It's a shame the jpg compression is pretty strong on this, you really notice it on the gradients and solid areas. Any chance you could upload a png version instead?
Hahah really? It's set to somewhere north of 90% quality and the filesize is over 1 MB. A PNG was pretty much out of the question because of the grain / texture on the picture. PNG's handle rapidly varying colors horribly in terms of compression, and a PNG was nearly 3 MB. For all economic purposes, this was the best it was going to get.
Hmm, perhaps it's deviantArt messing with the file then? The largest version I can view on the site (ie after clicking the image) is only 253KB in size. Could it be that you accidentally chose for dA to resize the file in the upload interface? that would cause the loss in file-size and quality.
Nope, standard browser, same thing happens in Chrome, Safari and Firefox. You can check yourself: [link] - What's the file size you get when you right click and download it from this page? I'm getting a 800 x 1143, 247KB jpg file
You know as soon as I read the resolution I saw the problem. DA lists the original file size. I had set the picture to "Display as 800px width" -- which DA recompresses the image to show at a shrunken size -- totally forgot to have it show the original image this whole time. Check it out again, you should be seeing the full 1.1MB quality now