Once Works Well was pure technology. Now it seeks merely to divert.
Pansy subjects - Verse! Opera! Domestic trivia! - are now commonplace.
The 300-word limit for posts is retained. The ego is enlarged

Saturday 19 July 2008

Feeble steps towards third dimension

Following Marja-Leena's wonderful results in scanning three-dimensional objects here are two of my attempts. One was scanned at 400 dpi and one at 800 dpi. The latter resulted in a massive 17.2 MB file. Not that it makes much difference here. Both emerged as TIFs which are unacceptable to Blog. So both had to be enormously downsized and saved as JPEGs. The resultant degradation of quality is plain.

One thing seems clear. Both Lucy (who also tried this exercise and was disappointed by a very shallow depth of field) and I need better scanners. Marja-Leena's cost over $Can500 and allows her to scan to an incredible 1200 dpi. Also, Marja-Leena shows her pix on a website and is not restrained by the resolution limitations of Blog. But let's face it, I'm guessing.

VERIFICATION I'm sure I'm rediscovering the wheel here but Blog comments don't always go through the first time. Or even the fifth. I was horrified when this first happened to me, imagining duplicate after duplicate piling up at the addressee's blog. Now I've come to regard this as the norm. Just repeat the silly alphabet thing over and over (not forgetting to insert the password each time) until the comment is posted. I apologise for all this. I'm still only in my third month

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I tried scanning leaves and sprays of herbs etc some years ago with good results but gave up because the files were so enormous.

Anonymous said...

Yes, the file size can be enormous and is fine if you are going to print. I've not needed to use the 1200 resolution, but that just means the scanner has the high end optics. 300 dpi scans are very good already. If I decide to post any image to the blog, after doing all the necessary colour and levels adjustments to make the image as best as possible, I resize it by first choosing 72 ppi and then the desired image size, then 'save it to the web', which compresses it further. (That's in Photoshop anyway and I imagine other software must have this.)

So, no, I don't have my images on the blog any higher resolution than that. Some artists do have their work shown in a somewhat higher resolution on their professional websites, but the web really has limits as you know and huge bandwidth costs.

Hope my suggestions help so you can keep trying - there's always a learning curve, isn't there?!