[Imc-uk-useability] resizing adventures

[ionnek]

Hi kriptick, mini:

thanks for your efforts to make how-to's for the resizing photos. I tell you, I
need it!!

Part of my job is to document euromayday events, which I want to do on indymedia
to create some synergy between the research project and imc. Documenting
involves - shockhorror! - pictures (let alone video but that's another
nightmare). I've only started to use a digital camera, always focussed on
indymedia text things and ignored the picture production. So now I'm sitting
here with hundreds of pics, pics with faces in them, pics that are probably too
big, etc etc. 

I'll give you an account of a clueless user who wants to publish pics on imc. 

I spent this beautiful sunny sunday morning behind my desk trying to figure out
how to crop pictures, how to blur faces, how to find out which size the £*(%&£%
things are, and what "size" means in the first place.

After playing with photoshop (yeah yeah I'm using windoze cause i don't know how
to connect to my non-stable internet connection with blag), I started browsing
through the imc uk site for help. First the help page.
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/static/help.html

With the images paragraph. 
Huh, "less than 50k file size and no more then 200k at very most. The width to
be viewable easily on everyones screen should be restricted to 540 pixels,
certainly no more than 1024."
 
I found the filesize not on photoshop (remember I've never used it before) but
through the explorer. Ok, my picture was too big.

How do I change the filesize? By making the picture "smaller" I guess. But what
does "smaller" mean??? The size in which the picture will be printed? The
number of pixels in the picture? Which is which? No idea.

Then I remembered some mails on the useability list. First I went to the publish
button. Which normally I would only have done when my pictures are ready to be
published (i.e. never), so I wouldn't have found mini's help page. It really
has to go to the "Help" link!!

The link to "here"
https://g8.indymedia.org.uk/Resizing_Images
is very small, I almost overlooked it. 

But it was useful. I downloaded the photofiltre. Ok. Thanks.

Now the questions: 
- I found the filesize of the picture in "file/image properties"  (it is under
50K). But what are the 640kb memory size?
- what does size in pixels refer to? The width in pixels is now 540 - is this
ok? Does it refer to the size of the pic when printed, or to the quality?
- Resolution is now 10.00 pixels/inch. What does that mean? 10 pixels per inch?
that seems not very much! Can I change the resolution? Is this correct: More
pixels per inch = bigger file size??

And the conclusion: What you are doing here is extremely helpful. Maybe the
step-by-step guide on g8.indymedia.org.uk could be even a bit more extended.
Things like: Check your filesize by doing xxx. Adjust the quality by xxx.

It is well possible that these instructions are already part of the para on
g8.indymedia.org.uk, and that I didn't recognise them.

Oh yeah, and the next thing is the faces. The best pictures have faces in them.
None of the pics shows anyone doing something illegal, but I think some of the
pictures might provide a nice gallery of the main players in the mayday
organising - which is often also squat organising, demo organising etc. So I
don't want to publish them.

I don't want to put black squares over people's faces, cause they would spoil
the meaning of each picture.
I've spent about 1 hour to paint a beautiful mask over my favorite picture in
photoshop. But really this takes too much time. Are there any ready-made
virtual masks on the web? How can I "depixel" faces, so that they are blurred?
And how do I make sure that it is impossible, once the pic is on an imc
newswire, for someone to undo this manipulation?

And the exif files. It seems that photofiltre gives me the option to loose the
exif file. Good. How important is it to loose the exif file? Does it get lost
automatically when posted on the imc newswires? I don't care if my camera type
is public, and I find it useful to have the time stamp. But... what are the
exeriences? Could such info be damaging?

Ah, in irfanview and photoshop, there is the option to fill in another file for
each picture - author, copyright, keywords, caption etc. What do I do with
this? What is it useful for? 

Many greatings from an absolute beginner

ionnek








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