Railfan Technology > Digital Show Image Quality?

I have produced shows using Adobe Photo Shop Elements 4.0 and Pro Show Gold and viewing both I notice a drop off in sharpness of the images compared to viewing the same images directly from a disk. Is this normal or am I not doing something when creating these programs that would give the same image quality?

Resize the images to match the native resolution of the projector you will be using. Most likely that will be 1024x786 or 800x600. That will mean the projector/computer combination will not have to guess about resizing the images to work. Also moving the files from AdobeRGB to sRGB color space will keep the colors from becoming "electric" when projected.

If you want the images to all look like the same quality then use the same dimension for the longest dimension. Either 786 or 600 depending upon the projector available. Make sure the 'constrain proportions" box is checked in Photoshop when you resize and the computer will match the shorter dimension to that. I use Bicubic Sharpen when downsizing the images which is generally all that is needed to keep the image crisp for projection.

Keep in mind we are throwing away a lot of pixels here to make the image fit on the projectors currently available so ALWAYS work from a copy of your original. Some day we will have a projector capacity to use all the image captured and you do not want to permanently throw away all those pixels which are superflous now.