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Ken
sage
Reged: 04/24/03
Posts: 271
Loc: 39 20'N 78 01'W
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I'm Cross posting this from the classic telescopes pictures thread, as apparently this has become an issue. I stated I would try to help as I value the Classic Telescopes Forum considerably. (It is my favorite of the CN forums) Please feel freee to PM me if you need any help, I am by no means an expert at all, but I will certainly try.
Photo Resizing info
Many times we want to post pictures that we have scanned, or transferred from CD or Digital Cameras. For the most part these images will exceed the size and space limitations of CN. The images must be resized (generally shrunk) to smaller than 800x600 at a memory size of less than 60k. Below are some quick methods although by no means the only ones to accomplish this task.
For Windows XP I recommend this easy application from Microsoft that accomplishes this task without the need to use any other imaging or editing applications.
Image Resizer
This PowerToy enables you to resize one or many image files with a right-click.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
For Mac OS X, the method is slightly less obvious. Here are two.
If you use iPhoto, Import the image that you want to post into iPhoto. then go to the menu up top and select 'Share' and scroll down and select 'Export' At this point you will be presented with several options for changing the size of your image. Select JPG as the Export 'Format' and then type 800x600 into the Scale images and export. After doing this , just doublecheck that the image is smaller than 60k and you are ready to upload your picture. If you find your image still exceeds the 60k limit, then go ahead and just shrink it some. you could also change the file compression, but if you don't know what that means at this point, we will wait until later to discuss that.
The second method offers less control but works in a pinch especially if you dont use or have iPhoto. The Mac Tiger mail program will offer to resize an image attachment that you are going to mail. The easiest way to do this , is just email yourself the image and at the bottom of the new mail window will be a box to select the image size.
You Linux users are even geekier than I am, and probably already know how to do this, I only use an emergency Knoppix CD, so I can't help in that case, but I'm sure we can find a Linux user who can if anyone is in this situation. It's been a while since I've used Win 98 or ME but I'll gladly help look up instructions for anyone in that case also.
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Ken
39N 78W
77 Edmund 6"f6
94 Meade 2045D
02 Edmund Astroscan
02 Questar 3.5
04 Meade ETX-105
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McFortner
professor emeritus
Reged: 03/01/05
Posts: 746
Loc: Stockbridge, GA, USA, Earth, S...
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I've had pretty good results from IrfanView myself. It is a free image viewer for windows that can do basic manipulations like resizing, color/contrast adjustments, and conversions. It is worth at least twice what I paid for it! 
Michael
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Time's fun when you're having flies. - K. T. Frog
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Anonymous
Unregistered
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Hmmm. Suppose one accidentally posted an image that slightly exceeded the guidelines (60kb max filesize). Is there a way to delete a file attached to a post, so as to replace it with a smaller one?
Graham
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Don W
Postmaster
Reged: 05/19/03
Posts: 13244
Loc: Wisconsin, USA
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Yes, you edit your post, remove the old image and upload the revised one.
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Don Wyman
Obsession 18" f/4.5 #1166
W/Argo Navis DSC and Torus Primary
William Optics Megrez 90
Coronado PST
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Anonymous
Unregistered
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Quote:
Yes, you edit your post, remove the old image and upload the revised one.
OK, I see how it works now. Initially I tried to edit a post, but the actual edit page itself does not present the option to even know the attached image exists. You have to submit the edited text, and then that brings up yet another page that allows to touch the attachments. It certainly was not obvious at first.
Graham
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Glassthrower
Vendor - Galactic Stone & Ironworks
Reged: 04/07/05
Posts: 14703
Loc: Hurricane Alley
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Using Paintshop or Photoshop, one can reduce the file size of images by doing the following :
(the file size reduction can be drastic sometimes, from over 500k to less than 60k)
Using PaintShop Pro 7 -
1) open the image
2) Navigate to "Colors" in the top toolbar.
3) Navigate down to "Decrease Color Depth" on the "Colors" menu.
4) Select "256 colors (8 bit)"
5) A tool window will open, do not change any of the values, simply hit "Ok"
6) You are done and you have likely decreased the file size of the image by 50% or more.
Under "Decrease color depth", do not choose anything lower than 256 colors. Going lower will not further reduce the image size much, and it will degrade the photo to an unacceptable level.
Going higher than 256 colors will maintain image integrity, but it will not sufficiently reduce the image size to make a difference.
Using this technique will reduce image clarity somewhat, and may introduce some slight pixelation, but for the most part the image will remain unharmed and the difference will be barely-noticeable. This technique is perfect for posting pictures of equipment or where super-fine detail and clarity are not needed.
I would assume, but have never tried it, that Adobe Photoshop has a similar tool that works in the same way, since Paintshop is a knock-off of Photoshop.
