2 Questions about images

Freeway
#1

i’ve imported some images into Freeway 4 4.3.2 and after searching on this list, i see that my problems probably stem from the fact they are jpegs. two questions:

can i use Graphic Converter to simply make them tiff or png at this point or is using them as pass-through the only quality option available now?

the original size of these photos is 12.9in X 8.64in. ultimately, the size on a computer monitor is considerably smaller. should i resize them before importing into the page i’m designing?

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#2

On 20 Aug 2008, at 16:52, deidremc wrote:

i’ve imported some images into Freeway 4 4.3.2 and after searching
on this list, i see that my problems probably stem from the fact
they are jpegs. two questions:

can i use Graphic Converter to simply make them tiff or png at this
point or is using them as pass-through the only quality option
available now?

No, you should make them into TIFFs with Graphic Converter before you
do anything in Freeway with them. Then resize them to the size you
want on the web.

the original size of these photos is 12.9in X 8.64in. ultimately,
the size on a computer monitor is considerably smaller. should i
resize them before importing into the page i’m designing?

This doesn’t mean a lot as there are no inches on the web :slight_smile:
The size in pixels is the only one you need to worry about; as long as
they’re the right pixel size, that’s the size they’ll show up.

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com

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#3

thanks. in the past i asked the photographer to give me tiffs simply because i heard the quality was supposed to be better. it annoyed her a bit to do that and i found no one ever asked me for a tiff so this round i didn’t bother insisting on tiff files. i didn’t realize FW worked best with tiff. live and learn.

the original pixel size is 3872 x 2592. if i was going for a screen size of about 2 inches, do i resize in GC for 216 x 144?

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#4

On 20 Aug 2008, at 17:07, deidremc wrote:

thanks. in the past i asked the photographer to give me tiffs simply
because i heard the quality was supposed to be better. it annoyed
her a bit to do that and i found no one ever asked me for a tiff so
this round i didn’t bother insisting on tiff files. i didn’t realize
FW worked best with tiff. live and learn.

It’s not so much that Freeway works best with TIFF, it’s more that if
you use a JPEG in Freeway as anything but a pass-through graphic,
Freeway will make it into a JPEG, whatever it was to begin with, and
compress it. It’s a bad idea to make a JPEG from a JPEG, as JPEG is
already a compressed format itself, and if you attempt to compress it
again, you will get odd artefacts and the eventual JPEG may even be
bigger in Kb than the original. When I get sent JPEGs, I batch convert
them all to TIFF or .psd files in Photoshop before I touch them, and
convert them to size at the same time.

the original pixel size is 3872 x 2592. if i was going for a screen
size of about 2 inches, do i resize in GC for 216 x 144?

Hard to say; as I said before, there are no inches on the web, or
onscreen. The size in inches would depend on what resolution you were
running your monitor at; it would be different sizes for different
people. Stick to pixels; it’s the only measurement that means anything
web-wise. Draw an empty box in Freeway and make it 216x144; does it
look big enough? If so, that’s your size. If it isn’t, drag it a bit
bigger and note the size in the Inspector to get the new size.

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com

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#5

On 20 Aug 2008, 4:07 pm, deidremc wrote:

thanks. in the past i asked the photographer to give me tiffs simply because i heard the quality was supposed to be better. it annoyed her a bit to do that and i found no one ever asked me for a tiff so this round i didn’t bother insisting on tiff files. i didn’t realize FW worked best with tiff. live and learn.

the original pixel size is 3872 x 2592. if i was going for a screen size of about 2 inches, do i resize in GC for 216 x 144?

Freeway is happy with almost any graphic format that you can save out of Photoshop. But you will be happier (as the sort of fussy designer-type who seems most likely to be attracted to Freeway) with images that don’t look like they were run through a food processor.

One pass of JPEG compression at high quality is about all that any given photo can stand, and certain types of images aren’t even happy with that. Two passes of JPEG compression (really, just saving the file will do this) compound the damage, and more passes escalate the result to something that is visibly messy, particularly around the edges of contrasty areas and in large areas of medium texture.

JPEG compression is lossy, and works on a “superblock” system where entire regions of the original photo are scanned for duplication. When image data is found that looks like it might be similar to its neighbors, the interior detail is completely removed – permanently – and replaced with a shorthand that says “this whole area looks like this”. In order to counter the mushiness that this process can add to an image, a process similar to unsharp masking is used to heighten the contrast at boundaries between dark and light. The trouble that this causes in later generations is that the sharpened areas get sharpened again, and the “crawlies” develop. Noise, either in the original or caused by the edges of the superblocks becoming visible, is indistinguishable from contrasty detail that the algorithm seeks to preserve. All in all, it becomes a mess.

