title: product images with no loss of quality (or pixel perfect, with no processing/resizing done at all)?
body: <p>I have spent a lot of time on my product images, adjusting them to perfectly match the actual product's color..  white balance, tint, contrast, hue..  But now when I look at them in Magento, they have been butchered beyond belief.  For my products, it is mandatory that the images appear precisely as do the products.  I have plenty of bandwidth and am not concerned with minimizing file size.  I also do not mind if I have to manually resize and upload the same image two or three times if I can somehow bypass the processing that is happening altogether.</p>
  
  <p>Magento is great!  But this is a showstopper.  I cannot launch the website if the images do not look right.  If I can't do this, I'm actually going to have to ditch this cart which I've spent months learning, or spend a lot of time coming up with my own solution even though I have no low-level mysql experience.  Either way, delaying launch would really hurt financially.</p>
  
  <p>I have attempted to insert ->setQuality(99), after the call to init() and before the call to resize(), in \catalog\product\view\media.phtml, and also after the call to init() in \catalog\product\gallery.phtml.</p>
  
  <p>in both cases I have also used setQuality(10) to ensure that I have done it properly, and strangely it works in gallery.phtml but not in media.phtml.  It doesn't matter though, because even though the 100 value in gallery.phtml is not too bad in terms of detail, unfortunately contrast/color/exposure is different.  It looks washed out and desaturated.  It makes the product look unappealing.  </p>
  
  <p>In a thread at magentocommerce.com, someone suggested that it is the resize() function that is causing the problem, but that can't be true because resize() is not called within gallery.phtml.  In general people have pointed to GD2.php as the culprit, but I haven't found any solutions that get around it completely.</p>
  
  <p>If I were to upload a 265 px width image for the media.phtml view, and a separate one of the same photo using whatever resolution I desire for the blown-up gallery.phtml view, how would I tag those in the backend (base or small? or will I need more tags?) and then how would I access the proper image from the phtml files?  This is a bit over my head.  I think I can figure it out but not without spending a lot of time, which I do not have.  Is there an extension that exists that already has tackled this problem?  I notice that some of the "lightbox" extensions are popular, but none of their descriptions mention anything about overcoming the horrendous image quality spit out by gd2, which makes me doubt that they do.</p>
  
  <p>Can someone please offer some advice?  If there is already an extension, I would be so pleased.  Thank you.</p>