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#1
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Windows freeware to lock in a 3: or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping
Do you know of Windows freeware that has the option to easily lock in a 3:2
or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping? I often create DIYs where it's nice to keep the cropped close photos at a standard aspect ratio of what most smartphones use, which seems to be 4:3, or to that of most 35mm cameras which seems to be 3:2 aspect ratio https://photo.stackexchange.com/ques...n-aspect-ratio I generally crop in Irfanview because it's so very fast & super easy (click, click, crop), but there is no way to lock the aspect ratio for that crop to 4:3 in Irfanview, nor in Pinta, MS Paint, or Paint 3D freeware. Microsoft Photos has an aspect ratio lock, but it's not easy to use as the image is blacked out except for the crop area, where you slide the underlying image about to crop. http://wetakepic.com/images/2018/02/...ard0131bb4.jpg Do you know of Windows freeware that has the option to easily lock in a 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping? |
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#2
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Windows freeware to lock in a 3: or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping
On Sat, 17 Feb 2018 16:00:56 -0800, ultred ragnusen
wrote: Do you know of Windows freeware that has the option to easily lock in a 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping? You could try FastStone Image Viewer. In the Edit utilities, there is an option called "Crop Board" which gives you some cropping choices. |
#3
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Windows freeware to lock in a 3: or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping
"ultred ragnusen" wrote
| Do you know of Windows freeware that has the option to easily lock in a 3:2 | or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping? This may or may not serve. It's not free, but you can use it for free if you don't mind a startup nag: https://www.jsware.net/jsware/pprep.php5 I wrote it mainly for a friend who was taking a lot of photos and wanted to be able to send them out for printing at specific ratios, for framing or for small photo prints of things like 100 vacation photos. It will batch crop to any ratio, doing an entire folder full. Of course, you don't always want to crop the same area, but for large numbers of images this will do it quickly and easily, and in most cases the crop will be fine. You can also pick the orientation. (Crop from center or a specific corner.) If you're picky about th exact crop area on every image then you probably want a fullscale graphic editor. This is designed to be simple, quick cropping and resizing, while retaining the best possible image quality when desired. (Crop a JPG and you'll lose some quality, but you can minimize the loss, or avoid it by saving as BMP.) |
#4
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Windows freeware to lock in a 3: or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping
In article , Mayayana
wrote: This is designed to be simple, quick cropping and resizing, while retaining the best possible image quality when desired. (Crop a JPG and you'll lose some quality, not when it's a lossless or non-destructive crop. but you can minimize the loss, or avoid it by saving as BMP.) and drastically increase its size. |
#5
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Windows freeware to lock in a 3: or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping
On Sat, 17 Feb 2018 20:50:48 -0500, nospam wrote:
This is designed to be simple, quick cropping and resizing, while retaining the best possible image quality when desired. (Crop a JPG and you'll lose some quality, not when it's a lossless or non-destructive crop. That's true for lossless. But the cropping itself is always destructive. but you can minimize the loss, or avoid it by saving as BMP.) and drastically increase its size. IMO, BMP should only be used when a software doesn't support a better image format. How it stores 24bpp image pixels is unacceptably wasteful. |
#6
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Windows freeware to lock in a 3: or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping
In article , JJ
wrote: This is designed to be simple, quick cropping and resizing, while retaining the best possible image quality when desired. (Crop a JPG and you'll lose some quality, not when it's a lossless or non-destructive crop. That's true for lossless. But the cropping itself is always destructive. no it isn't. everything lightroom is non-destructive, including cropping. you can un-crop and/or re-crop at a later time. in photoshop, uncheck delete cropped pixels: https://pe-images.s3.amazonaws.com/p...and-straighten /non-destructive-crop/photoshop-delete-cropped-pixels-uncheck.png but you can minimize the loss, or avoid it by saving as BMP.) and drastically increase its size. IMO, BMP should only be used when a software doesn't support a better image format. How it stores 24bpp image pixels is unacceptably wasteful. bmp is obsolete. |
