From: micky <NONONOmisc07@bigfoot.com>
Subject: Why do their heads look too narrow, or wide

Is there an active newsgroup that's good for graphics, art, or computer graphics?

On the theory there isn't, I'll tell you my question.

I belong to an organization that has membership cards, and last year
they added photos to the membership cards.

If I wanted my picture added, they insisted that I send in a high
resolution photo, even though the picture is only about 1" square. Does
this make sense? They said their card-making place said to insist.

I didn't have a hi-def picture, just one from scanning a passport
pictuer on my home scanner.

At any rate, when the card came, the picture looked great, the color
looked great, there was plenty of detail (to the extent one can see that
in 1" square) but my head was squeezed together horizontally. Some
people might have a head as narrow, but I don't.

I don't see how this could be related to high definition but otoh, we
have two anomalies and I don't want to assume it's a coincidence. Might
they be related?

Finally, they sent me a brochure with some of their more hot-shot
members, and maybe 20% of them look like their heads are squeezed too.
Of course I don't know them and maybe they really look like that. One
guy looks like his head has been widened!!

I found a picture of two women in this brochure and an earlier letter.
She actually looked normal in both of them, and were it not for the ones
that look abnormal, I'd not know which is the accurate picture, I think.

What's going on?

Should I tell them? I think the full color glossy brochure cost a lot
of money. If I knew they were going to reprint it, I'd tell them before
they did it, but I don't know and I won't know. WRT membership cards,
it's not like it really matters if our heads are distorted. Mostly I'd
like to understand how it happened.

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From: "Jonathan N. Little" <lws4art@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Why do their heads look too narrow, or wide

micky wrote:

Finally, they sent me a brochure with some of their more hot-shot
members, and maybe 20% of them look like their heads are squeezed too.
Of course I don't know them and maybe they really look like that. One
guy looks like his head has been widened!!

I found a picture of two women in this brochure and an earlier letter.
She actually looked normal in both of them, and were it not for the ones
that look abnormal, I'd not know which is the accurate picture, I think.

What's going on?

Obviously they have no concept of preserving aspect ratio nor how to crop...

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

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From: Paul <nospam@needed.invalid>
Subject: Re: Why do their heads look too narrow, or wide

micky wrote:

Is there an active newsgroup that's good for graphics, art, or computer graphics?

On the theory there isn't, I'll tell you my question.

I belong to an organization that has membership cards, and last year
they added photos to the membership cards.

If I wanted my picture added, they insisted that I send in a high
resolution photo, even though the picture is only about 1" square. Does
this make sense? They said their card-making place said to insist.

I didn't have a hi-def picture, just one from scanning a passport
pictuer on my home scanner.

At any rate, when the card came, the picture looked great, the color
looked great, there was plenty of detail (to the extent one can see that
in 1" square) but my head was squeezed together horizontally. Some
people might have a head as narrow, but I don't.

I don't see how this could be related to high definition but otoh, we
have two anomalies and I don't want to assume it's a coincidence. Might
they be related?

Finally, they sent me a brochure with some of their more hot-shot
members, and maybe 20% of them look like their heads are squeezed too.
Of course I don't know them and maybe they really look like that. One
guy looks like his head has been widened!!

I found a picture of two women in this brochure and an earlier letter.
She actually looked normal in both of them, and were it not for the ones
that look abnormal, I'd not know which is the accurate picture, I think.

What's going on?

Should I tell them? I think the full color glossy brochure cost a lot
of money. If I knew they were going to reprint it, I'd tell them before
they did it, but I don't know and I won't know. WRT membership cards,
it's not like it really matters if our heads are distorted. Mostly I'd
like to understand how it happened.

If the software simply resizes the entire image and uses it,
then the aspect ratio affects whether a circle looks like a circle.

If the person running the software, crops the section they want
and assumes square pixels, the heads might all come out looking
normal.

If the software is known to resize the entire image, then you
ask whether it wants, say, 4:3 (1024x768) or something. And
prepare the image file and make sure it matches those dimensions.

The issue can be fixed, if the submitter knows in advance,
how brain-dead the software is.

Paul

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From: VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH>
Subject: Re: Why do their heads look too narrow, or wide

micky <NONONOmisc07@bigfoot.com> wrote:

Is there an active newsgroup that's good for graphics, art, or computer graphics?

On the theory there isn't, I'll tell you my question.

I belong to an organization that has membership cards, and last year
they added photos to the membership cards.

If I wanted my picture added, they insisted that I send in a high
resolution photo, even though the picture is only about 1" square. Does
this make sense? They said their card-making place said to insist.

