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
Elearning Babel

My own experience on this issue is that Rise uses a very agressive compression of bitmaps when stored on the cloud during authoring, not on final export. I guess that this is intended to limit the storage cost. But amazon and google have image archive solutions that preserve quality and are offered for free.

In previous Rise releases, full color PNG images where always palette-reduced and dithered without warning. Now they are always converted to JPG and the poor quality produces a lot of artifacts on flat areas.

Anyway, the current situation is not acceptable for a quality (and costly) authoring solution and should be addressed. Maybe on general settings you could configure the media quality for storage? At least, you could preserve PNG quality and apply compression only to JPGs. That way, authors could choose what kind of image to use for different scenarios.

 

Paul Knights

Never thought of the "limit the storage cost" angle before ... sounds very plausible.


I know we use huge amounts of video in our courses, and if everyone is doing the same then Articulates servers will get full very quickly! The PNG solution although what we want would still not address storage capacity for articulate. Maybe we could have the option to have our assets stored locally - but this could prove difficult for non localised teams and collaborative working.

Still, would be nice to have the option!

 ps - how about keeping the same asset file names so we could easily replace on export?

Irina Poloubessov

Interesting aspect of storage cost - but then, if there is a limit on image size, we could still prepare it locally at the quality that is satisfactory for us, on our own responsibility. I'd rather play with settings in Photoshop to reduce the file size, rather then have it uncontrollably converted to low-quality JPG. 

JC Blanchard

I totally agree with Irina. Well said Irina! We pay money for high quality vector images and they are completely destroyed in Rise. From the perspective of our clients, this makes US look bad, not Articulate. Converting PNGs to JPG is not acceptable. If I upload a PNG, that's because I need a PNG. If I would want a JPG, I would convert it myself.

Gabriel Butler

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)

JC Blanchard

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.

Irina Poloubessov

I managed to copy the text of JC
from the reported by mistake comment:

 

"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

 Without transparency

Here is the same image with transparency

 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.

"

JC Blanchard

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.