#7
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Windows freeware to lock in a 3: or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping
"JJ" wrote
| IMO, BMP should only be used when a software doesn't support a better image | format. How it stores 24bpp image pixels is unacceptably wasteful. It depends on the situation. A BMP *is* the image. You can compress it as a TIF if you don't want to use the space, but the format is not wasteful. It's just not compressed. It's what all other formats decompress to. It's what gets displayed onscreen. It's the actual image data of a raster image. Surely you knew that? A BMP is *exactly* that. Aside from something like 22 bytes of header data, it's no more and no less than the record of the color of each pixel in the image grid of the image. It's what any graphic editor actually works with. You open an image, it's converted to a device independent bitmap, you edit it, then it's saved out again as whatever. There's no such thing as editing a TIF, GIF, PNG, JPG, etc. Those are just storage methods with different pros and cons. They're all storing a bitmap. (PNG and GIF can also offer transparency, but it's still a bitmap that's stored. The transparency is created by data that defines how the image gets displayed.) I suppose you could save as PNG, but neither TIF nor PNG is remarkable compression. JPG only exists because it has very good compression, it's royalty free, and it's cross-platform. The quality is poor, but it doesn't matter so much for web graphics and photos of trivia sent between iPhones. It's not a format for storing photos. Similarly with GIF: It's handy for creating small files and it's cross-platform, but it's lossy insofar as it reduces an image to 8-bit color. I sometimes save to TIF, but mostly I save as BMP if I expect to work on an image. I have plenty of room on disk. If ultred is going to print the images it may not matter much. But if he's going to do further editing there's no sense working in a lossy format just to save space. That's why I designed for JPG and BMP -- One for small-size images where quality isn't critical and one for serious image editing. |
#8
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Windows freeware to lock in a 3: or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping
In article , Mayayana
wrote: | IMO, BMP should only be used when a software doesn't support a better image | format. How it stores 24bpp image pixels is unacceptably wasteful. It depends on the situation. A BMP *is* the image. nope. a bmp is a representation of an image. You can compress it as a TIF if you don't want to use the space, but the format is not wasteful. It's just not compressed. in other words, wasteful. It's what all other formats decompress to. false. It's what gets displayed onscreen. also false. It's the actual image data of a raster image. Surely you knew that? given that it too is false, why would he? I suppose you could save as PNG, but neither TIF nor PNG is remarkable compression. JPG only exists because it has very good compression, it's royalty free, and it's cross-platform. The quality is poor, but it doesn't matter so much for web graphics and photos of trivia sent between iPhones. It's not a format for storing photos. nonsense. a high quality jpeg is visually indistinguishable from an uncompressed original (easy to prove). a low quality jpeg looks like crap, but that's an intentional choice made by the user, not a flaw in the format, and something that is rarely, if ever done. jpeg works quite well for storing photos if raw is not an option. there is also the issue that a given raw format might not be readable at some point in the future, whereas jpeg always will be. Similarly with GIF: It's handy for creating small files and it's cross-platform, but it's lossy insofar as it reduces an image to 8-bit color. that part is (mostly) true. 8 bit colour is not an issue if the gif is a graphic and not necessarily an issue for photos. gifs are also useful for animations or short video clips. you can find many of those at https://giphy.com. |
#9
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Windows freeware to lock in a 3: or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping
On Sat, 17 Feb 2018 16:00:56 -0800, ultred ragnusen wrote:
