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[JVJ]

Rez,
I've had VERY little experience with Elements, but I have installed it on my computer so that I can refer to it should you have any questions. Other Elements users in the group can chime in here, but the section I found most useful was the "Edit and Enhance Photos" which resembles the Photoshop interface. It lacks a few useful tools like [Select][Color Range], but there's actually a LOT of the power of the full Photoshop program here.

Best of luck with your lessons.

Peace, Jim (|:{>

[narfstar]

Raw scans for those who can not wait. I will put the tiffs up tomorrow.

[Yoc]

Thanks Narf, I've added RAW to the names to show they are different from the edits still to come from Rez

[narfstar]

Also, I think it only right to work with 300 minimum instead of 150 as after the amount of time delegated to a book I feel it should be of greater detail for better use in future technologies as hinted at in other earlier conversations.

a 300dpi tiff comic is nearly 500meg. I scanned Great at all 300dpi. Seems we can have 300dpi jpg or 150dpi tiff coverted to jpg but 300dpi tif will be too big.

[Yoc]

I'd say that's pretty big yeah.  LOL
I believe PNG files are lossless like a TIFF file but a bit smaller.  You might as Jim, he's likely more up on file formats than most.

-Yoc

[narfstar]

Another JVJ c2c book scanned by narfstar. Raw scans to check out before the edits. This one is all 300 dpi

[JVJ]

The 300 ppi jpegs are going to be good enough for what we see on our screens, folks.
Seriously, your monitor only displays from 72 to 96 ppi, so, if you could put a 300 ppi tiff file into your display, it would show up as 3 to 4 times the size of the actual comic book. NOT very readable. Might be great for looking at original art, but not so very pleasant when viewing a cheaply printed comic book.

PNG files are not lossless, unlike tiffs which are, and they allow for transparency, like tiffs (and GIFs).
  (GIFs have only 1 bit of transparency, while PNGs have 8 bits, which means 255 levels of transparency.)
Unlike tiffs, PNGs are displayable on the web, and unlike jpegs they allow for transparency, something that isn't really of much interest to the GAC group as far as I can tell.
PNGs also display more consistently across the Mac/PC platforms.
PNG is "probably" the wave of the future - who knows what new format will be conceived tomorrow, though? Still, storing your scans on DVD or a hard drive as 300 ppi tiffs should suffice for the nonce.

and it is PPI, guys, not DPI. DPI measures a half-tone screen for offset printing. It is a physical thing you can measure with a ruler. PPI is how something is displayed on your monitor. It is completely dependent on the user and the software. It cannot be measured with a ruler and your 300 ppi tiff file, narf, can be displayed on my monitor at 150 ppi and look twice as large. i.e. your 1 inch of 300 pixels, I can view as 2 inches of 150 pixels. A 155 dpi screen will always have 155 DOTS in 1 inch, no matter who's looking at it.

Any other questions?

Peace, Jim (|:{>

[OtherEric]

Corrections noted, Jim.  You've ALMOST got me to using PPI but I've gotten used to the incorrect term.

I'm not sure the GAC group isn't interested in transparency; I don't think we know what it can do for us.  Just from the name I'm not sure it is terribly important to scanning old comics, but given everything you've already taught us you may well know some wonderful use none of us have though of.

[Yoc]

See, I told you Jim would know more than me! 
So Jim, any suggestions for Eric and Narf who want to produce the best raw scans they can but don't want to have to upload 500mb per a book?

-Yoc

[JVJ]

See, I told you Jim would know more than me! 
So Jim, any suggestions for Eric and Narf who want to produce the best raw scans they can but don't want to have to upload 500mb per a book?

-Yoc

Well, I knew a little bit about PNG, Yoc,
but for the nitty gritty details I just Googled it.

As for transparency, Eric, I can't see much need for it here at all.

As for resolution, I'd simply recommend you keep doing whatever it is you guys to do display the scans on-line. Think of the 300 ppi (come on, Eric, you CAN do it!) tiffs as your "masters" that you can return to when the need arises. Store them somewhere (on DVDs seems to the most economical) and in five years (or so, or whenever the next display technology breakthrough occurs) you'll be able to bring them into the latest editing/conversion software and turn them into whatever the latest display format happens to be.

Nothing needs to change in the post-cleaning process that I can see. Scan in tiff, edit in tiff, convert to jpeg and display. See, I don't even know what resolution jpegs you're downloading NOW. Whatever it is, it's certainly been satisfactory so far. Just consider the original/cleaned scans as being insurance (against loss, damage, or innovation).

Of course, transferring the tiff files to someone for cleaning adds a certain level of "overhead" to the process. That I have no answer for, since I don't really know what happens after the files are edited. How are the files "packaged" for display? In what format? Using what "tool"? At what resolution? I have zero experience with the process and can't comment or make suggestions from such a position of ignorance.

