My "Black Panther" movie wallpaper—why you should enhance your wallpapers too before uploading

This applies to those who are savvy in image editing software like Adobe Photoshop. I see many wallpapers that have a Instagram-like faded effect. I personally think that such wallpapers lose the second purpose of a wallpaper—making your desktop look good while also bringing out the contrast ratios of the screen. The latter is my personal philosophy and I think blacks being knocked out from an image or a colour overlay disqualifies it from being an effective wallpaper.

So, I want to share my latest upload of the Black Panther movie wallpaper.

Here's what I uploaded:

[p2re7e]This was deleted

New upload:

1920 x 128033

Here's the original:

You see, the blacks are richer in my upload, with the saturation upped a bit to show the blue more.

Steps:

1. Auto-curve layer adjustment with per channel contrast
2. Increase saturation with another layer adjustment
3. Increase sharpness on the Black Panther character
4. Little blur on everything else so that the JPEG artifacts disappear.

Let me know your thoughts on this, guys.

I would like your wall because thumbnail looks better than the original, as you said the black color is much better but I have to delete it because of low quality background, the squares all over, especially around the moon :(

Sorry but I still think that "low quality background" rule is utterly ridiculous. Removing good quality wallpapers because of minor artifacts you have to zoom in to see (and everyone can judge for themselves if that's acceptable), while some downright bad and uninteresting ones are around in tons makes utterly no sense.

VincentTL said:

Sorry but I still think that "low quality background" rule is utterly ridiculous. Removing good quality wallpapers because of minor artifacts you have to zoom in to see (and everyone can judge for themselves if that's acceptable), while some downright bad and uninteresting ones are around in tons makes utterly no sense.

I respect your opinion but unfortunately you are completely wrong. And I'll explain you why: ONLY way to judge a quality of a wallpaper is to zoom in. If you wouldn't do it then it could seem like a fine and good quality. You just can't judge it by a thumbnail or just by a one part of it. A wallpaper must be WHOLE good quality. If just a part of it is not, then it will be deleted because of low quality. It's simple as that. Another reason for deletion of a wallpaper with 'just' a low quality background is that if we would accept it as a 'minor artefacts' (therefore good quality) then things would escalate far and far and at the end of the day we would have to accept really low quality wallpapers as a good ones. We have to stop it right at the beginning to maintain our site quality standards.

Edit: What is 'uninteresting' for you could be 'very interesting' for somebody else. It's totally subjective and it has nothing to do with quality of a wallpaper.

A lot of it is subjective, but the bottom line is that if you have a very good quality, HD wallpaper where the only issue is that part of the background has artifacts when you zoom in (and in a lot of cases, it won't even be visible in use on all except really expensive screens - meanwhile, looking at the fact 720p wallpapers are accepted, I assume it's not the site's main target group), it is quite ridiculous and misses the point, sorry. I had a bunch of wallpapers removed exactly like that - excellent quality, excellent lighting, all details of the model and the scenery were very crisp with zero artifacts, but a part of the image was a gray wall which had slight artifacts if you looked really closely. Which, by the way, is sometimes inevitable with digital photography.

I totally get the point about "uninteresting", but my point is: 1) A lot of the stuff that makes it to the "best of the worst" thread stays. I'll leave it to you to judge if those are mostly better than a high-quality wallpaper with a background of worse quality. 2) I see plenty of wallpapers that have no artifacts but the overall photo quality is below what I'd consider good and clear. If I were to report all of those, trust me you would get spammed.

Which is why I find it so bizarre that the one thing that can get a good wallpaper nuked is artifacts on its least interesting part.

VincentTL said:

A lot of it is subjective, but the bottom line is that if you have a very good quality, HD wallpaper where the only issue is that part of the background has artifacts when you zoom in (and in a lot of cases, it won't even be visible in use on all except really expensive screens - meanwhile, looking at the fact 720p wallpapers are accepted, I assume it's not the site's main target group), it is quite ridiculous and misses the point, sorry.

I myself use a 10 year old laptop with a 1280x800 screen and STILL can see those artefacts on background. Have I miss the point somewhere? I have to repeat myself: I spot a compression artefactss (little squares, distortions, noise, whatever you call it) in ANY part of a wallpaper ➜ low quality ➜ deletion. I just can't allow them to stay here because of reasons I mentioned before. We would have here a tons of low quality walls and that's what we don't want to.

I had a bunch of wallpapers removed exactly like that - excellent quality, excellent lighting, all details of the model and the scenery were very crisp with zero artifacts, but a part of the image was agray wall which had slight artifacts if you looked really closely. Which, by the way, is sometimes inevitable with digital photography.

Yes, I've deleted those 4 walls of course because 'slihgt artefacts' (no, they were clearly visible little squares) were on one third of a wallpaper which is not a small part of it! (even absolutely not interesting, though). Yes, you are right that in some cases it's inevitable to have more noise or grain on wallpapers but in my experience in 95% acceptable walls with these distortions are night shots (higher ISO), vintage or old photos made by film cameras (naturally higher noise) or underwater photos. I am less strict with judging on these kinds of wallpapers. All others should and have to be high quality on all parts otherways the will gone.

I totally get the point about "uninteresting", but my point is: 1) A lot of the stuff that makes it to the "best of the worst" thread stays. I'll leave it to you to judge if those are mostly better than a high-quality wallpaper with a background of worse quality.

Absolutly not valid argument: from tens of thousands of users just a very few (hardcore almost everyday-visiting users) are posting on this thread. It's not bad at all - they say their opinion in that form; but it's deffinetely not a majority and can't be taken as a decisive. Btw, content of a wallpaper has nothing to do with its quality.

2) I see plenty of wallpapers that have no artifacts but the overall photo quality is below what I'd consider good and clear. If I were to report all of those, trust me you would get spammed.

Well, just no :)

kejsirajbek said:

I would like your wall because thumbnail looks better than the original, as you said the black color is much better but I have to delete it because of low quality background, the squares all over, especially around the moon :(

Let's see. How's this?

1920 x 128033

LWTBP said:

Let's see. How's this?

1920 x 128033

Better than previous.

kejsirajbek said:

Well, just no :)

challenge accepted. ;)