Do you know of Windows freeware that has the option to easily lock in a 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping? [...] I generally crop in Irfanview because it's so very fast & super easy (click, click, crop), but there is no way to lock the aspect ratio for that crop to 4:3 in Irfanview, nor in Pinta, MS Paint, or Paint 3D freeware. In Irfanview: # Create a pre-selection for your crop by Click&Drag with your mouse. (Be sure, the upper left corner starts on the correct position.) # Press Shift+c to get the CustomCrop dialog. # Adjust the Crop to 3:2 ratio (or whatever ratio you like) and click the button SaveAndDrawOnImage # Fine-tune the extent of your crop by dragging the borders of the crop with your mouse while *keeping the Alt key pressed*. # If need be: Re-position the crop area by dragging it with the *right* mouse button. HTH. BeAr F'Up set to acf. -- ================================================== ========================= = What do you mean with: "Perfection is always an illusion"? = ================================================== =============--(Oops!)=== |
#10
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Windows freeware to lock in a 3: or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping
In message , JJ
writes: On Sat, 17 Feb 2018 20:50:48 -0500, nospam wrote: This is designed to be simple, quick cropping and resizing, while retaining the best possible image quality when desired. (Crop a JPG and you'll lose some quality, not when it's a lossless or non-destructive crop. That's true for lossless. But the cropping itself is always destructive. Other than that cropping obviously removes information, what do you mean: I thought the non-destructive crop was just that (in the part of the image you keep, obviously). Being as it (as implemented in IrfanView, anyway) crops to the nearest 16 (I think it's 16) pixel boundary. I assumed the reason it does that is t avoid loss. but you can minimize the loss, or avoid it by saving as BMP.) and drastically increase its size. IMO, BMP should only be used when a software doesn't support a better image format. How it stores 24bpp image pixels is unacceptably wasteful. In what way - does it use two 16-bit words, or something? Or do you just mean it doesn't do any (even lossless) data-compression? -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear. - Preface to "Animal Farm" |
#11
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Windows freeware to lock in a 3: or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping
In message , Mayayana
writes: [] a format for storing photos. Similarly with GIF: It's handy for creating small files and it's cross-platform, but it's lossy insofar as it reduces an image to 8-bit color. [] Not quite: it reduces it to 8-bit _storage_, but it does that by using a palette. I think the palette entries are at least 16-bit. Basically, it reduce an image to 256 _colours_, but they're not the _same_ 256 for any given image: a picture of a sunset, for example, will have a lot of oranges and reds. And once the reduction has been done, there's no _further_ compression (though some image editors - like, unfortunately, IrfanView, which I think is great in most respects - tend to operate in maximum-colours mode, so edit actions in them _do_ cause degradation when resaved in GIF. But that's not the format's "fault"; if the editors could be constrained to work in 256-colour mode, there'd be no loss). -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear. - Preface to "Animal Farm" |
#12
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Windows freeware to lock in a 3: or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote
| a format for storing photos. Similarly with GIF: It's | handy for creating small files and it's cross-platform, | but it's lossy insofar as it reduces an image to 8-bit | color. | [] | Not quite: it reduces it to 8-bit _storage_, but it does that by using a | palette. I think the palette entries are at least 16-bit. Basically, it | reduce an image to 256 _colours_, but they're not the _same_ 256 for any | given image: a picture of a sunset, for example, will have a lot of | oranges and reds. I wouldn't argue with that. But it's still reduced to a max of 256 colors. It's best for logos, cartoons, simple images. A sunset will dither. (Remember the old days on Windows monitors? If you used a sunset desktop photo you would have had stripes.) | And once the reduction has been done, there's no | _further_ compression As I understand it there is, but it's not lossy. It's a formulaic system that will record things like "43 pixels of color #18" as a data record, rather than using 43 * 3 bytes to record 43 pixels. It's very efficient in that context because repeating pixels are the norm. (though some image editors - like, unfortunately, | IrfanView, which I think is great in most respects - tend to