I didn't have a hi-def picture, just one from scanning a passport
pictuer on my home scanner.

At any rate, when the card came, the picture looked great, the color
looked great, there was plenty of detail (to the extent one can see that
in 1" square) but my head was squeezed together horizontally. Some
people might have a head as narrow, but I don't.

I don't see how this could be related to high definition but otoh, we
have two anomalies and I don't want to assume it's a coincidence. Might
they be related?

Finally, they sent me a brochure with some of their more hot-shot
members, and maybe 20% of them look like their heads are squeezed too.
Of course I don't know them and maybe they really look like that. One
guy looks like his head has been widened!!

I found a picture of two women in this brochure and an earlier letter.
She actually looked normal in both of them, and were it not for the ones
that look abnormal, I'd not know which is the accurate picture, I think.

What's going on?

Should I tell them? I think the full color glossy brochure cost a lot
of money. If I knew they were going to reprint it, I'd tell them before
they did it, but I don't know and I won't know. WRT membership cards,
it's not like it really matters if our heads are distorted. Mostly I'd
like to understand how it happened.

Did you send a picture whose dimension (vertical and horizontal) were
equal? If not, and because their pic was 1" square (meaning vertical
and horizontal are equal), they would have to stretch your pic in one
direction to make it square.

If you still have the pic you sent in, right-click on the image file and
look at its Properties. Look under the Detail tab for the height and
width attributes. Are they equal?

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From: micky <NONONOmisc07@bigfoot.com>
Subject: Re: Why do their heads look too narrow, or wide

In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Sun, 1 Jan 2017 23:57:13 -0600, VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> wrote:

micky <NONONOmisc07@bigfoot.com> wrote:

Is there an active newsgroup that's good for graphics, art, or computer
graphics?

On the theory there isn't, I'll tell you my question.

I belong to an organization that has membership cards, and last year
they added photos to the membership cards.

If I wanted my picture added, they insisted that I send in a high
resolution photo, even though the picture is only about 1" square. Does
this make sense? They said their card-making place said to insist.

I didn't have a hi-def picture, just one from scanning a passport
pictuer on my home scanner.

At any rate, when the card came, the picture looked great, the color
looked great, there was plenty of detail (to the extent one can see that
in 1" square) but my head was squeezed together horizontally. Some
people might have a head as narrow, but I don't.

I don't see how this could be related to high definition but otoh, we
have two anomalies and I don't want to assume it's a coincidence. Might
they be related?

Finally, they sent me a brochure with some of their more hot-shot
members, and maybe 20% of them look like their heads are squeezed too.
Of course I don't know them and maybe they really look like that. One
guy looks like his head has been widened!!

I found a picture of two women in this brochure and an earlier letter.
She actually looked normal in both of them, and were it not for the ones
that look abnormal, I'd not know which is the accurate picture, I think.

What's going on?

Should I tell them? I think the full color glossy brochure cost a lot
of money. If I knew they were going to reprint it, I'd tell them before
they did it, but I don't know and I won't know. WRT membership cards,
it's not like it really matters if our heads are distorted. Mostly I'd
like to understand how it happened.

Did you send a picture whose dimension (vertical and horizontal) were
equal?

Yes.

If not, and because their pic was 1" square (meaning vertical
and horizontal are equal), they would have to stretch your pic in one >direction to make it square.

Well I see that you're right, basically. Their picture was *about* 1"
square but was actually narrower than it was tall.

So you're all right. They squeezed it rather than cropped it. Very
strange since they didn't need to show my shoulders, and plenty of the
pictures don't. Some have the heads reaching almost to the edge, but
my head is only in the center 60%. The brochure pictures have an even
higher ratio of height to width, but they must have been cropped since
the distortion is no greater than for me.

I don't know if this is done by the organization, or if the brochure and membership cards are done by the same company, but somewhere they have
more than one person doing the pictures and one of them doesn't know
what he's doing. If an outside company did this and not the org
president's younger brother, they're not getting what they paid for.

One woman actually looks cuter with her face stretched than in the other picture, but she's the only one and many of the men and women look
noticeably weird. (And many other pictures they did correctly.)

If you still have the pic you sent in, right-click on the image file and
look at its Properties. Look under the Detail tab for the height and
width attributes. Are they equal?

Well, I've looked at both the pdf file and the .jpg file and they're
both square. Well 2360w x 2219h, 94% of W = H

But it does say 2400 dpi which was their minimum standard, but he still
said it wasn't hi def, maybe because it was only 1.8 meg, which it said
was not enough. Hey that's another thing, they had conflicting standards
of what was hi-def. At the time I thought they knew more than I do but
now I think not. Not that I know what hi-def is but if it meets one standard I think it must meet the other measure.