Good luck.
MikeG
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Michael Gilmer - Member of the Meteoritical Society & Collector of Falling Stars.
Galactic Stone & Ironworks - Buy/Sell/Trade Meteorites, Moon Rocks, Mars Rocks, & 35 different falls and types!
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Anonymous
Unregistered
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Quote:
Using PaintShop Pro 7 -
1) open the image
2) Navigate to "Colors" in the top toolbar.
3) Navigate down to "Decrease Color Depth" on the "Colors" menu.
4) Select "256 colors (8 bit)"
5) A tool window will open, do not change any of the values, simply hit "Ok"
6) You are done and you have likely decreased the file size of the image by 50% or more.
Actually, that is not a particularly good approach. First, reducing the color depth to 8-bit (256 colors) can seriously degrade the quality of photographs of any size. A typical photo, even one far smaller than 800 x 600, might need many thousands of colors to represent the contrasts, shadow and bright regions, and gradients without noticeable banding. For some astro photos, you might not see a difference, but for others----planetary and lunar shots and long exposure deep sky shots in particular, maybe anything other than short exposure star shots I would think, and for photos in general, 256 colors will give seriously, seriously degraded quality.
Further, if you reduce the color depth, you will have to save in a file format that supports indexed color. JPG does not! So, you can't save an 8-bit image to a JPG file without increasing the color depth back to 24-bit. Which largely defeats the purpose of reducing the depth to begin with. The reduction will possibly enable more JPG compression in the end, but the starting point for the JPG save will be a fully 24-bit per pixel image and with quality degraded.
The best thing to do, in my opinion, for photographs, is reduce size to 800 x 600 (or whatever Cloudy Nights current guidelines state), and save as JPG without reducing the color depth! For photographs in general, JPG compression is far better at deciding how to adjust colors than forced color bit-depth reduction can do.
If a JPG file exceeds the max allowable size, simply re-save, but change the quality setting. Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop allow you to adjust the compression quality, and it usually doesn't take much to get a file down to size.
As an example, I have attached a 1 minute shot of Orion that I took in Yosemite earlier this year. The resolution is 640 x 427 pixels. The file is 36 kilobytes. It contains 7842 unique colors. If I reduce to 256 colors, and save as a GIF or PNG file (which support indexed color), the quality for this short exposure star shot isn't seriously degraded. This type of shot isn't good for showing the degradation, but you can be sure there is degradation reducing from more than 7000 unique colors to just 256. The file size for GIF and PNG jumps to around 100kb, too big to post on Cloudy Nights.
If you look on my personal website, you will see numerous photos on a few pages. Some on the telescope page are 1024 pixels in one dimension (click link below photo to see full size version, and zoom to see it 1:1 rather than poorly shrunk by your browser). The quality is quite high, yet none of the files exceed 135kb.
My Personal Website
Graham
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CharlieInDayton
member
Reged: 12/28/05
Posts: 75
Loc: Directly above Earth's center....
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See either of the following
http://forum.mihov.com
http://www.mihov.com/eng/
for Image Resizer. It's freeware!
From the website:
Quote:
This powerful utility can do two things: it can change the size of a picture (including smooth resize) and it can convert pictures from one graphic format to another. The important thing: the program does all that in batch mode, which means only one click for you! The program supports JPG, GIF and BMP file formats.
I use it on a regular basis to get anything I put on the web down to 640x480 -- works quite nicely...
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It doesn't matter what you're looking at.
It doesn't matter what you're looking through.
It never looks like the pictures...
Charlie in Dayton
Edited by CharlieInDayton (12/29/05 02:02 PM)
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Glassthrower
Vendor - Galactic Stone & Ironworks
Reged: 04/07/05
Posts: 14703
Loc: Hurricane Alley
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I only advocate cutting the color depth when posting pics of equipment when quality is secondary to size. When posting astrophotography pics, one would obviously not want to cut the color depth and butcher the image with pixelation. But, I do post most of own pics in reduced color depth in .GIF format which seems to work fine for me. The image quality is not as good, but the file size is kept very small. Sometimes to around 10k or less - which is easy on bandwidth.
MikeG
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Michael Gilmer - Member of the Meteoritical Society & Collector of Falling Stars.
Galactic Stone & Ironworks - Buy/Sell/Trade Meteorites, Moon Rocks, Mars Rocks, & 35 different falls and types!
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Victor Kennedy
Pooh-Bear
Reged: 05/22/03
Posts: 9850
Loc: Slovenia
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If you have Windows XP, you can open your picture in Microsoft Office Picture Manager, pull down the Picture Menu, select Compress Pictures, and in the pane at the right, click the Web Pages button, then click OK at the bottom of the pane. Save the file (with a new name), and it will be a better size.