operate in | maximum-colours mode, so edit actions in them _do_ cause degradation | when resaved in GIF. But that's not the format's "fault"; if the editors | could be constrained to work in 256-colour mode, there'd be no loss). That's just not true. Few 24-bit images use only 256 colors. Try this one: https://www.jsware.net/Files2/sunsetMV.jpg IrfanView says there are 100,627 unique colors there. If I reduce to 256 colors in PSP I get something like a comic book image, where Superman is in 3 colors. There are 3 reduction routines down to 256 colors and the effect varies with each, but all drop out a tremendous amount of data. If I save as GIF from PSP I get a pointilistic image. PSP16 does a slightly smoother job of it than PSP5, but both end up looking like a print from an old printer. And that image started as a low quality JPG that had already been resaved at least twice, so it wasn't a great picture to begin with. It had already dumped a lot of the richness. The degradation from the original would have been heartbreaking to see. To me that's a great example of the role of JPG and GIF: Great for onscreen images that need to be small and that need to be accessible across platforms. I use GIFs a lot for diagrams. But they're not good for much else. It would be crazy to store photos as GIF in order to save space. I find it kind of ironic when this topic comes up. I don't think I've ever heard you say this, but whenever I talk about conserving space on disk, many people will respond with, "Ah, that's not worth the trouble. Disks are so cheap these days!" Yet when it comes to saving large images for a good reason, those same people think it's crazy: "Takes up WAY too much space!" I suspect most people who feel that way are taking loads of pictures with their phone. They just want 2,000 vacation photos to fit on disk. They have no intention of doing any involved editing or printing of those images, or even going through to dump the bad ones, so they're happy with downgraded JPGs. |
#13
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Windows freeware to lock in a 3: or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping
In message , Mayayana
writes: "J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote | a format for storing photos. Similarly with GIF: It's | handy for creating small files and it's cross-platform, | but it's lossy insofar as it reduces an image to 8-bit | color. | [] | Not quite: it reduces it to 8-bit _storage_, but it does that by using a | palette. I think the palette entries are at least 16-bit. Basically, it | reduce an image to 256 _colours_, but they're not the _same_ 256 for any | given image: a picture of a sunset, for example, will have a lot of | oranges and reds. I wouldn't argue with that. But it's still reduced to a max of 256 colors. It's best for logos, cartoons, simple images. A sunset will dither. (Remember the old days on Windows monitors? If you used a sunset desktop photo you would have had stripes.) Yes, I had such a monitor (well, laptop). | And once the reduction has been done, there's no | _further_ compression As I understand it there is, but it's not lossy. It's a formulaic system that will record things like "43 pixels of color #18" as a data record, rather than using 43 * 3 bytes to record 43 pixels. It's very efficient in that context because repeating pixels are the norm. My bad - I meant loss, not compression. (though some image editors - like, unfortunately, | IrfanView, which I think is great in most respects - tend to operate in | maximum-colours mode, so edit actions in them _do_ cause degradation | when resaved in GIF. But that's not the format's "fault"; if the editors | could be constrained to work in 256-colour mode, there'd be no loss). That's just not true. Few 24-bit images use only 256 colors. Try this one: https://www.jsware.net/Files2/sunsetMV.jpg What I meant was: once an image has been reduced to 256 colours, then any editing _that did not change the number of colours_ (such as brightness or _possibly_ contrast tweaking) would not result in further corruption if saved as GIF; once it's been reduced to 256 colours, then anything further you do to it, _provided it doesn't result in an increase in the number of colours_, can still be saves as GIF without further degradation. The sort of things that _do_ result in number-of-colours increase include blurring, including resizing (especially down). IrfanView says there are 100,627 unique colors there. If I reduce to 256 colors in PSP I get something like a comic book image, where Superman is in 3 colors. Agreed. (Though it's subtle: I didn't notice it at first.) There are 3 reduction routines down to 256 colors and the effect varies with each, but all drop out a tremendous amount of data. If I save as GIF from PSP I get a