Thanks all.

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From: Paul <nospam@needed.invalid>
Subject: Re: Why do their heads look too narrow, or wide

micky wrote:

(And many other pictures they did correctly.)

But that potentially tells you something.

Some images contain metadata about scale (dots per inch).

For example, pulling a PNG off my C: drive...

Width: 800 pixels
Height: 608 pixels
Horizontal Resolution: 120dpi
Vertical Resolution: 120dpi
Bit Depth: 24
Frame Count: 1

Now, if you were to mess around with the DPI
and make it different on H versus V, that could
affect the results of using the image for something.

As for HD, 1920x1080 would be a definition. I don't really
know what media defined this. I couldn't find a better
article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_television

1920 is certainly not high definition today, when we have
4K, 5K, and 8K panels.

Paul


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From: Big Al <Big_Al@invalid.com>
Subject: Re: Why do their heads look too narrow, or wide

On 01/02/2017 02:30 AM, micky wrote:

But it does say 2400 dpi which was their minimum standard, but he still
said it wasn't hi def, maybe because it was only 1.8 meg, which it said
was not enough.

DPI has nothing to do with resolution.
If you've seen images that are horribly pixelated, they could still be
2400 dpi. That just means that the image is using 2400 dots in one
inch to represent the picture. And that 2400 dots could be 240 big
square looking pixels that are 10 dots wide each. So you have a
collection of 10x10 colored squares in the image and that's what makes
it look pixelated.

I can take a really grainy picture and change the DPI and scale the
image larger to make its size mega pixels in photoshop, but the picture
is still grainy or pixelated. "You can't get blood our of a rock".


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From: "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam>
Subject: Re: Why do their heads look too narrow, or wide

"micky" <NONONOmisc07@bigfoot.com> wrote

| Well, I've looked at both the pdf file and the .jpg file and they're
| both square. Well 2360w x 2219h, 94% of W = H
|
| But it does say 2400 dpi which was their minimum standard, but he still
| said it wasn't hi def, maybe because it was only 1.8 meg, which it said
| was not enough. Hey that's another thing, they had conflicting standards
| of what was hi-def. At the time I thought they knew more than I do but
| now I think not. Not that I know what hi-def is but if it meets one
| standard I think it must meet the other measure.
|

As Big Al said, DPI means nothing, because
the image is not in inches until it's printed. It's
in pixels. You can set an image to 96dpi or 300
dpi or 2400 dpi in a graphic editor and it will have
no effect on the image, except that some image
formats will store your setting in the header.
A 400 pixel wide image will look about 4 inches
wide on a typical monitor. On a monitor at 300ppi,
or with typical printing, it will show at about 1 1/3
inches wide. It's the same no matter what you
might choose as a DPI value. That only comes into
play when you print it.

Likewise, "high-res" is not really a technical term.
They probably just mean a large image, with lots of
data. They should have told you to make sure the
image is exactly 2400x2400 pixels.
If they really print at 2400 DPI then they need a
photo of at least 2400 pixels w/h to take advantage
of that level of quality in a 1-inch print. If the image
is, say, 1200 x 1200 then the image would probably
get enlarged before printing, which means that they'd
have no choice but to make up pixel colors for the
filler pixels, essentially blowing up the image with
anti-aliasing.

It sounds like the problem is that there are no
cooks in the kitchen. The organization is just
relaying the instructions of the printer. The printer
has not included any editing service in their price.
(Which may or may not have been clear to the
organization.) And you didn't prepare your photo
to fit without editing. I'd blame the printer. They're
the only people who can be expected to understand
the technical details. But in future you'll know not to
trust that anyone along the line knows what they're
doing and you can do the prep yourself.



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Subject: Re: Why do their heads look too narrow, or wide
From: Wolf K <wolfmac@sympatico.ca>

On 2017-01-01 23:08, micky wrote:
[snip details of graphics errors]

What's going on?

[...]

What's going on is that the idjit at the card company hasn't left enough
space for a square photo. They either "made the picture fit" by hand, or
else have set the template to squeeze the image into the allotted space.
It's quite likely that they don't notice the distortion. See Footnote below.

