Sorry Guy but I gotta' ask

Over the last couple years there have been threads on picture posting and Jpeg compression. I searched Jpeg compression, picture compression and picture posting and cannot find the post the says how to compress the Jpeg to get them small enough to post here. I know this is rehash, but could someone explain it to me? Even by Email would be good so as not to distrat. I got a new Dig-Cam for Christmas and I'm dying to post some pictures of the engines I've been building.

Thanks,

LAST EDITED ON Jan-09-04 AT 09:45 PM (CDT)
 
Here's one way to do it- http://www.clstunt.com/htdocs/dcforum/DCForumID11/32.html If this link won't work just go to the SSW User Support Forum and look for the thread "Reducing Size of Pictures using MSN Outlook" posted Oct 10 by J R Model Guy. You don't want to go over 640 pixels wide so those with smaller screens can see the entire photo without having to scroll side to side.

I had some pictures put on a photo CD at Wal Mart and the disc came with a mini photo editing program that included a compression tool.

There are basically two thing you must do to get the picture to a reasonable size for any web site. It is Re-size and Compression. For example, if you shoot a picture on a 1MB pixel camera, it will be too big to display on most people monitor regardless of the compression. You first need to resize it to fit most people average computer screen (800 X 600) or (1024 X 768). You don't what the picture to fill up 100% of the screen, so you need to re-size it to fit.
After resizing it, you can save it using deferent compression ratio. I screen will usually come up, depending of the software that will let you set this ratio in percentage. The smaller the less clear the picture will be. I use 50%. Save this only one per edit, because the more saves you do the less clearer the picture will be.

Well, you COULD crop the image down to just include the important part before you resize and compress.

Just a thought.

Cy.

Randy,

Another way to accomplish this is to open whatever picture file you have with "Paint," if you're using a Windows machine. On the upper, text tool bar, click "File," then "Save As." A Window will open enabling you to name the file, determine it's location on your hard drive(s) and determine the file type to be used. I name these files by adding a "-1" or "-2" to the current file name. If the file is not named to let me determine what it is, I provide a descriptive name at this time. I save these (trial) efforts to the desktop at first. I also save the file as a JPEG (.jpg). I do all these steps within the first window.

Then go to the folder (Desktop in my case.) where you saved that file and right click on the file name. On the menu that appears, click on "Properties." This will tell you the size of the newly saved file, as well as its type. If it's 50K or less, you're set to post it here.

If the file is larger than the 50K maximum, go back to Paint, then that text tool bar's option "Image." Then click on "Stretch and Skew." Replace the number 100 in each of the % boxes with a smaller number such as 50 to 90, depending on the size of the file you originally saved. Then "Save As" again, then check the Properties again. Repeat until your picture is the desired size.

Why didn't I overwrite the original image in the first step? If I had done that I would have no clean, unaltered image to use in case I did something that either destroyed or badly distorted the picture while I was tweaking it to the size I desired. Additionally, each time a graphic file is tweaked, it loses a bit of its clarity. If it loses what I consider to be too much, I can go back to the original and use slightly different numbers in the % (per cent) box of the "Stretch and Skew" option while reducing its size.

Once you've done this a few times, it becomes much easier to do than describe. Also, experience will enable you to get your file to the desired size with many fewer manipulations.

Or, you can send your picture file(s) to someone who will tweak them with a better graphics program and return them to you to post. I’ve seen Sbasser do this for others a few times, but I’d definitely ask him before I sent him pictures to size for me.

Are you totally confused yet?

Have fun!

LAST EDITED ON Jan-09-04 AT 11:09 PM (CDT)
 
OK Paul,

I knew I'd been through this before so I'm gonn'a give it a shot here.

Yeah Yeah!!

Here is the same image reduced from 800 pixels wide to 500 pixels wide and from 48k down to 24k in size.

[photo not recovered: 3fff8c6e4c43e0e5.jpg]

Go figure...

Cy

>Here is the same image reduced from 800 pixels wide to 500
>pixels wide and from 48k down to 24k in size.
>
>[photo not recovered: 3fff8c6e4c43e0e5.jpg]
>
>Go figure...
>
>Cy

And interestingly, I can take Randy's original picture, and without any additonal cropping or downsizing, by using 75% compression, I can get it down to 16K in size. It is the same image size, and on my computer screen I cannot tell any difference in quality. You can compress these things and get them under the limit quite easily. It not only saves disk space, but download time for everyone.

