Poor image quality when uploading an image with Rise

Apr 10, 2017

Hello,

I created and saved-for-web a .png image in Photoshop. When I uploaded it with Rise (as a centered image in my blocks-lesson), it converted it with poor quality. Is it possible to avoid those artifacts? Looks not so good when a course is viewed on PC screen.

Thank you!

 

Pinned Reply
Alyssa Gomez

Hi everyone!

Do you have an image that looks 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.

248 Replies
Move Training  Team

I have to reiterate the concern here. I have hundreds of users using our courses and frankly this is an embarrassing bug that affects one of the fundamental features of the platform.

Things like chart blocks and quick add blocks are neat features, but I don't understand how fixing poor image quality could take a backseat to trivial new features (in comparison) like those. 

Irina Poloubessov

Joe, exactly. It is embarassing indeed. Next to the wonderful other features, great usability, intuitive use, and all the features I value so much in Articulate - this awful bug is so basic and fundamental, upon which it is hard to convince our peers and learners to appreciate the product.
It is like talking to a great, smart, inspiring businessman but without a front tooth :(

Roland Straub

Time to bang the drum here for the great articulate support we all usually get here. Sure the staff getting to reply to all these frustrated posts isn't the one to but gets all the blame.

Thank you guys for that, hang in there and keep up the good work.
Roland

PS: out of curiosity. As the tool has this severe graphics bug, I would expect a partial payback of the hefty annual fee that is with appr. $1300 p.a. (here in Switzerland) expensive but worth the price if everything works. I think a failure to ensure a crucial feature like this, would well justify a compensation. Is that in discussion with you guys?

Justin Grenier

Hi everyone. I want to provide an update on this issue.

We’re so sorry that images in Rise 360 don’t look the way you’d like them to. We prioritize all of our work on new features and fixes based on what will have the greatest impact on our users, and we’ve found that most folks are pleased with how their images look.

We’re planning to determine ways we can help you finetune your images, and this work is in our development queue. I can’t provide an ETA right now, but we’ll keep you updated.

Irina Poloubessov

Dear Justin,
Thank you for the update - but excuse me, who are those "most folks"?
We have never seen any user interview conducted within Articulate to rate the product. So I am not sure which audience counts for you as an impactful.
I see here numerous people suffering from Storyline and Rise image quality. Our company has thousands of employees and we develop blurry content for them -- is it not enough people complaining?
Greatest impact on user is a fundamental performance first,  and how can you be sure that other users, who do not take their nerves and energy to make that point here, are really happy with the images?
Articulate 360 is indeed a great product, and the contrast of poor, destroying, awful images just makes it ridiculous - having sleek responsive design with the quality of images that even silliest website does not allow itself to have today. We do not want the fancy algorithms intervening with our work! This SHOULD BE THE HIGHEST PRIORITY, and again since we have never been asked to contribute to the opinion of the "most folks" - I hope that this thread provides enough position with this regards! This is offensive to leave us helpless here.

Paul Knights

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?

Erin Higgenbotham

Wow....I logged in to ask this question and see that there really hasn't been a fix for this yet? 2 years later? :(

 

Now reading the comments in more detail. I do have to agree with Irinia...that " most folks are pleased with how their images look." comment. I used to work in IT/Web Dev after college and that was an excuse given to people to brush off their concerns. IT/Web Dev knew it was an issue, but didn't have the resources to allocate to fix the problem. So they just ignored the issue or there wasn't enough complaints to justify any fixing it anytime soon.

I, as well, don't care for the image quality in my course. While the pictures are there, they are grainy and not as crisp as they really should be.

Alex Bradley

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!! 

Cheryl Lee

Hi, I too am facing issues with compression - it's really noticeable in vector/flat style illustrations. I also wanted to let everyone know about what I had observed. When I uploaded my PNG file to be background for the 'Text on Image', my original file size was 56KB (a PNG file with file size 3000x1500 px) but Rise compressed my file to a PNG with a file size of 69KB. Another file, original file size 94KB to 262KB... Which goes against my understanding of... 'compression'... but I took a look at the file dimension and noticed that they changed the width to 1680px. So I resized my PNG accordingly and this seems to do okay sometimes - while I can still see some pixelation, it's something that I can live with... but again, this work around isn't fool-proof either, sadly. 

I also wanted to voice my concern also about the 'Best Practices document' - I see that some of the staff are trained to just link it whenever there is a question about image quality, and personally I am wondering if these staff that link to this guide have even read through this - the only information here is that Rise has its own compression technology (which is a complete mystery to us) and the maximum file sizes for each file type. It really needs to provide more guideline to be able to be titled 'Best Practices' since currently it just says 'upload whatever you want under the file size limit and we'll just compress it for you (or in my case make the file size bigger and change the file type without telling you, and render your clean looking vector-style art weirdly).

So Articulate staff, I'm sure you are more aware of how the compression technology behaves in your own product. I think having something like this in the 'Best Practices document' would be really helpful if you cannot fix the bug due to resource restraints - provide us with the dimensions the platform is trying to compress the image to? Thanks!

Nicola Fern

I want to add a plus one to this. I complained about the image quality before elsewhere as well.  I'm developing courses for radiologists and we depend HEAVILY on being able to accurately reproduce high quality scan images in the courses. If there are artefacts in the images, these could be misinterpreted or misread so the image quality is of paramount concern for us.  I just want to be able to turn all the fancy compression OFF and do it myself.  Surely it just needs a checkbox to skip the compression process?

Erin Higgenbotham

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. ;)

Calvin Lo

Rise shouldn't be compressing PNG and GIFs to JPG if it's doing that. that's basic web graphics knowledge. GIFS and PNGs are for text and vectors and JPGs are for photos.  If you save or compress a 2-color vector image into JPG, you will end up with a bigger file size because of more colors (shades of the two colors) added and a blurry image.

It sucks that Rise does this and can't seem to figure out how to fix it. I like the sleek overall look of the course but the poor image quality of my screenshots are ruining it. 

Move Training  Team

I think it’s because Rise likes to add a shadow overlay on any cover image for the purposes of ensuring contrast agains the text color of the course title that will sit on top of the image. Would be nice if there was a way to know what the true color of your image would look like as a final product, or to avoid the shadow overlay, but I think they do this to “fool-proof” the look and feel.

Cass Netzley

Hi Allison,

As nice as being able to tone that setting back to 10% is (pun intended)... it's still quite a shift being made to the cover image even at 10%. This really messes with my designers when trying to utilize our brand colors and functional icon sets for unique product based covers. It's quite the trial and error routine trying to zero in the particulars of 'Dutch Orange' when we know the hex code, can see what we want in Illustrator/Photoshop and then have to mess with the original color to try an accommodate what Rise will do with the 10% text contrast setting.

I'm pretty sure there's already a submitted request to allow the text contrast to be turned off altogether or at least set to 0%. Let us know if you see that in your system or not. If there is an existing request, please add my name to it if it hasn't been already.

Thanks!