If you have a Mac, you can use a program like Graphic Converter to do it. Graphic Converter is shareware, and I have found that, for my purposes, it is easier than Photoshop and does all I need to do. There are several ways to resize a photo in Graphic Converter, but the easiest is to select "Save a Copy as..." under the File Menu. In the next dialog box, select or enter a file name and click on Save. In the next dialog box, enter the file size you want in the box beside "Resize to reach following file size" (For Cloudy Nights, the recommended file size is 60k). If the saved copy of your photo is too small, start with the original again, and when you get to the last dialog box, experiment with the Quality slider at the top left. Sliding it along towards the left will result in a grainier, but larger, picture.
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Charlie Hein
Postmaster
Reged: 11/02/03
Posts: 6587
Loc: 26.06.08N, +80.23.08W
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Ever wonder how to tell if your photo is "legal"? Read this thread on how to check the dimensions and file size of your image - even after it's been uploaded!
Charlie
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Weston CSC:
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Ken
sage
Reged: 04/24/03
Posts: 271
Loc: 39 20'N 78 01'W
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All the above still applies, however the image size dl limit has now been raised by the moderators to 100k.
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nreid
Pooh-Bah
Reged: 03/06/04
Posts: 1256
Loc: Highland Village, Texas
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Haven't seen this for linux yet but here some instructions for using gimp. Open gimp, choose to open image, under image on the toolbar choose scale image. You can choose percentage or different options here but pixel size is defaul option. Choose 800x600 or whatever size you like and then click scale. At this point your image should shrink. Save as image_different_name.jpg so that you don't overright you original. Very easy to do! You can use just about any image software on linux to do the same thing but gimp is almost always loaded plus it can be used on other *nix such as solaris or freebsd. Best of luck.
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Obsession 18" F4/5 with Moonlite Focuser
Stellarvue SV105
WO 66mm SD
WO EZ Touch setup
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Darenwh
professor emeritus
Reged: 05/11/06
Posts: 655
Loc: Saint Francis, WI
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Here is how I prepare images for websites: Lake-link image converter. It accepts most of the most popular image formats including JPG, Tiff, PNG, BMP, etc... It also will email the file to you or you can just input the image and it resizes it and you just click the secondary button, save image, and done. Works great and is super easy to use. I will say that I have not used it for astrophoto's before. The website is also a great fishing and outdoors website for Wisconsin with additional information for other states in the midwest.
Daren
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Daren
St. Francis, WI
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pcfox38
newbie
Reged: 01/28/08
Posts: 1
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I agree with you whole heartedly with the infranview, i have been using it over the years for alot of differnt projects with photos and i have always had excellent results!
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BianchiAZ
member
Reged: 01/04/08
Posts: 67
Loc: Tucson, Arizona
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LINUX LINUX LINUX
Hello fellow Linux Stargazers!
How to batch re-size a bunch of pics at once. Not just one at a time.
Since I have been frequenting the forums and I have been posting many pics of my telescope project I needed a way to batch edit my pics to get them down to the posting limit size. I was doing 1 picture at a time and It was very time consuming using Showfoto.
These instructions are for using the Linux program GIMP. GIMP is a very powerful Graphics Image Manipulation Program on a level with PhotoShop. There are tons of free programs out there but this is the one I use for editing other than Showfoto which does not contain a batch resize plugin either.
You may have just noticed I said either in that last sentence. As most things with Linux the programs are often tweaked to the users specific needs with a minimum of overhead. GIMP is not overloaded with plugins so you guessed it... we need to compile and install a nifty plugin created for GIMP. This is simple simple simple.  You do not need to be logged in as root to do this just your every day user account.
Get the plugin source here http://members.ozemail.com.au/~hodsond/dbp.html The instructions for step by step processing of images is there too.
I have include my step by step of installing it with a little bit of explanation of what is going on as you install it.
You do not need to be logged in as root to do this just your every day user account.
To prepare make a temp directory to hold the source code. It can be named anything. I made a directory called gimp_plugin
Download the plugin source to your temporary directory.
The file is archived and zipped. Hence the extension .tgz (tarred and gunziped)
Untar and unzip the source by typing tar zxvf dbpSrc-1-1-8.tgz
A directory will be made in your temp directory containg your source. When I do the ls command... it lists dbp-1.1.8 (directory) was created.
Now enter that diretory.
Use the command "make install" (without quotes) to install it.
Thats it. Simple.
