Hi Steven, I'm by no means an expert on image manipulation. If experts recommend to do despeckle as last step, then perhaps that might be best. My logic was that a noisy image would be harder to scale right because the noise could introduce more artifacts. But I could be wrong -- I don't have that much experience, and don't have time now to do the experiments. (Would first need to search for a suitable photo...). However, I thought that if you already have a number of photos at hand to experiment with, then it might be a quick experiment for you to first reduce noise in the image, then perhaps sharpen it, and then scale it.
About quality of ImageMagik vs. GIMP, I have no idea. I never made a detailed comparison of the two in quality of scaled image. I did make a comparison of scaling of ImageMagik and PIL (Python Imaging Library) and found them to be comparable for the photos I needed to rescale at that point; after which I wrote my script in Python using PIL to scale down (without any further enhancements) a full copy of all images from my digital camera to fit my screen. But, as I said, they're images from a digital camera and not from a scanner. And I didn't care if a single image would come out with poor quality; it was a massive batch operation. At that point I had already given up on writing a GIMP script to perform this operation in batch so I didn't compare the quality of GIMP scaling with the others. Cheers, --Tim _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
