Raw files

[pmanson]

Probably a newbie error but i'm a bit confused.

I've been reading a couple of online articles recently and trying to get more out of my EOS 1000D. As such i've decided to start shooting in raw.

So I decided take some pictures of our son in raw then use the free utility (Digital Photo Professional) to convert the raw files to jpg and to do some basic file editing.

So I took one of the files, made it slightly brighter and saved it as a jpg. It looks great (to my eyes) in the Windows 7 file preview but when I set the image as my desktop background it looks a bit fuzzy and almost like i've scanned a photograph in.

I know it's almost impossible to troubleshoot issues like this but I don't want to risk getting photos printed in the future if i'm not getting the basics correct.

Cheers,
Phill

[Dave^]

Probably due to the resolution of the picture being totally different to the resolution of your desktop...

Process the RAW again, but this time, save it to the same resolution as your monitor...

[Simpo Two]

That was my thought too. Whether RAW or JPG, the image is still X dots by Y dots.

[pmanson]

Wierd. I wonder if it was my eyes playing up earlier.

Just reset the background and everything looks as it should.

[LongQ]

pmanson said:

Wierd. I wonder if it was my eyes playing up earlier.

Just reset the background and everything looks as it should.

Iirc the Canon software, like many others, creates a thumbnail as well as the requested file. Is it possibly you set the small size thumbnail as the desktop rather than the jpg first time around? (That of course should be quite dramatically obvious usually but thumbnails can be set to be quite large sizes.)

Beyond that there is potential for the image to be incompletely processed by Windows when being set as a desktop - which is perhaps the more likely situation. I've seen a few odd thing using Win7 -like 2 similar and almost identically processed images, displayed in the same editor, looking very different on screen. I have yet to fully understand why.