My images look blurry when I export or publish my site from Muse. Why and how do I fix it?

Question

My images look blurry, jagged, pixelated and low quality when I publish or export my site from Muse. Is there any way to avoid or fix this problem?

Answer 1

The primary cause of blurring images is the less than Photoshop-quality image downsampling algorithm currently used in Muse (that was compounded in early betas due to a bug in the JPEG compression library we were using at that time). Due to work we've done for Beta 7 to improve image encoding performance we now have the infrastructure in place to enable us to take a much better image resampler/resizer (after Beta 7), so this source of blurring will be addressed.
The other source of blurring is unique to opaque images containing line art or otherwise containing hard edges and large areas of solid color. When an image is opaque Muse will encode it as JPEG (if it's altered in Muse is a way that requires re-encoding). For line art this will introduce JPEG compression artifacts that can be noticeable depending on your eye and the specific image involved.
There are (at least) to ways to avoid these JPEG compression artifacts:
Resize your image before placing and avoid applying any effects (rounded corners, drop shadow, etc.) or doing any cropping or resizing in Muse. If the image is unaltered your original JPEG, PNG or GIF will be passed through unaltered.*
Put at least one pixel of transparency in your original image. (It could be a single 99% opaque pixel.) This will force Muse to encode as PNG. PNG compression is lossless and thus doesn't introduce any compression artifacts. However, an average PNG can be 5 times the size of a JPEG for the same image, so there is an impact to webpage download performance.
*For PSD files Muse has to encode the original PSD data into some web-friendly image format. If an image is resized in Photoshop and placed Muse won't resize/resample the image data, but it will encode it as JPEG or PNG depending on whether it contains transparency.