Peace, Jim (|:{>

[rmdavidson]

Jim, I hate to bother you about this but I've wondered about it for quite a while.  I have read in several old computer books and you have stated a few times that "your monitor only displays from 72 to 96 ppi."  Now, I can change the resolution of my screen, based on my relatively old graphics card, from 800 by 600 pixels up to 1280 by 1024 pixels, all within the same 19 inch screen.  Wouldn't this indicate that the pixels per inch would have a wider range than 24 pixels?

I tried saving a picture in Photoshop today to use as wallpaper.  I saved it once as 1024 pixels high and 100 ppi and another version as 1024 pixels high and 300 ppi. As my screen resolution is set at 1280 by 1024, the 300 ppi covered it nicely top to bottom.  The 100 ppi tiled nine images in the same area.  This would seem to me to indicate that my monitor is showing 300 ppi.

Of course, math was always my worst subject in school and I could be completely wrong.  I have asked other people about this and gotten a dazed and confused stare in response.

Sorry if this is getting off-subject, narf, but this has been pestering me for some time.

[JVJ]

It's a very logical question, rm,
What happens when you change your screen resolution from 800 x 600 to 1280 x 1024? If your monitor is like mine, the displayed picture (and the icons and the text) all get SMALLER. In the case of this example, they get distorted vertically as well, since your display card is mapping the contents of the horizontal pixels at a 160% ratio and the vertical ones at a 170% ratio.

For example: If you're running Windows (which I am, so you have to accept MY example): I can set my icon display size, in pixels, in the Settings area of the desktop. So, let's say my icons are set at 40 pixels wide. At the original 800 x 600 setting, each desktop icon is going to be 40/800, or 5% of your screen width, i.e. BIG. Your display drivers are mapping each pixel to the resolution you set. At the 1280 x 1024 setting, each icon is only a little over 3% of the screen width. Same size PHYSICAL display, finer resolution = smaller picture.

But I have been remiss in my statements, because I have been referring in every instance of "72 - 96 ppi" to the WEB. The web serves up images at a standard resolution of 72-96 ppi. If you have any web authoring software, try the same experiment with your wallpaper in that software. You'll find that the 100 ppi image will fill your browser window and the 300 ppi image will show only 1/9 of the picture. Here's something I found on the web at http://www.workdance.com/Downloads/Tutorial2/tutorial2a.html

PPI: Pixels per inch
This is your display resolution, i.e., what you see on-screen. Usually referring to a monitor or digital camera.
It also greatly affects file size and image efficiency - more on that later.

This is the most often encountered resolution term, and it alone can be confusing because the term relates not only to the on-screen display of any image, but also to the image file itself.

A side note: Whether you're on a Mac or PC does have some bearing here, since Mac screen resolution is 72 ppi, and PC screen resolution is 96 ppi. For PC users, exchange 96 ppi for 72 ppi in the math, and you'll get the result for your system.

You can read more at the link if you want. But what I've been saying (or NOT saying very well) is that ON THE WEB you're getting files served to you that are being displayed by your browser at those resolutions BECAUSE that's what the HTML standard expects. Of course, NOW we're getting all kinds of plug-ins and add-ons and Flash and other display modifiers that allow for higher resolution and zooms and all those bells and whistles that plain old HTML didn't have, but that's not relavent - YET.

But if your graphics card and monitor/display are capable of showing your icons at 800 x 600 or 1260 x 1042, they aren't changing the number of pixels in your display, they're simply mapping more or fewer of them to the pixels of the icon (or the picture you downloaded). Whoever created the icon or the picture did it in pixels at some specific resolution (as you did your wallpaper) and you can tell your display (up to its supported resolution) how to show them to you. Your web browser will simply appear larger or smaller based on what you choose, but just as you can't zoom into an HTML-displayed image to make it bigger, you can't enlarge the browser display without lowering your screen resolution.

What format and resolution the files that you download from GAC are in could matter a lot if the software for viewing them isn't based on HTML. That part I don't know.

Is all that of ANY help?

Peace, Jim (|:{>

[Yoc]

Hi Jim, let me rephrase my original question.
What lossless image format produces the smallest file size when scanned at say 300dpi?
ie which is the most efficient I guess?
Once I get them to edit I'm working in TIFF as is until saving them as a JPG trying to get each page between 700-900kb.

[JVJ]

Efficiency only comes with compression, Yoc,
which by it's very nature ISN'T lossless. Which part of the process are you asking about? "Most efficient" for what? For transferring from scanner to editor? For posting on the web? For archiving?

I don't think you're going to get much smaller than 20 MB per page without compression. At 10" x 7" you have 70 square inches and at 300 ppi you're going to end up around 21,000,000 pixels (300 x 70). And at 1 byte per pixel, you're close to 20 MB.

