losing TIFF and PNG QUALITY when loaded into ArcMap?

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08-19-2011 05:17 AM
JacobDarrah
New Contributor
i have created some tiffs and pngs by exporting the USA topo maps from ArcMap using export to tiff and export to png.  I set the dpi for 300.  When load the image into arcmap it loses alot of quality in the raster.  when i open the tiff or png in windows photo viewer (default app for my computer) the images look crisp and clear.  any help?? Thanks!
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RobertBerger
New Contributor III
Greetings,

What you are seeing might be related to the stretch of the raster. To check, open the layer properties from the Table of Contents > Symbology Tab > change the stretch to none. If this resolves the issue, then you can turn off the default stretch in ArcMap Options > Raster > Raster Layer.
Hope this helps.

Robert
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JacobDarrah1
New Contributor II
that did help some, thanks!
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KarlWilson
Occasional Contributor III
ArcGIS seems to generally be quite poor at displaying raster images when you zoom in/out of the native resolution. I've also seen this lack of quality translate to ArcGIS Server map services too, which is very frustrating.

This issue is not related to raster stretching. If I load in an OS map tile for example, so with a Colormap symbology (not Stretched), it will look bad when I zoom in and out. In a graphics package (even MS Paint!) it will look much better.

I've seen this issue mentioned a couple of times before, but without any conclusion:
http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/7912-Why-is-the-image-quality-for-raster-overlay-tiles-so-poor-%28s...
http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/35320-Raster-Dataset-Resolution-Loss?highlight=raster+image+quality


Can somebody from ESRI help explain this please?

Thanks,
Karl
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