Picture size

On this particular day of this month, in the Year Of The Golden Pig, P & H Macguire did state:

I am in the process of scanning some old slides of 60s to 90s and
wondered what the optimum size should be for posting on this N/G.
They will be scanned at about 300dpi.

Regards

PJM

Absolutely scan at 300dpi or even more. You can always reduce (dpi, size,
etc.) but no matter what, no matter how a pic is, enlarging more than 25%
is useless and there is much quality degradation.

Avoid 72 dpi like unto the plague. That was a semi-arbitrary resolution
based on the early browsers that could not display more than that, and the
palettes were also fewer than 256 colours. Those were the old days.
And today's monitors, both LCD and CRT, can display even more than 300
dpi, and do it well.

Optimally, save at the highest settings all around for archival purposes;
with high quality CD+R disks selling for under a dollar apiece (Canadian,
eh? Prolly about U$D $0.70 or less), it shouldn't be a problem.

In addition to keeping the originals, the current post-production
(cropping, colour tweaking, sharpening, etc.) 'storage' size is 1600x1200.

Probably the best way to keep filesizes down is to (when finished tweaking
and all that) save at 85% of the original 'quality'. The difference
in filesize is striking, and truly, I have yet to find /anyone/ that can
tell the difference between 100% and 85% because of the way JPEG
compression handles the data.

As for filesizes, both physical and byte-wise, for this group, that would
depend on your FAQ or whatever has been decided either formally or by
general agreement, like the yEnc issue. (and yes, I know the debate
thoroughly; yEnc be GOOD, but Bill Gates has his own rules, which are by
default /your/ rules, like it or not)

Next door in ABPAutos, 1280 has now become the norm, and 1024 is
considered a bit small. It all depends, methinks, on how much detail you
wish to see, and for now, 1280 @ ~85% reduction is working extremely well.

However, beware of the various file manipulator progs. Your image editor,
e.g., PSP, Photoshop and The GIMP (Linux, /free/ and excellent, and I
believe there are versions for PC and Mac) are your best bets.

One notable exception to this is IrfanView, a freebie, and
although it is a small program, it has become legendary amongst users for
it's output quality, and legendary amongst programmers, who continually
praise its elegance of programming. Grab a copy and play with it a bit and
you'll likely be quite surprised at how much it can do and how well it
does it all. But, it should NOT be a replacement for a good image
manipulation graphics prog, but a very good adjunct program.

Drop by ABPAutos and have a look; you don't need to know anything about
cars to evaluate the pix; after all, I know virtually zilch about
aircraft, but I lurk here, and love it. I just think planes are cool, I
love learning about them, and I pass interesting pix along to two pilot
friends. (The Leduc-22 was the most recent; one of the pilots is also an
aviation journalist, and it took him on a very Sentimental Journey!)

FWIW, but I hope it helps in some small way.

However, the Gilded Rule is go BIG; you can always go downwards (or
'downsize' these days!) to suit your needs!


SW


--
There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like
about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to
other animals as well as humans, it is all a sham.

-Anna Sewell, writer (1820-1878)