On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 07:58:30PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
All the other changes could pretty simply be done without decompressing the entire image. (We don't fully decompress jpegs for resizing today, but we do PNGs.. which is why PNGs have tighter size constraints.. people were running the servers out of ram with huge PNG maps)... Rotation OTOH would be much harder to accomplish incrementally.
Incrementally? I'll leave that one to the image manipulation specialists.
He's correct; if you want multiple rotations of an image, do them all from the original.
How does placing the subject dead center maximizes the encyclopedic value of an image? Yes, perhaps you could see a few more hairs in
Depends what the subject is. But fairly evidently, the more stuff in the thumbnail (and we are talking about the thumbnail that appears in the article here - the full picture is still accessible) that is relevant to the article, the better. Our thumbnails are already small, like 200x150. If 100x150 of that is empty space caused by artistic positioning, then we've lost a lot of possible informational content. There are times and places for it - but small images that illustrate an article are not them.
Correct. Pictures (can be for) art. Thumbnails are for *information*. I, personally, am always quite favorably impressed when I click through someone's thumbnail of a closeup of a person, and discover that it's a full-sized picture, in which that face merely happens to appear. Good choice in cropping the thumbnail appeals to my sense of aesthetics.
If we wrote our text in some sort of compressed always machine parsable English we could probably express more ideas in a given number of words... but thats not what we do because the value to the reader is increased through brilliant prose.
Your example is good - we *do* cut waffle, and we *do* cut all the background discussion that you need to understand the article, or we put it down the bottom of the article, out of the way. Our lead paragraphs are idea-rich, information-dense text exactly comparable to cropping and increasing contrast in our thumbnails. Your example of "compressed always machine parsable English" might be comparable with "overcropping" - taking the idea too far and losing context.
Very nice metaphor, yes.
I'm a big advocate of socal soutions to social problems... but I'd prefer that the technoligy not make things worse while we're trying to figure things out. :) Perhaps that would happen, perhaps it wouldn't.. I'm not sure.
Just remember that Wikipedia couldn't possibly work.
Hee.
I don't know how to solve it... We have very few real photographers participating... a majority of our photo involved folks are primarly finding free images on the web, or just skimming their snapshot collections, so the culture of image alteration is very different from what it would be if more people were photographers.
And better image manipulation tools would discourage real photographers?
And, remember, folks, since I think we've taken our eyes off the prize; the original discussion here, AIUI, was "knobs that can be applied to a thumbnail".
Cheers, -- jra