On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, John Vertegaal wrote:

> Thanks for your effort and suggestions Steve, to make my pages load
> quicker.  New.htm looks just as good on my 14" screen as it did before,
> so I did some minor editing and planned to put it on the web as such.
> Then I started working on the homepage, but the two bottom pictures at
> 150x100 res. took up only 5K ea. and looked terrible even on my screen.
> 
> Now I'm confused.  You mentioned 10K for tumbnails.  

  That's a ballpark.  Thumbnails can sometimes be up to
20K.

> How do you get a
> reasonably sharp picture into a small area?  I always assumed that a
> smaller picture automatically sharpened up.  

  If you take a 640x480 picture and view it at 160x120, 
it'll look sharp.  If you reduce the size of the graphic to 
160x120 first, and then view it at that same size, it will 
all depend on what kind of parameters you incorporated into 
the size reduction as to how good it looks.

  One of the problems with that bottom graphic on your front 
page (I didn't look at the others) is that it seems to have 
started out at a smaller size, and was then enlarged.  Once 
you "grow" a picture and then shrink it again, it never 
looks the same.

> Furthermore, you mentioned
> that your example probably was too low res. for a real-life application.

  The "low-res" applied to the graphics files you could 
click on to view, not the inline graphic itself.  

> Because of my small screen I cannot confirm that.  But if I go that
> route I have to fall back on my own mangled jpeg to provide the high res.
> option, as I only have ftcolor to crop.  This may be the best way to go,
> or do you know of a freely available cropping program?  If there would
> be a way to get my onboard video setup working again, I could probably
> use Linux.  Any advice is greatly appreciated.

  I haven't used DOS in years, but I seem to recall that 
qpeg was a good viewer, and Graphic Workshop was pretty good 
at cropping, shrinking, etc.  I'm sure there are better 
ones.

  In Linux, I find xv to be a very capable "light-weight" 
graphics manipulator, and when I need to do something beyond 
xv's capabilities, I go to gimp.
  ImageMagick is probably a minor step up from xv, but I 
find its interface a bit more "clunky."   YMMV.

-- 
Steve Ackman
http://twoloonscoffee.com       (Need green beans?)
http://twovoyagers.com          (glass, linux & other stuff)

Reply via email to