Greetings from a very wet and dreich Leeds! (Look it up
<URL:http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dreich>
On 11/08/11 06:12, Computer Research Centrum, Ltd wrote:
No JPEGs please! No lossy compression!
For computer screenshots the best option is PNG (lossless compression).
I agree 100% - if I could agree more, I would! ;-)
JPEGs should be wiped off the face of the planet, in face, from
everywhere! No other intelligent species uses JPEGs - so what does that
tell you about the human race? ;-)
And now, a public information announcement....
Convert all your JPEGs to PNG or some other format (not BMP either - way
too large!) because, every single time you open a JPEG it is
uncompressed. When you save it, it is re-compressed.
Now, remember the old days before digital, and you copied a VHS tape
onto another and so on, well the quality ended up being quite bad pretty
soon. Or photocopied a photocopy? JPEGs are the same.
When you compress a JPEG, you throw away information - it is lossy - so,
each and every time you save a JPEG, you throw away more and more
information, soon you start to see "artefacts" and it's downhill from there.
So all those photos of your wedding or first child etc, get worse and
worse every time you edit them. Try it sometime, copy a JPEG and edit
the copy. Make a little change and save it. Close & re-open, edit save,
repeat. See how each generation compares with the original. It won't
take long, even at best quality compression (ie, less compression,
bigger files, less lossy).
I too have a camera that only takes JPEGs - 12 MPixels I admit, but
JPEGS all the same. I have the camera set to best quality and I use
digiKam as my photo organiser (I'm on Linux - it *might* be available
for Windows). digiKam has an option on download to auto-convert JPEGs to
any other lossless format - it takes time, I admit, but I end up with a
saved PNG of my photos and minimum losses from the original.
OK, I checked, you can get digiKam for Windows (XP, Vista, 7) at
<URL:http://sourceforge.net/projects/digikam/files/digikam/1.7.0/digiKam-installer-1.7-win32.exe/download>
Mind you, it does mention that the software is not as stable on Windows
as it is on Linux/Mac-OS x.
The main download page for non-windows versions of digiKam is
<URL:http://www.digikam.org/drupal/download?q=download/binary/>
Cheers,
Norm.
--
Norman Dunbar
Dunbar IT Consultants Ltd
Registered address:
Thorpe House
61 Richardshaw Lane
Pudsey
West Yorkshire
United Kingdom
LS28 7EL
Company Number: 05132767
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