The answer to your question is that I don't think you're going to get much smaller than a tiff file without loss. I just saved the PL ifc in several different formats and here are the file sizes:

.tif - 2,023 KB
.tif with .lzw compression - 1,977 KB
.tif with .zip compression - 1,660 KB
.tif with 100% jpg compression - 1,072 KB
.jpg at 100% - 998 KB

(since this started life as a .jpg from the web, it's much smaller than a 300 ppi scan)

Everything except the .tif and .lzw is a lossy compression of sorts, and as you can see, .lzw doesn't help much. Now as to what the LOSS is in each format, I can't say. I don't know that much.

When I did the same save with a full 300 ppi scan, I got VERY comparable results:
.tif - 19,238 KB
.jpg at 100% - 10,233 KB

SO, again, I need to know WHAT it is that you want to do with that 700-900 KB file in order to answer the real question that you haven't asked yet.

Peace, Jim (|:{>

[rmdavidson]

Thanks for the explanation of screen resolution, Jim.

You have amazing patience with all our questions and it is much appreciated.

Best,

Richard

[Yoc]

Thanks Jim.
I was talking about 'For transferring from scanner to editor'
I believe you've answered the question - TIFF it is.

-Yoc

[JonTheScanner]

In principle you could get huge lossless compression for b&w (ifc ibc) or even gray scale.  All that it would require that the image be largely white (or largely black but that would be less common).  The compression scheme would be something like this, pixel 50% black (one byte), the next 300 pixels white (two bytes), etc.  That way there would be much less than one byte per pixel. 

But this of course require preknowledge that the page is mostly white, and does not consist of randomly placed dots.

[narfstar]

Please move this discussion to the clean up thread it is hurting my poor bald head Now I know why I let others edit scans. I need a decision here. Should I upload 150 ppi Tiffs to be edited or 300ppi jpgs to be edited

[JVJ]

Narf,
I would LOVE to answer that question, but in order to do so, I need to know what file type and resolution eventually goes into the .cbr files that are actually downloaded for viewing. So far, no one has given me that information and my answer relies up me having it.

And I agree 100% that some of the posts in this thread belong very much in the How Much Clean-Up? or some other thread. We should stop abusing your hospitality.

Peace, Jim (|:{>

[narfstar]

I think 300ppi jpg is the optimal for the cbr. But the tif have to be 300 to make 300jpg and 300 tif are too big to pass along.

[JVJ]

I'm not so certain that 300 ppi jpegs are the rule, Narf,
OtherEric says that most .cbr files contain 150 to 200 ppi jpegs, and that's what they turned out to be when I extracted a few pages from one and bought them into Photoshop. So the answer I gave Eric and will give you is that it is quite reasonable to pass along 150 ppi tiffs, and keep the 300 ppi tiffs as archives. When the correx are made, THEN they can be turned into 150 ppi jpegs, assembled into .cbr packages and posted.

Seriously, that makes the most sense and should cut down considerably on the transfer "overhead".

Peace, Jim (|:{>

[narfstar]

I think most of the files are only 150 ppi but I was suggesting that most think that 300 is the best. If everyone is happy with 150, I know I am, we can transfer 150 ppi tiffs to 150 ppi jpgs.

[JVJ]

The simplest thing would be to create a .cbr file using 300 ppi jpegs and see what size it ends up and how it displays. I think the only advantage you're going to get is that you will be able to display the file at a larger size. But I could be wrong about that. Does anyone know of any files on the site that ARE 300 ppi? If so, we can do the test without any additional effort.

Curious minds want to know more.

Peace, Jim (|:{>

[Yoc]

I know some scanners like to have their covers at 300 dpi while the insides are at 150.
150 seems to be the norm but I feel for any truly special, one of a kind books a bump to 300 is worth it.  BTW, any scans used in Alter-Ego are requested at 300dpi.

-YOc

[JVJ]

I think ALL of the SCANS should be at 300 ppi, Yoc,
the 150 ppi should relate ONLY to the jpegs that get posted for uploads. It is plenty of resolution for display on a computer screen.

Again, I'm going to pound on this again and again, because it really is important that people understand it: there's a BIG difference between Ppi and Dpi. Roy Thomas's desire for 300 ppi scans has absolutely nothing to do with GAC DISPLAY needs.

But, you're absolutely right that future printing needs are another reason to nudge us toward 300 ppi SCANS. Roy Thomas wants 300 Ppi scans so that he can reproduce them at 150 Dpi (or Lpi [lines per inch]) on a printing press as half-tone screens in Alter Ego. The general rule of thumb is TWICE the print screen resolution for scanning resolution. So 300 ppi scans can be made available in the future as Roy or anyone else needs them.

(In all honesty, though, since Roy GENERALLY reproduces comic book pages at 1/2 size, the 150 ppi scans would suffice. All we'd have to do is change the resolution of the scan from 150 to 300 ppi and we'd get a half-size 300 ppi scan that would be exactly what he'd need and use.)

I'll ask again if anyone has actually put 300 ppi jpegs into an upload file on GAC, and if so, which one(s)?

Peace, Jim (|:{>