pointilistic image. PSP16 does a slightly smoother job of it than PSP5, but both end up looking like a print from an old printer. And that image started as a low quality JPG that had already been resaved at least twice, so it wasn't a great picture to begin with. It had already dumped a lot of the richness. The degradation from the original would have been heartbreaking to see. To me that's a great example of the role of JPG and GIF: Great for onscreen images that need to be small and that need to be accessible across platforms. I use GIFs a lot for diagrams. But they're not good for much else. It would be crazy to store photos as GIF in order to save space. Agreed (though there are _some_ images that _don't_ lose a lot: mainly ones without gradual shading). I find it kind of ironic when this topic comes up. I don't think I've ever heard you say this, but whenever I talk about conserving space on disk, many people will respond with, "Ah, that's not worth the trouble. Disks are so cheap these days!" Yet when it comes No, you'll rarely hear me say that, as I come from the bygone era (my first computer had 1K of memory; before that, the first one I worked on had 16 memory locations). I will _sometimes_ concede that view when discussion of time versus resources comes up, but given the choice and time, I'll go for saving space where practicable. (Actually, more in MP3 files than images; my eyesight, touch wood, has not deteriorated with age other than the ability to close-focus, but my hearing _has_ lost top, and/or I haven't had speakers capable of great top for some time.) to saving large images for a good reason, those same people think it's crazy: "Takes up WAY too much space!" I suspect most people who feel that way are taking loads of pictures with their phone. They just want 2,000 vacation photos to fit on disk. They have no intention of doing any involved editing or printing of those images, or even going through to dump the bad ones, so they're happy with downgraded JPGs. My 'phone - a cheap one (a DooGee) - has, IIRR, a 6M camera. It takes pictures I consider considerably inferior to those I take with my 3M Fuji with a reasonable lens - which I usually have set to 1M size (JPEG that is). When you say they want "vacation photos to fit on disk", do you mean "to fit on _a_ disc", i. e. to make a CD (or, I guess these days, a DVD), to give to friends/relatives? (I remember using a Sony camera at work, that had a floppy drive built in - and you could get several pictures on, of acceptable quality! [That camera also had something I've never seen before or since: the ability to use ambient light to backlight the display.]) -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf If it's not on fire, it's a software problem. |
#14
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Windows freeware to lock in a 3: or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote
| That's true for lossless. But the cropping itself is always destructive. | | Other than that cropping obviously removes information, what do you | mean: I thought the non-destructive crop was just that (in the part of | the image you keep, obviously). Being as it (as implemented in | IrfanView, anyway) crops to the nearest 16 (I think it's 16) pixel | boundary. I assumed the reason it does that is t avoid loss. | It's a clever method, but in general editing JPG is lossy. How often will one need to crop to the nearest 16 pixels but have no reason to do other editing? If one will do other editing then the image should be taken out of JPG format. So it's a kind of silk purse from a sow's ear thing. Nospam was just arguing, splitting hairs. It's really all he does. | IMO, BMP should only be used when a software doesn't support a better image | format. How it stores 24bpp image pixels is unacceptably wasteful. | | In what way - does it use two 16-bit words, or something? Or do you just | mean it doesn't do any (even lossless) data-compression? It has no compression. It's very straightforward. In general a BMP will be a 24-bit, uncompressed image. (There are other options, but they're no longer used as far as I know.) The header looks like so: ----------------------------------------- BITMAPFILEHEADER '14 bytes bfType As Integer (file "magic": "BM") bfSize As Long bfReserved1 As Integer bfReserved2 As Integer bfOffBits As Long (offset to start of image) BITMAPINFOHEADER '40 bytes biSize As Long biWidth As Long biHeight As Long biPlanes As Integer biBitCount As Integer biCompression As Long biSizeImage As Long biXPelsPerMeter As Long biYPelsPerMeter As Long biClrUsed As Long biClrImportant As Long ---------------------------------------- So, 54 bytes for the header. Following that are the bytes that represent pixels. The header is just enough to interpret the image data. So bytes 