Who needs this sort of compression?

[Guest]

Microsoft Office Picture Manager promises to compress pictures for smaller
size and faster loading, but...

http://www.zima.net/fun_eng.html

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Vadim:

Ummm... Perhaps you should have read the instructions

You took a small JPEG and resized it to 1024 x 768 at 300 dpi for
"Printing". Yeah, it will get a bit bigger. As a professional
photographer, YOU should know that...

OK, maybe Microsoft should use the word "adjustment" instead of
"compression", but it was trying to produce a tool for absolute newbies who
have no idea about this stuff.

The tool gives you the options of "Best, Good, Fair, and Low" quality and
size. If your original starts off below the quality standard you choose,
the tool will up-sample it.

But I would have thought a professional photographer on a Mac could probably
afford a copy of PhotoShop to do this kind of stuff in

That said, I must admit to keeping a copy of Microsoft Photo Editor handy.
This little freeware tool from Office 2000 is just sooo convenient for
quickly cropping and resizing bitmaps

Office Picture Manager is its "replacement". Personally, I think it's
toxic. It's so determined to "help" that it gets in the way. If I have to
do anything more than cropping/resizing/colour balancing, I fire up
PhotoPaint.

Cheers

Microsoft Office Picture Manager promises to compress pictures for smaller
size and faster loading, but...

http://www.zima.net/fun_eng.html

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[JE McGimpsey]

But I would have thought a professional photographer on a Mac could probably
afford a copy of PhotoShop to do this kind of stuff in

As an alternative, the (free) Gimp 2.0, running in Apple's (free) X11
does nearly everything that I'd use Photoshop for, though it has fewer
bells and whistles.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

As an alternative, the (free) Gimp 2.0, running in Apple's (free) X11
does nearly everything that I'd use Photoshop for, though it has fewer
bells and whistles.

Gimp is a little heavy and I'm not a huge fan of the X11 GUI. If Photoshop is
too expensive, you could at least invest in a license of GraphicConverter.

Corentin

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Gimp is a little heavy and I'm not a huge fan of the X11 GUI. If Photoshop is
too expensive, you could at least invest in a license of GraphicConverter.

I use GraphicConverter for most things (and it comes free with Panther),
but for layers and filters, Gimp works better for me.

Of course, I'm nothing like a professional photographer...

 

[Michel Bintener]

GraphicConverter was part of the software that was pre-installed on my
Powerbook, but I don't think that it comes free with Panther. Unless I'm
missing something.
Anyway, I can only recommend Photoshop Elements. I haven't tried the latest
version (v.3.0) yet, but I've been using v.2.0 for over two years now, and
I'm really satisfied with it. It offers the same functionality as Gimp (if
not even more, I haven't really tried Gimp since I don't like the X11
environment). And it is more advanced than GC when it comes to editing
photos. Don't get me wrong, GC is excellent, and I still use it because it
can open more file formats than PSE can. Still, being an casual
photographer, I just love PSE. And let's face it, for the features you get,
it's really not that expensive. Sorry for going on about this, but I just
love this application.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

GraphicConverter was part of the software that was pre-installed on my
Powerbook, but I don't think that it comes free with Panther. Unless I'm
missing something.

Ah, I made an unwarranted assumption - I installed Panther on my G4
tower having already purchased a copy of GraphicConverter, then my newer
Powerbook came with Panther installed, and GraphicConverter's license
says "Apple bundle customers", which, of course, is obviously more
likely to be a Powerbook bundle than a Panther bundle.