Commons:Graphics village pump/May 2008

Looking to scan some more images

I'm looking to scan more images from public domain publications, and I want some advice. What do you think is a good resolution to scan at? I've been using 600 dpi, though it does create very large images. If the images are very large, is there any utility in uploading an 'economy size' set as well, e.g. smaller jpgs to go with pngs? What about backgrounds - is there anywhere or anyone who could give me some training in how to make the backgrounds look nice (mainly removing the texture of the paper for a more 'black on white' effect? My partner in crime hasn't been active lately, so I need help from someone else. Richard001 10:26, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Scan at the highest resolution you can. Experiment to find out whether that limit is set by your scanner, your computer's capabilities, or Commons' unfortunate file size limitations.

The Mediawiki software automatically creates low-resolution versions, which are the ones that appear in most places. It doesn't convert pngs to jpegs, but that size difference is not that bad when scaled down anyway (somewhat depending on the content). I wouldn't worry about it.

Curve adjustments are usually a good way to make detailed contrast tweaks. In the Gimp, it's under Tools, Color Tools, Curves. —LX (talk, contribs) 11:14, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Ah, simpler than I thought. What do you think of Image:Expression of the Emotions Figure 4.png? If there's nothing else I can improve upon I'll get on with scanning, editing and uploading the rest. Richard001 08:18, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Looks fine to me, but I'm certainly no expert critic. —LX (talk, contribs) 09:13, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

I've also uploaded Image:Naturalist on the River Amazons figure 1.png, which is the high quality touched up version Adam sent to me. I've compared his version with the original PNG I sent to him and I think I can see what he has done: made the light parts white and the dark parts black, more of less. I've figured out how this is done in Photoshop too; basically just a quick adjustment using curves. He was going to do the touch ups but seems to have vanished, so I think I'll do this for the rest of the Naturalist images myself. I might post a couple more of my own here once I've uploaded. There are about 40 images so I want to get it done right. Richard001 09:59, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

I've done a couple from Naturalist myself now: Image:Naturalist on the River Amazons figure 12.png and Image:Naturalist on the River Amazons figure 2.png, and also a few more from Darwin (see Category:The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals). Am I doing the colour adjustment (or shade adjustment, since it's grayscale) right? Any other tips/criticism? I'd be interested in hearing about Image:Naturalist on the River Amazons figure 3.png: This Γ shaped image had text in the white space. Adam suggested the only thing we could do is leave it as a full page illustration with text, however I've replaced the text with the regular background and then turned all the lighter shades into pure white. I think this is the best way to deal with these ones, no? Richard001 00:40, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Funny how this has only just really occurred to me: should I be including the captions too, or cropping them out whenever possible? Richard001 08:49, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

I'd say do not include them in the image itself, unless there is some particular reason to do it. It's usually better to quote it in the description field of the information template. That way it can be searched and otherwise processed as textual data, which is far more useful. —LX (talk, contribs) 09:42, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm kind of leaning toward not including the captions too, as the text seems to do the job fine by itself, and they interfere with using the image just as an illustration somewhat. Another user disagrees though, so I think I'll bring it up at the main VP to get some more comments. Regarding quoting them in the description, it's certainly not an either/or matter, in fact if you look at the ones I've uploaded you'll see I have quoted all the captions already. The versions from Emotions at Darwin Online don't keep the captions (although they're not the best examples, as they also have the text showing through strongly from the other side of the page. Richard001 01:19, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Problem with Image:Armoiries des Armoises Differdange.svg

Hi, I seem to have a problem with . I can't seem to fix the code, when I look at this image on my side (inkscape, firefox and explorer) I see the correct colours. But once I upload it here to commons the yellow (FCEF3C) colour on the outside has seemingly changed to white (FFFFFF) (not in the middle shield (eskutcheon) which is correct).--Caranorn 20:10, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Not sure why it worked differently in different software, but I took out a white-filled path which didn't seem to do anything, and it's now OK (I think). By the way, it seems that dozens and dozens (if not hundreds and hundreds) of heraldic SVG files have the SVG title element "Flag of Canton of Valais (Wallis)", even though they're most definitely not images of the flag of Valais... AnonMoos 10:44, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the help AnonMoos. And yes, I noticed that some carryover information from very early coat of arms images remains in most .svg files of the French Projet Blason. I only started using the .svg format this past week, though I guess I should have removed the redundant information as soon as I noticed. Maybe I can still correct this for future images I upload.--Caranorn 13:32, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

JPG thumbnails and previews

I uploaded Ferrari Raikkonen 2008 Spanish GP.jpg and the thumbnail just doesn't look right, nor the preview. It's full of artifacts, and the quality seems to be quite low. If you open the image at full size, you'll see that the quality is much better than the preview. It happens with other pictures too, but not with all. What's the reason? What's the downsampling script of MediaWiki? Is there any way to avoid this, for instance with some special settings in Photoshop? - Keta 12:10, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

SVG error?

There seems to be an error in this SVG. It's not rendered as .png (as it should be), so it's not properly visible on Wikipedia article. :(

What could be the problem and how can I solve it? I made the pic in Corel Draw X3.

Thanks in advance. --Matija 12:15, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm having more difficulty fixing the file than I thought I would, but the basic problem is that the file is in UTF16 encoding (double-byte Unicode with lots of "00" bytes) instead of UTF8 encoding. The Microsoft Windows tools I have here at the moment understand UTF16, but they're not too helpful in changing UTF16 to UTF8... AnonMoos 13:42, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

It's still not good, but if you are still repairing it, you can replace the cyrillic text with this latin one: Narodna skupština Republike Srbije. If that's the only problem, of course :) --Matija 21:33, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Finally remembered to use "iconv" to convert it the right way when I booted into Linux... AnonMoos 13:44, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Splitting and cleaning a photo help needed

Hi. I need some help with an image, Image:Chester Brown&Seth.jpg. It features w:Chester Brown on the left and w:Seth (cartoonist) on the right, so I'm looking for someone who could maybe split the picture and cut out the middle man. Also, the image has some sort of blue tinge, so I don't know if an expert can tidy that up too? Thanks for any help, I hope this is the right place to ask. Hiding 20:59, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

It is the right place to ask. I did this task and also put a couple of more templates on the image pages. -- carol 11:36, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Actually, I did not clean the photograph, but I did adjust the value levels some. -- carol 11:37, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Well actually Commons:Graphic Lab School/Images to improve is probably the right place to ask, but here seemed to work to. =) /Lokal_Profil 14:14, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks everyone. Sorry to ask here instead of there. Hiding 21:18, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Need help with .svg

Sorry, if this promlem was discussed before. But my English is't exellent.. So I uplouded to Wikimedia Commons this image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Menskaja_voblasc_na_mapie.svg But Wiki doesn't display it. Tell me please, what is wrong? (image was made in Corel Draw v.12)--Rulezz 01:11, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I've managed to fix the image but I'm not sure what exactly had gone wrong. My only recommendation is to use Inkscape instead since Corel Draw seems to leav a lot of junk code that Mediawiki (and even firefox) doesn't like. Also don't forget to add a license to the image or it will get nuked. /Lokal_Profil 02:17, 27 May 2008 (UTC)