Now as to resizing the image, I would wait to do that until the very end. I always work with images at their native resolution until my client has signed off. Freeway does a very good job resizing the originals down, most of the time. But then, after the design is locked, if I have time to go looking through and being picky, I can usually find an image or four that Freeway’s fast bilinear interpolation has mushed up or made blocky. Photoshop’s bicubic interpolation and advanced sharpening tools are what I reach for then. I will take the percentage measurement from Freeway and use it to calculate the precise reduction, and often use the Save for Web (or whatever they’re calling it in CS3) to make optimized JPEGs which I then import as pass-through. But that’s only when I’m feeling especially fussy, as it’s a lot of work that most people won’t appreciate.

Walter

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#6

Sometime around 20/8/08 (at 12:07 -0400) deidremc said:

i didn’t realize FW worked best with tiff.

It isn’t actually the case that Freeway ‘works best with TIFF’. In
fact, Freeway is happy with whatever image format you care to use, as
long as it is one of the many that it can read. It will output
web-optimised graphics when you publish your pages, regardless of
what format you import.

If you save an image in JPEG form, the compression process throws
away some of the image information. When it is processed as a
web-optimised graphic (I’m assuming JPEG format) as part of the
publishing process, it is compressed once more. This happens from
scratch (no other way to do it), so it goes through a second lossy,
damaging compression process.

THAT is why it is best not to work with JPEGs. However, if you have
been given the images in that format there’s nothing you can do to
avoid the scenario above. As long as you don’t plan to edit and
resave the images there’s actually no real point in resaving them to
a different format.

Conversely, if you DO intend to do anything to them and save them
afterwards before using them in Freeway - for example, adjusting the
contrast or levels, or resampling to a different pixel size - then
you should save them in a non-lossy format. In this case, TIFF is
fine. As is native Photoshop (PSD) or PNG, or a number of other less
common formats.

If your photographer doesn’t shoot photos in RAW format then it is
incredibly unlikely that they are recorded in anything other than
JPEG right from the start. In which case you might as well receive
them in JPEG form as they’ll take less time to send online, take less
space on a CD, and so on. However, if the shots are recorded in RAW
format then having the photographer process them as TIFF is one of
the right things to do.

the original pixel size is 3872 x 2592. if i was going for a screen
size of about 2 inches, do i resize in GC for 216 x 144?

IF that pixel dimension looks right when you draw out a box of that
size in Freeway, then yep, absolutely. It ain’t large, that’s for
sure, but it could well be just what you need. I suggest importing
one of the full-size images and scaling it down to see what size fits
your design, rather than working from an abstract idea of ‘about two
inches’. Once you have the image scaled down and the box shrunk to
fit, read off the pixel width and height from Freeway’s Inspector
palette. THAT will be the ideal size to make them, assuming you will
never want the option of zooming in to show a portion of the image.

k

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#7

Can I jump in here a bit please, I’ve been reading up on image optimisation quite a lot on the forum and there’s a lot of advice but I think Walter’s suggestion that (if you can) mess about with your images as much as you need to in (say) photoshop in a lossless format (psd or tif) then scale it to it’s final size for use on the web and then make it a jpg and drag it into freeway as a passthrough graphic. Is this the VERY BEST way of preserving the highest image quality ?

Best Roger

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#8

Sometime around 21/8/08 (at 08:25 -0400) Roger Burton said:

Is this the VERY BEST way of preserving the highest image quality ?

Well, Freeway’s JPEG production is good. It is the scaling that isn’t
necessarily quite up to Photoshop’s best. Personally, I greatly
prefer optimising the JPEG compression in the page in Freeway - but I
will sometimes scale externally first. And save in native PSD format,
almost every time.

Passthroughs can be useful, I won’t deny - but they do take away a
significant level of flexibility. My recommendation is to see that as
an alternative workflow process, something to try if the ‘normal’
process isn’t working for you.

k

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#9

If you read closely in my advice, you’ll see that I do this at the very end, and only if the image isn’t looking its best at that point. Otherwise, it is a waste of your time.

Walter

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#10

okay. resaving the photos as tiff and resizing has fixed a multitude of problems. thank you. i still don’t quite understand pixelology; that image size i need turned out to be about 600 pixels in graphic converter though the size of the box in FW was 133.

i also learned that the Lightbox Action doesn’t work with tiff so i had to save the same downsized images as jpeg just for use in Lightbox.

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#11

Sometime around 21/8/08 (at 14:32 -0400) deidremc said:

that image size i need turned out to be about 600 pixels in graphic
converter though the size of the box in FW was 133.

Sounds like the image has a 300 pixel per inch (ppi) setting. Freeway
pays attention to this info in images, just like InDesign,
QuarkXPress or Illustrator. It can be told not to, if that’s not what
you want; click the ‘Ignore Resolution’ checkbox. Then your 600-pixel
image will take 600 pixels on the page.

There are good reasons for Freeway working this way, but the really
cool thing is that you get to have it whichever way you prefer.

i also learned that the Lightbox Action doesn’t work with tiff so i
had to save the same downsized images as jpeg just for use in
Lightbox.

Yep, that sort of thing simply references the images you nominate, it
doesn’t do any processing for you.

k

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