Poor quality conversions

[timgavin]

Media Library: 11.10.1.
Laravel: 11.34.2
Herd Pro: 11.13.0
PHP: 8.2.26

The source image is 1014x564 and was converted to 645x360.

source

conversion

The image is both pixelated and blurry, even with quality set to 100. You can really see it on her nose, and the hair on her face. Her eye is completely out of focus; the image loses all detail. I've tried this with multiple settings and options, and multiple images of varying dimensions and continue to get the same poor results.

This is what I used for this particular image, but it doesn't really matter as they all produced the similar results.

$this
    ->addMediaConversion('sm')
    ->width(360)
    ->height(360)
    ->quality(100)
    ->sharpen(5)
    ->optimize()
    ->nonQueued();

After writing this I decided to try sharpening it some more (10). The blurriness was improved, yet the pixellation still remains. However, I want to be careful about sharpening images as you never know what result you're going to get.

sharpened

Tried another method: Fit:Max which produced better results, but I can't get the image to be the size I want.

->fit(Fit::Max, 360, 360)

Edit: I've tried pretty much all other conversion methods and they all produce much better results than width() and height().

[timgavin]

More tests

original

conversion

$this
    ->addMediaConversion('sm')
    ->width(360)
    ->height(360)
    ->sharpen(5)
    ->nonQueued();

Here's the same image, but resized in Affinity Photo to 360px tall.

If I'm doing something wrong, and expecting the wrong results from the methods I'm using, please tell me. The documentation is very sparse and not easy to understand.

This is what the documentation says

The width and height of the Image can be modified by calling the width and height functions and passing in the desired dimensions in pixels. The resized image will be contained within the given $width and $height dimensions respecting the original aspect ratio.

So if I want an image to be at least 360px tall, or 360px wide, it appears width() and height() is what I would use, yet the results are unusable. I've tried every other method (fit, crop, resize, etc) and nothing gives me the image in the dimensions I require, yet they all produce far better results.

[timgavin]

Since this was placed into discussions, I'm going to assume it's my misunderstanding of the documentation instead of a bug.