WordPress 2.5 comes with a fantastic media manager, offering the ability to automatically resize an uploaded image into thumbnail and medium sizes as well as offering the original file. I've used this feature a bunch, both on this blog and my photoblog. I didn't really think much of it, but just noticed today that the resized images were much less saturated than the originals. Here is a comparison of the same image, one resized by WordPress 2.5.1 (left), the other by Preview.app (right):
The shift in saturation is pretty obvious. For some images, it wouldn't be a big deal. But I want to use WordPress to manage the files in my photoblog, so fracking up the saturation of a photograph is pretty bad. I spent about an hour trying to figure out how to convince the PHP image resizing code to not suck the soul out of the images. No can do.
The easy fix? Just use the "original size" option so WordPress doesn't mess with the file, and resize it before uploading. I'll be using Aperture to pump out 800 pixel wide photographs before uploading them to mindfulseeing.com