Hi all.
I hope You people don' t mind me sounding like a teacher or something, but I noticed that a lot of the blueprints on this wonderful site are not exactly optimized for use on the internet...
( Well, some of the images I posted may be too large too when I forgot to reduce them properly ... )
Many of us have an ADSL- modem or similar high speed connection, but there' s lots of people still on 56k modems ( maybe some unlucky ones have even slower modems )
I am pretty sure these people run into problems when opening a page that has several MB of pictures in it.
It does not have to be like that though. Even the biggest Blueprints can be reduced to a few 100 kb, when converted and saved properly, so I' ll try to explain how.
( I didn' t find another topic on this, so here it goes )
First thing to do of course, is scanning the image.
If You want an image of good quality, just scan it at 300ppi, so You can print it at the same size as the original.
When used on-screen, this image will be much larger, since Your screen will display at 72dpi
( forget about 96dpi )
Now when Your image is in grayscale, there' s no need to scan it in color, since that will only make it bigger than needed, so use grayscale. Don' t use Black and white ( 1 bit ) !
When scanned, save it as a high resolution format, so You can convert it later in Your image manipulation app. Best format is TIFF ( or tif )
When all images are scanned, open them one by one in Your image manip.app. like Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, Graphic Converter or whatever You use.
Fiddle a bit with the " LEVEL " settings to get rid of unwanted grays in the background and lower the amount of colors ( grays of course ) to 16 . Save Your image in the GIF format.
Saving as JPG will convert the image to millions of colors - what we don' t need - and also destroys a lot of information when compressing the file.
Lines will look blurred also, so GIF is the way to go.
As an example, I took an image that was posted by Swen Beuchert, who supplied us with a massive collection of great prints ( thanks again Swen ) that I downloaded and then noticed it was rather huge... about 1,4 MB...
Please note that I am not blaming Swen for this, ' cause it is easy to forget reducing files properly, certainly when You got as many as he has
So I opened this GIF-image and did what I mentioned before ( levels, amount of colors ) and saved it again as a GIF file.
The result can be seen in the images below. Look at the " file lenght "
The image on the gray background is the original, the white background is the new one.
The other image shows both files at 100%. No loss at all, except for file- size that is... now only 169,8 kb. Worth a try ?
Peter