Going back on what ive said I did run across an interesting observation, in these two examples you can see how a picture looks after being uploaded naturally on the treet site, example 2 shows the image when using the edit feature.. notice the quality with crop options (at the same resolution) is much higher then the normal image everyone see's.
example1
http://i40.tinypic.com/35n3gp4.png
example2
http://i43.tinypic.com/34edzpv.jpg
Things should be vastly improved now. But a few note.....
Even when the image uploaded is exactly the same size as it is displayed, the system still "resaves it" using standard site-wide quality settings. The reason the site does this is to make sure that all the images on the site have comparable quality and size.
So, for example, the image you originally uploaded (seen in the crop display) is you original image, exactly as you uploaded it. But, when it appears in the final gallery (and elsewhere on the site), it is reprocessed, and that's where the quality suffering was happening. I have increased the site-wide setting of the reprocessing quality which should make all images look a lot better. I took a look at the one you uploaded, and it looks much, much better. But, if you get out your magnifying glass, you may see slight differences.
I will look into some way to make the photo gallery images available as higher quality. In fact, I may look into replacing the photo gallery software with something better if people do use it a lot.
Let me know what you think.
I think the photo gallery software should come secondary to the sites performance but ive never had a problem with your site, the quality setting upgrade didn't show me much of a difference (but we are talking about a fairly large picture), and good comment about waiting and seeing if people use it alot before allocating site resources to facilitate a feature only I seem concerned about.
You are sooooo right. Good eye.
Let me take a look at why that happens, I am sure I can fix it.