Ditto - John,  I feel the same way. Thanks, Lee, I am just  delving  
into compressions, because my disk image from a DVD had this new to me  
extension cdr , and on Apple discussions I  found out this is a Master  
disk with less compression than usual.  So I will be learning about  
compression in files etc which I had not even thought of before. I  
suppose one way is to use Webopedia and ask for the meaning of JPEG,  
TIFF  and all the rest, or maybe I should google under Compression.
Marta................................................................... 
.........
He that is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell  
and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death. -Thomas Paine,  
philosopher and writer
(1737-1809)
On Mar 28, 2005, at 11:00, John Robinson wrote:

> Lee,
>
> Thanks, as usual for a great explanation, but just for your info. my  
> eyes glaze over on most anything you say as you speak so far above my  
> capabilities, but boy do I ever learn from you!!
>
> John R.
>
>
>
>
> On Mar 28, 2005, at 10:54 AM, Lee Larson wrote:
>
>> On Mar 27, 2005, at 9:22 PM, Bill King puzzled:
>>
>>> I just read an interesting article posted on MacSurfer from the  
>>> Syracuse Post-Standard newspaper.  It concerned the ability of  
>>> iPhoto 5 to repetitively save a picture using JPG compression and  
>>> apparently losslessly.
>>>
>>> I would love to hear for any graphics compression experts about the  
>>> authenticity of this technique...
>>
>> I'm not a graphics expert, but I think I can explain what's going on.
>>
>> The JPEG scheme is actually a whole collection of different  
>> compression techniques all lumped into one standard. The most common  
>> one chosen is what's called "discrete cosine transform" (DCT)  
>> compression. Within the DCT algorithm, you can choose the amount of  
>> information to be retained. (It's just the value of a constant in the  
>> formula.) The more information that's retained, the larger is the  
>> size of the compressed file. It's possible to choose lossless DCT  
>> compression, at the expense of almost no compression for complicated  
>> images.
>>
>> You can see this in programs like Canvas, which has a slider control  
>> to select the quality of the output image. Sliding it over to 100%  
>> results in a big file with no quality loss.
>>
>> The JPEG scheme also includes a lossless algorithm called entropy  
>> encoding which I believe is less often used than the DCT.
>>
>> I don't know which scheme Apple uses, but It's probably one of those  
>> two.
>>
>> As a postscript to this, let me note that I've had disagreements with  
>> so-called experts about this. They claimed that JPEG is an inherently  
>> lossy format while I countered that it need not be. Most "experts"  
>> don't really understand the capabilities of JPEG because most  
>> programs don't take advantage of JPEG's real capabilities. I bring up  
>> the DCT and their eyes glaze over.
>
>
>
> | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will
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