No More Grey Whites in Blogger! :)

My first orange (saved as a png file)

Once upon a time a girl who lived in the Land Downunder planted an orange tree. One day her orange tree finally bore its very first orange! No no no no......Wait, what! Let's try again.

Once upon a time a girl who lived in the Land Downunder was happily blogging using Blogger. Her photos were never perfect but she enjoyed sharing them and keeping a record of her days. Then late 2013 something changed. Some of her images became weird and even ugly when they were uploaded to Blogger - like the one below! Exact same image - two very different looks.

Exact same image, saved as a jpg file, which still looked like to top image until uploaded and auto enhanced by Blogger

Oh no!!! What had happened? Google had changed Blogger so that it would auto enhance all images as they were uploaded. No matter how hard she tried to re-edit her photos or work around the problem, nothing could overcome the awful auto enhance and some images were affected more than others.  The only remedy she could find to fix this terrible state of affairs was to join Google + which then allows access to switch off the auto enhance option. Stubbornly refusing to join Google+ she even contemplated moving her blog to Wordpress or stopping blogging altogether - and she was not alone.

png file which loads as is to Blogger, bypassing their auto enhance 

Identical image (as a jpg) when upload to Blogger 

Yum became yuk. Some favourite photos were never shared.....and there was a sadness.

png

This jpg image has less white/contrast and doesn't show so great a difference in Blogger

png

Identical image as a jpg after uploading to Blogger

Then one sunny day in April - that would be today - she/I followed a fresh trail and found the key which she/I had almost given up hoping for. Did you see that one line UPDATE near the top of Lo Sauer's post?

"Update: After a quick test it shows that apparently Google does not enhance png's with an alpha transparency."

Not understanding all things technical I began looking into this idea to find it held the answer. I can export directly from iPhoto as a png, or I can save my jpg images as a png in PicMonkey which I use for final editing and watermarking. In PicMonkey there's a dropbox for choosing jpg or png right beside your image file name in the save window. Easy! The png images are very large so I resize them once saved as a png before uploading to Blogger.

 *The auto enhance only effects some images, particularly those with a lot of white or great light/dark contrast.  Jpg format still works perfectly fine for most images.

Such an easy answer - at last. Oh, by the way, the orange was sweet and juicy, even though not picture perfect - I loved it just the way it was! (As I like my photos - just the way they are!)



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