Photos look worse when used for the web

I wanted to thank you for taking the time to write your tutorials. The ones on interpolation, digital CCDs and airy discs were very helpful. I have a website set up and am currently re-designing it. This website seems to be able to display its images on the web without loosing any contrast or saturation, even compressed for the web these images are quite clear. I have had a bit of trouble with loosing too much when compressing the images for web use. I was wondering if you have a tutorial that might help me retain saturation and contrast for web presentation.

There are a few reasons a photo would lose contrast or resolution when displayed on the web.

The most likely is that you are using a different color profile than sRGB (Adobe RGB 1998 possibly?), which will cause colors to look far less saturated when displayed using programs that are not color managed (the internet). Make sure you are saving these files that have been converted to sRGB.

Alternatively, if you have created a color profile for your monitor (using a color management device such as the spyder or eye-one) it could be that in Photoshop images are being displayed using the monitor's color profile, but then this is no longer used when viewing in a web browser. If this is the case it is less of a problem and unavoidable. Other than these, there is no reason a photo should lose color saturation when downsized for web viewing (nothing changes with the color information, just the resolution).

As far as contrast, make sure that you are not using too much JPEG compression, and that you sharpen your images after any downsizing. There's more on this topic on this website's tutorial about resizing images for the web and email.