So I’m looking at the NASA Earth Observatory picture of the day, and it is a picture of the tornado path through Massachusettes from the other day.
And I download the 8MB TIFF file, because I want to take a closer look. But when I down load the 8MB TIFF, it is actually fuzzier than the image on that page, which is 240 kB. Which means I appear to get a better look on the non-zoomed smaller file.
Why? Why does the 8 meg file look fuzzy while the 240 kilo file look clear?
I just downloaded that 8MB file and expanded it with Irfanview. The result was still very clear and detailed at man times the size of the original on the web site. I would say there is something in your image viewer client that is compressing the file for your screen view and losing the detail.
Bottom line: The detail is in the download.
Concur. When I go to the linked page, all I have to do is click on the image and Firefox will take me to the image on a page by itself, which is crappy. But that’s because it’s the scaled-to-fit-the-screen version. If I click on that image, I get the full size which is so sharp I can see reflections of clouds in the lakes.
At what magnification are you viewing the 8MB download? When I look at it with 100% magnification (actual size), I see the same sharpness as the picture of the day, but a much larger size. When I increase the magnification to more than 100%, then it starts getting fuzzy, which is only natural.
ETA: Using Paint.net on Windows 7 to view the 8MB .TIFF download.
I was doing the download with automatic opening in Windows Picture and Fax viewer. So I toggled over to Paint, and it is much better.