LAST EDITED ON Jan-16-04 AT 11:58 AM (CDT)
 
>I can take Randy's original picture, and
>without any additonal cropping or downsizing, by using 75%
>compression, I can get it down to 16K in size. It is the
>same image size, and on my computer screen I cannot tell any
>difference in quality.

At the risk of sounding like either a broken record or a zealot, the majority of the images on the site are (IMHO) too big and too expansive to be enjoyable--never mind the file size.

Cropping the three engine photo to an area just outside the actual engines themselves and then reducing them down to 500 pixels enhances the visual presentation. The eye is drawn into an intimate relationship with the engines themselves and the text (if the bigger picture above had not messed up the page format) is easier to read before and after. Readability/impact is as much an issue as file size. And bigger is not better image size wise.

The newer cameras have lots of resolution as they are headed toward a printed image, which is in general terms 4 times the resolution of a screen. And when people take a photo of something, they usually don't crop in the camera, which is why a simple batch converter is not the best solution.

Yes, it takes a little time to do a custom crop, but the benefits are magnified by the number of times someone downloads the file.

FYI, what I do with the crop tool is:

1) Click anywhere inside the upper left hand portion of the image element (plane, engine, guy holding plane, etc.) that matters and drag the selection cursor down and to the right.

2) Watch carefully and adjust the cursor so the right and bottom edges of the selection rectangle being drawn are JUST outside the image element of interest.

3) Release the mouse.

4) Move very slightly down and to the right to clear the existing selection.

5) Click at what I now know will be the lower right corner of the cropped image--a point JUST outside the right and lower bounds of the image element of interest and drag up and to the left.

6) Watch carefully and adjust the cursor so the left and top edges of the selection rectangle being drawn are JUST outside the image element of interest.

7) Release the mouse.

Now I am looking at a selection that just includes the airplane, engine, project part, person, detail that the image is about. Go to the Image Edit menu and select "Crop". Magically, the program will throw away all the pixels we really don't need to see to get the message and improve the visual impact of the image.

Then I simply do a resize down to 500 pizels wide by however high that turns out to be.

Then I go do the jpeg compression down to as small as I want. In the engine example above, I purposely left some image quality there so you did not see the jpeg jaggies in the fins, but could have carried it a lot further.

The result is a small file with a medium sized image that jumps out and grabs the eyeball and tells the story you want it to tell.

The only thing worse for readability than an overlarge image on a small (laptop?) screen is an animated avatar.

Cy.

Bah!

Randy knows very well how to post pics, he's just looking for an excuse to show hos beautiful engines and make us drool...

Ion (just kiddin', Randy!) Muniz

Old Sourdough:

Thanks for the info on how to use Paint to alter the pics. I followed your instructions and it worked great. Just did a test post in the User Support Forum and it worked, but I think I hurt my shoulder trying to pat myself on the back.

Thanks again,
Bill Hodges

Click on this link or copy and paste, it is a utility that will do all you are asking.

http://www.irfanview.com/

Thanks jonuck!

Nice little program.

I put together a small treatise on how to compress and compose batchs of photos to give forum members a good look at an event (or a model project, either way) without clogging up the member's internet connection or Len's server.

Hearwith:

Part one

Part two

Part three

Part four

My in-flight shots pale to insignificance in comparison to Elwyn's, but the point is more about putting a lot of airplane image into a small amount of screen space and bandwidth.

Nothing bugs me more than having to scroll all over the screen to see various parts of some gigantic image that got compressed within an inch of total fog in order to meet the 50K limit when a little time and care would result in a crisp 20K image that does not spread the text out into an unreadable screen wide column. But I'm not going to go into that here...

Cy

Thanks all, I've got it. Maybe I'll remember it now since I've got my new Dig-Cam.

>Thanks all, I've got it. Maybe I'll remember it now since
>I've got my new Dig-Cam.
>

Randy,

Bravo! Beautiful little mills. Did you build the righthand diesel?

Be sure and look in the "User Support" forum for this kind of stuff. That's where I hashed out my picture posting problems.

Happy New Year!

Andy

LAST EDITED ON Jan-10-04 AT 09:10 AM (CDT)
 
Larry,

Thanks for reminding us of these threads. I even took the time, after reading the four parts, to check out your web page via your user profile here. I particularly enjoyed the Corsair article. My father, a USMC pilot, flew SBD's in the Southwest Pacific during WWII. He was impressed by that airframe's durability and the ability to bring 'em back alive, even when heavily damaged. He had to ditch once when damaged (A hit that didn't put the engine into flame, but did dump all his oil.) beyond the ability to make it back to his base, but he was uninjured and was picked up by a sub that evening. Two days later, the sub surfaced to put him aboard a PBY for return to his base.

