Poor image quality when uploading an image with Rise

Hi Kora! Thanks for reaching out.

Does your image look blurry in Rise 360? We've designed a workaround to keep your images looking crystal clear.

If you'd like an image to keep its specific file format and not undergo compression, you can opt-out of image optimization on a case-by-case basis. Add _NOPROCESS_ to the name of your image file. It'll upload and display exactly as you saved it. Keep in mind that the 5GB file size limit still applies, and you could see an increase in your output file size.

Maybe this has been mentioned, but I found a decent way to get around this. Using either Photoshop or Snag it, take that image and change the IMAGE SIZE resolution.

Typically the setting is either 72 or 96. Play with what setting works for you, but I found that increasing the resolution of the image to between 300 dpi or 350 dpi improved my resolution so that things were not horribly blurry. It doesn't make it 100% crisp, but for some of the images I had to use, I found this as a decent placeholder until Articulate fixes the issue. ;)

I think this problem occurs because Articulate always had "everyone" as their demographic for using their products, which meant that non-technical/professional people could pop a 8mb 300 dpi picture in their course when it should be cropped, reduced to 72 dpi and be around the 200kb mark etc!

The nice folks at articulate thought let's make life easy and automatically compress pics for these people.... but actually its us as professionals that are using their products and complaining about what should be a given - quality!

Surely they can just introduce a button in the system/settings which turns this on or off?

We are having this problem as well and have filed multiple support tickets for this with many similar examples and included our Rise projects as well. This is one of a few image handling issues that we are experiencing in Rise. Since many of these issues have MacGuyver-esque hoop jumping solutions it seems that there is a level of Apathy both on the Articulate QA side and the Development side to address some very core functions that limit true designers to have ease of use or normal workflow patterns. This causes hours of extra work to compensate for these shortcomings.

However, for this particular situation exporting your vector art as a high quality GIF somehow will help eliminate the artifacting and banding you are getting in the color gradients and help with the horrible aliasing issues as well. I can attach examples if needed. Try that as that has been our salvation thru this challenging situation with Articulates authoring tools. 

Warm regards (and yes this is quite unacceptable level of functionality for a design-centric authoring tool and technology company)

The problem is more severe with PNG graphics than it is with JPG photos. While fiddling around to get better quality with PNGs, I found that if  I save a PNG with transparency, it looks much better than the same image saved as PNG wihtout transparency. I suppose that when the transparency box is checked, Rise must respect the file format to render the transparency.

Here is my PNG image in Rise without transparency

Here is the same image with transparency

Artefacts and most banding are gone. Note that it is not necessary to have transparent areas in the image, you just have to tick the transparency checkbox when exporting to PNG.

Dear Articulate Team,

I see this great idea of a workaround with the replacing of the images with .jpg extention --- it means that regardless which image we upload (png, gif, jpg) -- Articulate converts it to jpg , and we out of control of the Settings it uses for the jpg?

I love Articulate products very much for their great performance and usability, however with regards to the images I find it very confusing and upsetting: to automatically convert all our Images to JPG  -- this is not a transparent process and without our control on our own data.
If we choose to upload PNG we have a reason behind it and we want to keep it ot at least to be asked about the JPG settings if the conversion is inevitable. Why not leave the images as they are, without any additional processing on them? We take this responsiblity on ourselves to ensure the best image quality.

Boss: "We have had a few complaints about a problem with our e-learning product"

Me: "But most folks say it fine!"

Boss "Oh cool, right then what's next on the agenda?"

That's a conversation I can never imagine happening.

Well said Irina and yes, I agree with you Paul.

I find it incredible that not one member of the Articulate team has had the decency to be honest and upfront with us and:

a) explain what is causing the issue with images

b) explain what needs to happen in order to fix the issue with the images

c) explain either when this fix is going to happen (with timelines!) or just be honest and tell us why it will never happen.   

The most frustrating thing of all for me is the stringing along and the constant fob-offs. Please please PLEASE Articulate, treat us like the paying customers we are and just explain to us what is going on here!! 

Hi Irina, I reposted the original message!

The problem is more severe with PNG graphics than it is with JPG photos. While fiddling around to get better quality with PNGs, I found that if  I save a PNG with transparency, it looks much better than the same image saved as PNG wihtout transparency. I suppose that when the transparency box is checked, Rise must respect the file format to render the transparency.

Here is my PNG image in Rise without transparency

Here is the same image with transparency

Artefacts and most banding are gone. Note that it is not necessary to have transparent areas in the image, you just have to tick the transparency checkbox when exporting to PNG.