The reduced sample from my artwork seems to have lost some of it's quality https://e621.net/post/show/1647864/amphibian-big_breasts-breasts-claws-clothing-digit
Is there any way I could get good quality reduced samples like everyone else?

This is user choise, they can turn off the samples or switch to dynamic scaling in their user settings.
https://e621.net/user/edit#posts

For guests the samples are always defaulted, but they can either click "show full image" on top or "Full size" under the image.

Samples purpose is to be sample, a preview to full thing, so it's not supposed to look like the full thing.

Best way to assure best quality sample is to upload as high res PNG as you can, so there's less scaling or compression artifacts in sample.

Mairo said:
This is user choise, they can turn off the samples or switch to dynamic scaling in their user settings.
https://e621.net/user/edit#posts

For guests the samples are always defaulted, but they can either click "show full image" on top or "Full size" under the image.

Samples purpose is to be sample, a preview to full thing, so it's not supposed to look like the full thing.

Best way to assure best quality sample is to upload as high res PNG as you can, so there's less scaling or compression artifacts in sample.

Thanks for the reply and advice, but I have looked at various other uploads (while having reduced samples turned on) and they all show good quality samples,
regardless of resolution. I don't even recall encountering samples that had any kind of artifact problems in the past, maybe it has something to do with bit depth?

Ryxinel said:
Thanks for the reply and advice, but I have looked at various other uploads (while having reduced samples turned on) and they all show good quality samples,
regardless of resolution. I don't even recall encountering samples that had any kind of artifact problems in the past, maybe it has something to do with bit depth?

It's because samples are JPG to make them as small as possible with as wide range of scenarios as possible. There are stuff that would be lower filesize with PNG, but would require extra coding to detect these cases and the benefits are low, because users are still required to view full image to see it in full glory. Also reminder, this is still huge stepup from sites like Furaffinity where they sample the image into JPG and throw original into trash by default.

JPG fileformat works best with noisy, complex, grayscale, calm and non-contrasting colors, etc. really well. That's why the format works best with real life photographs and many images posted here can look decent even with that applied.

Your example is vector drawing where solid pure red againts solid pure blue. This is almost literally the worst case scenario for JPG, so even if we bumped the compression quality higher with samples, it would still look pretty bad. There's not much else you can do other than to tell users to click on "full size" in description.

Hopefully in future WebP would get bit wider support, that fileformat is lossy like JPG but does count cases like this and you most likely see slight color banding instead of massive noise next to outlines, but right now JPG is what we use for samples.

Mairo said:
It's because samples are JPG to make them as small as possible with as wide range of scenarios as possible. There are stuff that would be lower filesize with PNG, but would require extra coding to detect these cases and the benefits are low, because users are still required to view full image to see it in full glory. Also reminder, this is still huge stepup from sites like Furaffinity where they sample the image into JPG and throw original into trash by default.

JPG fileformat works best with noisy, complex, grayscale, calm and non-contrasting colors, etc. really well. That's why the format works best with real life photographs and many images posted here can look decent even with that applied.

Your example is vector drawing where solid pure red againts solid pure blue. This is almost literally the worst case scenario for JPG, so even if we bumped the compression quality higher with samples, it would still look pretty bad. There's not much else you can do other than to tell users to click on "full size" in description.

Hopefully in future WebP would get bit wider support, that fileformat is lossy like JPG but does count cases like this and you most likely see slight color banding instead of massive noise next to outlines, but right now JPG is what we use for samples.

Alright, thanks for clearing things up.