title: WordPress Image Resizing Reduces Quality of Image
body: <p>I'm running a WordPress site with WordPress version 3.4 (hence using the now deprecated "image_resize" functionality) and I've found that the image resizing abilities of WordPress are extremely lacking in regards to quality. There doesn't seem to be anything online regarding this issue (correct me if I'm wrong).</p>
  
  <p>The images that my client uploads can be quite big, so I wanted to use the image resizing functionality with a cache technique such that images that need to be smaller won't take quite as long to download by the visitors. But when I use image resize I'm finding that the quality is significantly reduced, even with the $jpeg_quality argument set to 100.</p>
  
  <p>Here is an example of the quality difference:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/1rNQa.png" alt="Image Quality Example"></p>
  
  <p>Aside from the blurriness that StackOverflow may add due to its handling of the image, the major difference is in the colour vibrancy. The image on the left is the original uploaded image to the WordPress site which has a native width of about 800 pixels. It has been resized manually within the HTML to 200 pixels wide. The image to the right is the image having been resized by WordPress's resizing method to 200 pixels at 100 percent jpeg quality, using the following code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>image_resize( "/path/to/image", 200, 0, false, null, null, 100 );
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Can anyone explain why this is looking so bad, and what I can do to solve it?</p>