55-58 will be the first pixel, and so on: 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 (byte numbers) 00 00 FF 00 00 FF 00 00 FF (3 red pixels, using big endian notation. Blue is in the high byte. Green is in the middle.) That's what all raster images are. Pixel grids. Bitmaps. No raster image format stores anything different. They just store it in different ways, with varying degrees of damage to the image. JPG degrades the image to make it compress better, with less color variety. GIF reduces to 256 colors and compresses that. (256 colors requires an embedded color table, which takes up extra space, but then each pixel can be stored as a single byte.) I don't know how PNG works but I'm guessing it's basically a BMP in a ZIP, with the addition of alpha channel data (transparency) requiring 4 bytes per pixel. (GIF, by contrast, stores transparency data by indentifying one specific color that's not to be painted onscreen.) TIF, likewise, is basically a BMP in a ZIP. (Though a ZIP can often shrink a BMP by 90%, while a TIF seems to only manage about 50%. I don't know why.) They're all just ways to store a BMP. None of those image formats means anything until the BMP is extracted. One can't render a JPG onscreen any more than the words of a ZIPped Word DOC can be read from the ZIP bytes. It has to be decompressed to get the BMP. Similarly, when one applies filters in an editing program it's just a math formula applied to the bitmap bytes. Sharpening increases the difference between the numeric values. Interpolation for resizing calculates a new pixel grid by examining the values of neighboring pixels. Lightening increases the byte values of the pixel bytes. It's all just math operations on 3-byte RGB pixels stored as grids in a BMP. In other words, the idea that BMP is outdated is a misunderstanding of what raster images are. |
#15
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Windows freeware to lock in a 3: or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping
In article , Mayayana
wrote: That's what all raster images are. Pixel grids. Bitmaps. No raster image format stores anything different. They just store it in different ways, with varying degrees of damage to the image. there is no damage. JPG degrades the image to make it compress better, with less color variety. it's entirely up to the user what the jpeg quality/compression level is, and at its highest quality, a jpeg is indistinguishable from the original. this is very easy to demonstrate, should you not believe it. GIF reduces to 256 colors and compresses that. (256 colors requires an embedded color table, which takes up extra space, but then each pixel can be stored as a single byte.) a colour table takes up very little space. I don't know how PNG works clearly. but I'm guessing it's basically a BMP in a ZIP, with the addition of alpha channel data (transparency) requiring 4 bytes per pixel. nope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics (GIF, by contrast, stores transparency data by indentifying one specific color that's not to be painted onscreen.) true, and primitive. TIF, likewise, is basically a BMP in a ZIP. nope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF (Though a ZIP can often shrink a BMP by 90%, bull****. simple logos with large areas of solid colours might shrink that much, but certainly not with photos. logos would be better served with a gif or png, not a zipped bmp. while a TIF seems to only manage about 50%. I don't know why.) yep. you sure don't. They're all just ways to store a BMP. None of those image formats means anything until the BMP is extracted. wrong. One can't render a JPG onscreen any more than the words of a ZIPped Word DOC can be read from the ZIP bytes. It has to be decompressed to get the BMP. decompressed, yes, but no bmp. Similarly, when one applies filters in an editing program it's just a math formula applied to the bitmap bytes. Sharpening increases the difference between the numeric values. Interpolation for resizing calculates a new pixel grid by examining the values of neighboring pixels. Lightening increases the byte values of the pixel bytes. that part is mostly true. it's more complex than that, but i'll spare you the details. It's all just math operations on 3-byte RGB pixels stored as grids in a BMP. what you *refuse* to understand is that it doesn't have to be (and normally is *not*) a bmp. also, 3 bytes is horribly outdated. these days, it's two bytes per component or it's a floating point value, with each pixel often having more than 3 components (rgba, cmyk, hexachrome, etc.) In other words, the idea that BMP is outdated is a misunderstanding of what raster images are. any misunderstanding is entirely with you. bmp is obsolete. period. |
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