Web Site Problem!!! HELP!!

greenspun.com : LUSENET : B&W Photo: Creativity, Etc. : One Thread

Hi! For over a month I have been trying to set up a web site to display my (humble) B&W street photographs. I went out and bought Netscape Publisher, with the Net Objects site creator. I also got HPs ScanJet 5s, with Paper Port and the photo enhancing software, Paint Shop Pro 32 bit.

Well I scan my prints and they turn out pretty well. This is based on a 75 dpi, 8 bit gray scan. I then try to import the scanned photos into the web site (non published and published) and the photo quality deteriorates considerably. Sometimes they have very little tonal scale, like what a photo looks like when it has not downloaded completely (though this is not the problem in my case). Other times the photo has the opposite problem, it appears too grainy. The frustrating thing is that they scan fine, but they mess-up once I import the imag; Either under JPEG or GIF. Maybe there is a something I could do in Paint Shop Pro, but everything so far has failed.

Any suggestions are greatly welcomed. I want to work on my site but obviously this problem is a major road block - whats the point if the photos look awful!!

Many thanks, Bart.

-- Bart Lund (bal1210@sprynet.com), January 11, 1998

Answers

The problem might be with your video card. If it is a low resolution card then when you view the images in the browser they may appear somewhat grainy or blotchy but if viewed on a higher resolution system they might look fine. I had this same problem and the images looked great when I viewed them on a higher resolution card. Perhaps you can post your URL(if it's up) to see if anyone else notices the same problem.

-- Andy Laycock (aglay@interchange.ubc.ca), January 11, 1998.

I had surprisingly good luck simply scanning contact prints. I'd had them done at a local pro lab, then went to Kinko's, put the prints on some sort of HP scanner, and scanned them at 150dpi, 8-bit grayscale, and saved them as TIFF files.

At home, I cropped them and modified the gamma slightly by +/- .1 or .2 (using a Unix program called `xv'; if you don't have a gamma control, you could do the same using *very* subtle brightness/contrast changes).

I then saved them as JPEG, with a `quality' setting of 75% and `smoothing' of zero. I think it's this latter setting that might make a great deal of difference: I've noticed that many image-manipulation/conversion packages seem to try to compress JPEGs down as far as they can go. But since it's a lossy compression scheme (that is, the more you compress, the lower the quality), it's not always a good idea.

Anyway, you can judge the results for yourself. My photos are at:

http://www.meer.net/~johnl/photos/bw/

john

-- John Labovitz (johnl@meer.net), January 12, 1998.


See also http://photo.net/wtr/dead-trees/, chapter 4. The author, Phil Greenspun, hosts these conferences and is one of those sickening people who are good with computers, writes very well, and makes some fine photos.

-- Alan Gibson (gibson.al@mail.dec.com), January 13, 1998.

Image problems

I support a range of computer users for a living. From my experience I would suspect corruption between the applications/hardware you are using.

Without knowing more details about your hardware, operating system, processor, hard disk, etc, I can't really point you in the right direction.

Does the problem occur in other graphic packages? Have you tried writing HTML code manually and adding the image in yourself with out the Netscape program. Does the image look corrupt when veiwed within other programs or is it just your web browser?

I have experienced problems with corruption myself on saving an image after cropping etc in Photoshop. I am using Windows NT, and a machine I have built myself with my choice of components, and after re-booting my PC it was okay.

Good luck.

Neal

B&W photoraphy Web site: http://www.ngarman.demon.co.uk/photo/

-- Neal Garman (neal@ngarman.demon.co.uk), February 11, 1998.


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