As a photographer, I pay great attention to image quality, as just like me, many other photographers are doing the same. And we are interested in displaying on our websites photos at their best possible quality, because this is a very important aspect for a photographer, the image quality.

But unfortunately, developers don't seem to realize that right now, there are almost no solutions out there capable of displaying our photos at their true quality ! And also nobody seems to realize just how big of an impact such a piece of software would have for the photographic community. Literally over night, that software would become the world's number one plugin to go to.

And this is exactly the case for Ari Fancy Lightbox too. It's a great piece of software, that has lots of good features and does many things right, which makes it one of the best lightboxes available right now. But unfortunately, the developers aren't paying enough attention to the image quality aspect, they are not developing it as a piece of software addressed to the photographic community. From the image quality perspective, right now Fancy Lightbox does an ok job, but not a great job, certainly not as good as it could possible do.

For instance, try to view this photo here through XnView, and then look at it through Fancy Lightbox. You'll see that XnView displays is better, it just looks different, more sharp, more vivid, there is a clear difference. And this is mainly because when resizing an image, there are lots of techniques that can be used (Cubic, Lanczos, Gausian, Mitchel, Bilinear, and so on), techniques which are greatly influencing the final result. Or this exactly where Fancy Lightbox fails, because when it resizes an image it doesn't implement a great resigns algorithm so that it can maintain the original quality of the image ! The best algorithm as far as I know is Lanczos, which gives the sharpest view when resizing, but there might be others too. If Fancy Lightbox would implement this kind of algorithms, or maybe even let as choose which one to use just like XnView does, over night, it would literally become the number one photographic plugin to go to ! So, why not implement such a feature ?

Hello,

The plugin doesn't create thumbnails or images with different dimensions base on an original image. Thumbnails are generated by gallery plugins. "ARI Fancy Lightbox" shows content into the lightbox and can scale content to fit screen size. Images are shown by a browser and the plugin can affect on browser's algorithm which is used to show scaled images.

Regards,
ARI Soft

admin wrote:
Hello,

"ARI Fancy Lightbox" shows content into the lightbox and can scale content to fit screen size.
Yes, that was precisely what I was talking about ! That scaling procedure, which is basically doing a resizing on the fly, but without using a good algorithm (because it's using the browser's algorithm). And it doesn't matter how we call it, resizing or scaling, because in essence, from the image's perspective both are doing the same thing, altering its dimensions.

You can see this image how it looks inside XnView, completely different, but when viewed through Fancy Lightbox something changes because the image gets actively scaled down and it becomes a little bit less sharp. It's not a huge difference obviously, but still, it's there. And I like your plugin too much not to want it to offer us the best image quality it could possibly offer.

Of course I'm not a software developer, I was just saying that perhaps you should try to look into this aspect, maybe there is something that can be improved about this. If you could somehow implement the Lanczos algorithm during the scaling procedure, it would offer better results. Probably right now it's just using the browser's algorithm during scaling, which is definitely not Lanczos.

LE:
developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/image-rendering
Just as I was suspecting, Firefox is using the Bilinear and Nearest-Neighbor algorithms, which are very weak, two of the most blurry algorithms out there. That means Fancy Lightbox uses the same algorithms during scaling procedures, because it inherits it / them from the browser. Chrome it's not doing a much better job either. That is why I was saying that currently there is no possibility to display images on the internet that look exactly like they do on your computer. And this is a huge deal for photographers.