screan size :/

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Name
hayley
Edit My Images
Yes
i have a dell insprion mini laptop and it only has a small screen with i edit my photos on, as this is all i have at home, but when im round someone else's house, they always tend to have bigger monitors then mine and all my pictures look really badly noisy on there's but are looking fine on mine, why is this?

hayley
 
Do you know what the native resolution and dimensions are of the screen you are using ? It may be that because it's small it's using a lower resolution than 72dpi, which is what your friends screens are likely to be using. The lower resolution image has to be interpolated upwards to display the correct size and becomes soft in the process.

Generally it's best to set the resoltuion of the internet versions of your images to 72dpi and resharpen before saving for web and uploading. You'll then match the resolution of the screens that the majority of your viewers will be looking at your work with.
 
DPI doesn't really have any useful relevance. For display on a monitor you just need to know how many pixels you need to fill? the screen.

e.g. my 17" laptop has a 1920x1200 display and my 40" TV has a 1920x1080 display. The DPI for the two displays is completely different (132 for my laptop and 55 for my TV) and completely irrelevant. I only care about the pixel dimensions I need my image to be in order to fit without further resizing up or down. So, when I prepare my final images I crop/resize to fit within a 1920x1080 maximum size. That way I know they will fill both screens as much as possible while never needing to be resized again to fit either display.

Hayley, if, for example, your laptop screen is only 1368x768 and you resize your images for a perfect fit then if you try to display them full screen on a display with a higher resolution (and potentially larger physical dimensions) then you will run into problems. Not only will you have insufficient pixels, but the very action of magnifying the images on the larger display is likely to make flaws more obvious to the eye, whether they be noise, focus, DOF, blur, shake or any other undesirable thing.

The best approach is to size your images to fit the intended display device precisely, or to only view at "actual size" and not to expand them to fill a screen with more pixels. Failing that, don't resize them at all, but keep them at maximum resolution and just let them be downsized (never upsized) to fit whichever display you happen to be using.
 
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