I meant to reply to this in my message a moment ago and forgot…
Anyway, to Timothy and anybody else who is concerned about size of
your images…
You can lose some detail with high level .jpg compression. If you’re
not a graphics “nut” you may not notice it. Compression is not an
option to you if you want to save the file as a .tif or .bmp or
similar file. You can save a lot of disk space in all these formats
by saving at a reduced color depth.
I use Paintshop Pro, which is a Paint Shop clone. I don’t know if
Paint Shop has these tools or not, but I suspect it does. When you’re
scanning at true color depths, with most of today’s scanners at least,
you are creating an image that can use up to 16 million colors. My
software lets me reduce that to 64,000 colors…32,000 colors…256
colors, 16 colors and finally, 2 colors. I notice no shift in image
appearance at the 32,000 level. Depending on the image, I do notice
some color shift when I take it on down to 256, but usually not much.
You can save HUGE amounts of disk space by reducing the color depth.
Try it and see how far down you can take your images and still have
them look normal to your eye. Most of us waste a lot of space on
detail our eyes can’t discern.
I hesitated to respond to this for fear of really getting launched
into a graphics discussion, which is not the point of this list. But,
I know a lot of you document your jewelry for your own purposes or for
sales, so I guess this is really relevant.
Suzette Crim