Vista Keeps Jpeg-Optimizing My Wallpapers to look Ugly!

Has anyone else noticed this as well? Say I want to use a 1280x1024 .bmp for my desktop wallpaper. If I right click > Set as Desktop Background, it seems like the applied wallpaper is not in fact my original .bmp, but it is a compressed .jpg located in

C:\Users\(me)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery

If I view the Properties of the picture, I can definitely tell that it's been optimized at a lower size and that it's been converted into a jpeg. The reason I'm concerned is because the optimized image shows typical jpeg artifacting around bright edges, which is of course, undesirable .

<< like those on my avatar around the edges of the text

What is the cause of this optimization process, and how can I get around it? Thanks in advance.

I noticed I also have this problem when I make my own wallpapers, but If i set them as my background directly from the web it does not do this.

Why don't you convert your bitmaps (bmp) to a low-compressed JPG file before setting them as wallpaper?

In Photoshop or equivalent, set the 'slider' to 10+

If Vista is doing the converting then it seems to default to high-compression and you'll never escape those horrible artifacts.

If it helps, I found this tip on Neowin Forums by Medion:

"...if you right-click on the picture and press "set as Desktop Backround" it will look like that. Do it through "Personalize" => "Desktop Background" and it will look better..."

But there seems to be a bit of confusion which method is best. Oh well, try both and see if that is a quick fix.

Thanks for the advice. Both "Set as Desktop Background" from Windows Explorer as well as Personalize > Desktop background both render artifacts into the picture.

However, when I uploaded my image to the web and set it as my background from Firefox, everything seemed to work flawlessly.

From now on, I'm going to keep a text document in the My Pictures folder of all the URLs from my desktop wallpapers that I've uploaded for this reason.

Oskari said:

Why don't you convert your bitmaps (bmp) to a low-compressed JPG file before setting them as wallpaper?

In Photoshop or equivalent, set the 'slider' to 10+

If Vista is doing the converting then it seems to default to high-compression and you'll never escape those horrible artifacts.

Click to expand...

I tried this as well - setting the Photoshop slider to maximum quality in .bmp, .png, and .jpg formats, yet Vista would still optimize my wallpaper (regardless if it was a jpeg or not)

weird - it has never optimized mine....

My current desktop

Picasa Web Albums - johnlgalt - My Desktops

and my alternate desktop

Picasa Web Albums - johnlgalt - My Desktops

Of course, I downloaded the images myself, and then set them as my background using the built in Vista background make the first time around, and then used my Ultramon software to allow for different wallpapers on different monitors to achieve these two - but I have done the same with pics of friends, pics of celebrities, etc.

No artifacts.

Do a screen capture of your DT and post it in your Google account gallery and link it so we can see what artifacts you're getting....because I suspect it may not be artifacts in your *pics* but just artifacts on your monitor or because of your video card going bad.

Same here, I have no artifact problems. I mostly use my digital photos as desktop images and they look pretty good as JPGs. Note: they do start life as RAW files, which I convert via Adobe Camera Raw and then convert to JPG via Photoshop.

No artifact problems here. Are the Images you are displaying different from the screen resolution. If they are and you have set the backgrounds to fit this may explain it.

The artifacting problem was really subtle, and I mean really subtle, but it was enough to cause an annoyance. I can show you a wallpaper I used that will emphasize the issue if anyone wants to try this out:

1) Download and save this wallpaper to your desktop:
http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/5715/corei7extremeevgann0.png

2) Right click in Vista > Set as Desktop Background

3) look very very closely at the edges of the EVGA logo. Notice any artifacting?

4) Now look at the same image, and right click > Set as Desktop Background from your web browser



5) Look very closely at the edges of the EVGA logo. No artifacts.

Through some investigation, I've noticed that vista is converting and resigning the image. now if you were to convert it yourself you may not loss any quality at all depending on the compression rate. On another note vista seems to only do this with png files.

Yes, but every time I apply a background through Vista, whether its a .png, .bmp, or .jpg, it will convert it to an optimized .jpg and store it in the default windows wallpaper folder.

I forgot to mention that it only does that if you use the context menu option. and i'm sure you know that windows won't let you use pngs as your background without converting it.