Here is step by step from my command line...
rick@linuxbox ~ $ is my prompt on the command line
1)rick@linuxbox ~ $ mkdir /home/rick/gimp_plugin <--- download source to here after making directory
2)rick@linuxbox ~ $ cd /home/rick/gimp_plugin (change to that directory)
3)rick@linuxbox ~/gimp_plugin $ ls <---- ls command to list whats in directory
dbpSrc-1-1-8.tgz <----there she is
4)rick@linuxbox ~/gimp_plugin $ tar zxvf dbpSrc-1-1-8.tgz <--- unzip it
dbp-1.1.8/
dbp-1.1.8/op.h
dbp-1.1.8/Makefile
dbp-1.1.8/gui.h
dbp-1.1.8/dbp.html
dbp-1.1.8/op.cc
dbp-1.1.8/dbp-fileSelector.png <---- 13 unzipped files
dbp-1.1.8/messages.po
dbp-1.1.8/gimpCall.h
dbp-1.1.8/dbp.cc
dbp-1.1.8/gui.cc
dbp-1.1.8/dbp-main.png
dbp-1.1.8/gimpCall.cc
5)rick@linuxbox ~/gimp_plugin $ ls (do a ls command to see the new directory.....)
dbp-1.1.8 dbpSrc-1-1-8.tgz (dbp-1.1.8 was created)
6)rick@linuxbox ~/gimp_plugin $ cd dbp-1.1.8 (change to that new directory)
7)rick@linuxbox ~/gimp_plugin/dbp-1.1.8 $ make install (compile / install the plugin... just type make install)
g++ -o dbp -Wall -O2 -I. *.cc -I/usr/include/gimp-2.0 -I/usr/include/gtk-2.0 -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include -I/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/include -I/usr/include/atk-1.0 -I/usr/include/cairo -I/usr/include/pango-1.0 -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include/libpng12 -lgimpui-2.0 -lgimpwidgets-2.0 -lgimpmodule-2.0 -lgimp-2.0 -lgimpmath-2.0 -lgimpconfig-2.0 -lgimpcolor-2.0 -lgimpbase-2.0 -lgtk-x11-2.0 -lgdk-x11-2.0 -latk-1.0 -lgdk_pixbuf-2.0 -lpangocairo-1.0 -lpango-1.0 -lcairo -lgobject-2.0 -lgmodule-2.0 -ldl -lglib-2.0 -DGTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED
gimptool-2.0 --install-bin dbp
/usr/bin/install -c -d /home/rick/.gimp-2.4/plug-ins
/usr/bin/install -c dbp /home/rick/.gimp-2.4/plug-ins/dbp
Thats it. all the othe mumbo jubo after the make install command is the compiler making and installing the plugin.
Now when you run GIMP you will have a Menu called Batch Process under the XTN menu item at the top.
I created this post for people that would like to use GIMP to do this if it is installed without the need to further bog down the system with more programs. As I stated there are many programs out there but this just happens to be one of the few I use. The above procees may seem daunting but it really is not. There are seven commands there to get this installed. Follow the instructions on using the plugin from the link given above.
Clear skies....
Rick
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mikey cee
Carpal Tunnel
Reged: 01/18/07
Posts: 2335
Loc: bellevue ne.
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 Clear as mud!  Mike
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Mike 10x50 sears tower binocs, 3" f/10 edmunds reflector, 2.4" f/11.7 manon refractor, 6" f/8 jaegers refractor, "The 8 Ball" 8" f/13.3 brandt refractor, 3" f/15.8 sans&streiffe refractor, 3.1" f/15 selsi refractor(towa 339), 2.4" f/15 sears refractor, selsi 30x30mm spyglass, criterion 5-draw 25x45x75x spyglass(1957).
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jeff R.
newbie
Reged: 07/29/07
Posts: 3
Loc: ND
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Hi, I was reading about your photo resizing, would this be why my photos in my ads go black and say pending approval when I add info or adjust price, etc? I was actually wondering how to do this as when I tried to list on Astromart, my photos were too large. My ad on CN goes off, and then returns the next day when I edit.
Just Curious,
thanks for any info
Jeff R.
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scopinout@yahoo.com
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jeff R.
newbie
Reged: 07/29/07
Posts: 3
Loc: ND
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Hi, I also wanted to say thankyou for the link for resizing on windows xp, and also say sorry as I realized how old thiis post is, but thanks anyway, very helpful.
Jeff R.
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scopinout@yahoo.com
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Littlegreenman
Pooh-Bah
Reged: 05/09/05
Posts: 1021
Loc: Southern California
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An easy website to do this on is wwww.photobucket.com
You can also allow people to view your albums there.
I use it for simple resizing and linking multiple pics on a post here on CN. You can also do fancier stuff, like slideshow.
BTW, I'm only recommending it as a cheap (free) and qwik way to resize pics and post them on the 'net. Not for 'high art.'
I just tried Microsoft Office Document Imager. For some reason it doesn't recognize jpg images! At least my copy doesn't. The good news is that at this rate they never will gain Total World Dominance. 
LGM
Edited by Littlegreenman (03/21/08 02:17 AM)
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