That said, I would state that my instructions to Randy were posted to help those to be able to post here who don't have one of the better graphics/image editing programs and, at this point, don't care to invest in one. I assumed that this was the case for Randy. It is for me. I have no digital camera yet and the only time I really want/need to edit an image is to allow me to post it to the net somewhere. I totally understand that this approach is, at best, a less than desirable but workable compromise.

It must have worked because Randy was able to post a few relatively decent images.

I have downloaded the Irfan(SP.!) program and will try it to see if it will work more simply than working with Paint in addition to possibly providing better quality.

Again, thanks for reminding us of your earlier instructions.

Paul

Irfanview is a great photo use program. It will allow you to do batch renaming and numbering in addition to batch conversions of photos for posting. Also one of the good things compared to some other programs, it will do "lossless" jpg rotations. Most programs do not perform this function in a lossless way. If you shoot in a real high resolution it won't matter much, but if you shoot in a low resolution you will appreciate the lossless rotation feature.

Steve Knapp

>>That said, I would state that my instructions to Randy were
>posted to help those to be able to post here who don't have
>one of the better graphics/image editing programs and, at
>this point, don't care to invest in one.

For those of you that don't care to invest in software, here's a page full of links to image editing freeware for Windows. (I assume most folks use Windows)

http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/freeimageeditpc/

All you would have to invest is a little download time and a little practice.

Just a thought...

Cy

Thanks, Cy. I'll check out this site as well.

Cy,

Can you (or anyone else, hopefully with experience), considering a fairly computer-graphics-illiterate user, recommend any of the programs at:

http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/imageediting/tp/freephotoedw.htm

Any input will be appreciated.

I assume by the lack of response that

1. No one has a recommendation, or

2. No one has read the post requesting that recommendation.

As a result, being the persistent person that I am, I'll just type this and bump the thread to the top.

So there!

I would love to make a recommendation cept I haven't used any of them..

On this computer I have...

Corel Photo Paint, Corel Draw, ThumbsPlus, Paint Shop, Adobe Photo Shop and AutoCAD. None are free except Corel Photo Paint came with a Digital Camera I bought.

Sorry, Dough, I was reporting to the high council on the fact the Ion has stumbled onto our cloning scheme by finding one of his vat mates and missed your post first time round.

The short answer is that I'm a Mac weenie and don't have any experience with Windows software.

The long answer is that, for purposes of cropping, resizing, modest touch up and exporting to web jpeg format (which is all you need to do for this forum), you want an application that is:

A) Simple to use
B) Has basic image enhancement tools (Crop, blur, contrast, brightness)
C) Has a jpeg encoder with a slider so you can preview the result before you save it.
D) Is a stable professional program.
E) Is something others you know use.

Judging from the description on the page, I'd guess that Serif PhotoPlus 5.5 fits the bill. It emphasizes the Export Optimizer which lets you see what you are about to do and know how big the resulting file will be.

This is perfect, as you want to keep reducing the file until you just see artifacts and then make it a bit bigger.

Len set the file limit to 50k, but I'd bet anyone with a tool like this could make just about any picture fit well in under 30. Half the time you can't tell the difference between a 30 and a 40 k image. Every byte we reduce a file saves Len money and the guys who read the post download time.

PhotoPlus 5.5 is in fact an older version of a published and supported tool which is ideal. Many of the latest features just add to the confusion factor of the interface. But at one time this was a commercial tool so the bugs have been chased out for the most part. Never mind the slices, user text and shape tricks. You can safely ignore those features.

Here's the download page:

http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/serif/ph/ph5/index.asp

My guess it's ideal for what Windows driving forum members might need to do.

If everyone on this forum with Windows who does not already have a photo editing software would all download this free professional piece of software, then you could rope together to climb up the learning curve.

I might even be persuaded to load a copy into VPC and bash in a few pitons through the hard parts.

Cy

I use a very simple tool called Quick ePics. It is very simple to use. It helps you resize a whole bunch of pictures at once. You just select how big the picture should be, how much to compress and it will perform this action on a list of pictures. It is very usefull when you have several photos to convert. The website for it is http://www.missionpeaksoftware.com. The software costs $15 and comes with a 30-day trial.