Why is my image blurry?

Image blurriness can happen for several reasons. Mentioned below are 2 of the common ones -

Device pixel ratio (DPR) -

Most devices have a DPR greater than 1 and probably even greater than 2.
This means that the Cloudinary image they show uses half the available pixels on each dimensions.

In order to generate the photo for a DPR of 2.0, all you need to do is to set the dpr transformation parameter to 2.0 -

https://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/c_fill,w_100,h_100,g_face,dpr_2.0/smiling_man.jpg

For more information on DPR, check out our blog post on the subject -

https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_to_automatically_adapt_website_images_to_retina_and_hidpi_devices

Image resize -

Image resizing may cause some blurriness, especially when scaling the image up. If the original image is smaller then the desired dimensions a blurriness would occur. Regardless, this might be corrected with the unsharp mask. For example -
Original Image:
https://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_700/front_face.jpg

With e_sharpen:
https://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_700,e_sharpen:200/front_face.jpg