto. Another person I talked to suggested deleting the iPhoto preferences files. I could try this, as I have a full backup, but am somewhat hesitant. Do you think deleting the files will do anything to fix my issue.?
Thanks!!!!
-Nick

 

[English Hacker]

No, I wouldn't say deleting any files will help.

Make sure you're viewing the files at 100%. That will mean you'll only see a portion of the image onscreen based on the resolution of the files. Are they good now? You may be viewing shrunken images which will cause them to be less sharp than they would be at 100%.

 

[thekb]

I think the problem is that you are cramming a 3872 pixel-wide picture into a 1920 pixel-wide box. When iPhoto tries to show you the entire picture onscreen it has to make decisions about which pixels it thinks are not important and it sometimes guesses wrong, leaving a blurry looking picture. Pixels are a constant size and are like teeny tiny blocks that make up a big mosaic picture. If the whole picture uses 3872 blocks and you try to reconstruct the picture using only 1920 blocks, it won't look just right.

Try what English Hacker was suggesting. View the picture at full size or actual size. The picture will not fit on your screen, but you will be seeing a true one-pixel-to-one-pixel presentation. If that looks good then there is nothing wrong with your monitor. The "fault" is with iPhoto, although there is nothing it can really do about it.

When you exported the photos to 1920, was it the screen captures or the original pictures? If the originals, that should have fixed the problem. If the screen captures, it wouldn't help at all.

If that doesn't fix it, I don't know what the problem could be.

 

[nickn]

Yes, if I display the images zoomed in so that every pixel will be displayed 1:1, then the picture is clear. I still don't understand what is happening though. I see what you are saying about how the screen needs to discard extra pixels and that the picture quality might be affected, but then how does preview display the exact same image fine when zoomed out to show the entire image? Additionally why does my my older 1440x900 screen not display the the same images blurry in iPhoto? It should be having to drop even more pixels to display the whole image thus making the picture quality even worse then my new 1920x1080 but that is not the case. The old monitor looks far better, even though it has far less resolution. Also when I exported a shot I used something in iPhoto to make the smaller image. I didn't take a screenshot for that. If you don't know that is ok, thank you very much for at least trying!!!!

 

[Dave Braine]

I think the problem is that you are cramming a 3872 pixel-wide picture into a 1920 pixel-wide box. When iPhoto tries to show you the entire picture onscreen it has to make decisions about which pixels it thinks are not important and it sometimes guesses wrong, leaving a blurry looking picture.

Can't say that I agree with that. My photos are 3072x1728 and display pin sharp at any size in iPhoto on my 1280x800 MacBook.

 

[thekb]

Can't say that I agree with that. My photos are 3072x1728 and display pin sharp at any size in iPhoto on my 1280x800 MacBook.

I'm only guessing without seeing the actual screen. I'd have to see what it looks like. Can you post one of the screenshots you took?

Dave, Since he sees the picture clearly at 1:1, that sort of confirms the problem is not the monitor. As to why you don't have that problem and he didn't have it on an older monitor ... I have no idea! That's a good question. I know some viewing software has better algorithms for reducing sizes than others.