On 10/23/2010 08:50 PM, Jay Smith wrote:
One caution that should be mentioned if the OP decides to use the Gimp
option
Frank mentioned to generate thumbnails when saving JPG files. If the
JPG is
opened in gimp and then saved (even though "no changes" are made), the
JPG will
suffer some amount of quality loss even if the highest quality level
is selected
when saving. I run into a _lot_ of people who are simply not aware
that _every_
time a JPG is saved, the quality is reduced.
This is definitely not true... Try this:
- load an image in Gimp
- save it as JPEG, using whatever settings you fancy (note; even if the
file is alreay a JPEG, it's important to save it here...). Let's call it
"original.jpg".
- close image
- reload "original.jpg"
- do a local edit on it (for instance, small circle selection plus
bucket fill)
- save it with same settings (Gimp will normally reuse the ones used in
the loaded image) as "edited.jpg"
- close image
- reload original.jpg
- load edited.jpg as a new layer
- put the "edited" layer in difference mode. You'll only see the bit of
the image you replaced by a circle, the rest is black.
- to see how black is the black, flatten the image and open the
histogram dialog.
- select any part of the image outside the edited circle. Under the
histogram, if you use a minimum value above 0, the count is 0, in other
words, the difference between the original and edited picture is 0
everywhere, and there is no loss.
I have Perl a script that runs Imagemagick multiple times against the
same image (a white dot is added each round)(*).
Then it uses imagemacick's compare to general the diff image. after two
or three iterations the only thing in the diff image is the white dot
added even with very low JPEG quality settings (the difference on the
first iterations is due to imagemagick not using the same settings as
the original image, in particular a different color subsampling)(this is
why it was important to save the image from Gimp the first time above).
This is because the Jpeg algorithm is stable, and the decoded pixels get
re-encoded in the very same values if encoding settings aren't changed.
Things are obviously different after a global change to the picture
(contrast, white balance, etc...)
(*) I won't post it here but interested people can drop me a mail. It
was written for Windows but will likely run under Linux with minor changes.
--
Ofnuts
_______________________________________________
Gimp-user mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
