Visual quality differences after raster reprojection and resampling (colors and sharpness)

mari_rodrigues — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 19:29:23 GMT

Hello everyone,

I have a specific question regarding the visual quality of a raster after reprojection and change in spatial resolution, especially concerning differences in colors and sharpness, and I would like to understand whether this behavior is expected and how to minimize the issue.

I am working with an RGB orthomosaic (≈ 5 GB), originally in a geographic coordinate system (WGS84, degrees), with a spatial resolution of approximately 1.5 cm per pixel. I reprojected this raster to SIRGAS 2000 / UTM Zone 22S and then resampled it to a 3 cm pixel size.

After this process, I noticed that the reprojected image shows:

a slight loss of sharpness compared to the original;
small differences in color tone and contrast;
band statistics that are similar, but not identical, to those of the original raster.

My main question is how I can correct or minimize this loss of visual quality, and which best practices I should adopt to prevent this from happening in future reprojection workflows.

I have attached the original and the reprojected images so that you can visually compare the differences in quality between them.

I would greatly appreciate any guidance or practical experience regarding this type of processing with high-resolution orthomosaics.

Thank you very much!

Re: Visual quality differences after raster reprojection and resampling (colors and sharpness)

Robert_LeClair — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 20:37:25 GMT

I "think" what may happening is your seeing the default environment settings of the Project Raster GP tool in play. See image below.

Some items you could change are cell size, resampling method, and perhaps cell size projection method. Tweak some of these settings and see what the result is.

topic Re: Visual quality differences after raster reprojection and resampling (colors and sharpness) in ArcGIS Pro Questions

Visual quality differences after raster reprojection and resampling (colors and sharpness)

Re: Visual quality differences after raster reprojection and resampling (colors and sharpness)