Other common mistakes:
a) reducing the picture size before inserting it into the doc. Result is
a low-res pixellated image.
b) printed pictures are too dark. Printing is generally darker than the display. Easy fix: change the gamma.
c) printed pictures are muddy. Printing is always lower contrast than
display. Easy fix: increase gamma and contrast.
d) captions in pictures instead of on separate line(s). There are so
many ways to f**k this up, I won't go into details.

Footnote: My observations suggest that some people are "distortion
blind". They cannot or do not see the actual shape of the image nor the distortions when the aspect ratio is wrong, etc.

Data point 1: One of may students back in the 60s was a movie junkie.
Our local theatre had two, sometimes three, programs a week; he went to
see almost all of them. In class, discussing the visual effects of
movies, I casually mentioned that some movies were widescreen
(CinemaScope, etc). He looked puzzled, and after some discussion it
appeared that he had never noticed that some movies filled the theatre's screen edge to edge, and other used only the middle two-thirds or so.

Data point 2: TVs in restaurants, bars, and hotels are frequently set to stretch the image to fill the screen, so that the images are distorted.
It looks funny to see squat football players that morph into skinny
giants when they fall. But oddly enough, very few people seem to notice.
Or if they do, it doesn't bother them. It bothers me. A lot.

Have a good day.

--
Best,
Wolf K
https://kirkwood40.blogspot.com
It's called "opinion" because it's not knowledge.

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From: "Jonathan N. Little" <lws4art@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Why do their heads look too narrow, or wide

Paul wrote:

The issue can be fixed, if the submitter knows in advance,
how brain-dead the software is.

Or also how brain-dead the operator is.

Most graphic software, even (may the gods forgive me) MS Publisher, can
resize images preserving the aspect ratio. But for example if the user
adjusts a non-square image by 'stretching' horizontally or vertically to distort the image to fit a square space over resampling and cropping
just points to user error.

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

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Subject: Re: Why do their heads look too narrow, or wide
From: Wolf K <wolfmac@sympatico.ca>

On 2017-01-01 23:19, Paul wrote:
[...]

The issue can be fixed, if the submitter knows in advance,
how brain-dead the software is.

Paul

I don't think it's the software. I think a lot of people don't see the
image, they see only the contents.

--
Best,
Wolf K
https://kirkwood40.blogspot.com
It's called "opinion" because it's not knowledge.

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From: "Mayayana" <mayayana@invalid.nospam>
Subject: Re: Why do their heads look too narrow, or wide

"Jonathan N. Little" <lws4art@gmail.com> wrote

| if the user
| adjusts a non-square image by 'stretching' horizontally or vertically to
| distort the image to fit a square space over resampling and cropping
| just points to user error.
|

But if the photo was not square as received then
how do they decide what to crop? The best approach
is not necessarily the approach that the print shop
is being paid to do. They may not even have permission
to take that liberty, lest Micky come back and complain
that his cowlick was chopped off and demand his
money back. :)

Micky needed to send in a 1x1 to be printed at
2400 dpi. He should have sent a 2400x2400 image.



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From: "Jonathan N. Little" <lws4art@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Why do their heads look too narrow, or wide

Mayayana wrote:

"Jonathan N. Little" <lws4art@gmail.com> wrote

| if the user
| adjusts a non-square image by 'stretching' horizontally or vertically to
| distort the image to fit a square space over resampling and cropping
| just points to user error.
|

But if the photo was not square as received then
how do they decide what to crop?

Really? Well using a but of common sense one should safely assume the
*face* the most important feature in the image. If you need to crop
vertically then crop out space above the head, then space below the
chin. If horizontal the shoulders are not as important as the ears!

The best approach is not necessarily the approach that the print
shop is being paid to do. They may not even have permission to take
that liberty, lest Micky come back and complain that his cowlick was
chopped off and demand his money back. :)

Or just do best fit.

Micky needed to send in a 1x1 to be printed at 2400 dpi. He should
have sent a 2400x2400 image.

Aside of that would be insane resolution for printing, typically 150 to
300 ppi is more than adequate for most printing processes.



--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

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From: "Kerr Mudd-John" <admin@127.0.0.1>
Subject: Re: Why do their heads look too narrow, or wide

On Mon, 02 Jan 2017 14:19:21 -0000, Wolf K <wolfmac@sympatico.ca> wrote:
[]

Data point 2: TVs in restaurants, bars, and hotels are frequently set to stretch the image to fill the screen, so that the images are distorted.
It looks funny to see squat football players that morph into skinny
giants when they fall. But oddly enough, very few people seem to notice.
Or if they do, it doesn't bother them. It bothers me. A lot.

I call it squishyvision or stretchyvision, depending.


--
Bah, and indeed, Humbug

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