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Suggestions on how to post pictures and description

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Fiveroosters aka clayandbrush
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« on: January 12, 2016, 05:15:37 am »

Dear all,
I would like to suggest some guidance on how to post pictures and description on the Forum. For sure what I am saying has been already said elsewhere, but I think it is good to resume everything in a single post.
QUANTITY OF PICTURES. I have seen that often some member do post a single image of a bottle, asking other’s opinion. It will be much better to always post at least five pictures, to be precise front view (meaning one main side), side view (meaning lateral view), back (or the other main side), top view and base view. I see that the lateral view is often missed, but in my opinion it has a great importance too. The shape of a bottle is fundamental for its dating. As is the base too, which often is missed.
POINT OF VIEW FOR THE PICTURES. The pictures should be taken not too close to the bottle, to avoid a big distortion which gives to the observer a completely false view of the real shape. Pictures should be taken as far as possible, but not so far to loose details. A good compromise is that the bottle takes about one third or maximum  one half of the picture. From then, the picture should be cropped so to frame the whole bottle alone. It is useless to post a picture of let say 900 pixels of which only one third are dedicated to the bottle.
QUALITY OF PICTURES. Call me maniac but I am often surprised by how a so simple yet extremely important feature like the white balance setting is completely missed by the majority of people. It’s a mystery to me. It is so elementary, and so important. Does make sense to show a picture where a white surface appears blue or yellow? I don’t think so. The poster should keep in mind that the observer doesn’t knows the real bottle, he is basing his opinion on the pictures alone. It will be very useful to place the bottle against a neutral background, white or, much better, neutral gray. This gives immediately a good indication of the correct color’s rendition.
DESCRIPTION. To be always mentioned: size (height without the stopper), type of hollowing, and details which often are not easy to show in pictures, like surface wear, or the shape of the mouth, if it is flat or concave, etc. The surface wear and/or patina is very important. A natural wear is something really hard to reproduce by faker, if not impossible. Usually a fake wear is easily spotted. A natural wear shows different scratches, differing in length, width, depth, orientation. A fake wear often shows similar scratches, with the same orientation.
SIZE OF PICTURES. Pictures to be posted should be resized to a maximum size of 900 pixels, better if 800 pixels. Frankly, when I open a picture that is bigger than the screen of the computer and I have to move the image left/right and up/down to try to have an idea of the whole bottle, I invariably exit the post and don’t look further. And once again, call me maniac, reduce image’s weight! Here below are two pair of pictures. In each pair, the first image is weighing about 500 kB, while the second picture is weighing about 50 kB. Ten times less! Note that I did choose pictures with hard to reproduce details, like the reflection of light, and contrasting as well as subtle colors. Be honest, do you see a difference, unless you will enlarge the pictures? Weight of the pictures means space on the server!! At a dated server space, we could host only 1,000 pictures instead of 10,000! Make sit sense? It is useless to occupy space when it is not necessary. To do something useless is simply stupid in my (call it obsolete) mentality.
A last suggestion: please be so kind to sign your posts. It is a matter of respect to the readers, and frankly is sometime hard to call someone by the nickname.
Thank you for reading, and if possible to follow, these my humbly opinions.
Kind regards
Giovanni


* IMG_1.jpg (599.3 KB, 800x1105 - viewed 99 times.)

* a1.jpg (58.63 KB, 800x1105 - viewed 80 times.)

* IMG_2.jpg (427.93 KB, 800x800 - viewed 91 times.)

* b1.jpg (57.51 KB, 800x800 - viewed 65 times.)
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Wattana
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« Reply #1 on: January 25, 2016, 05:06:20 am »

Dear Giovanni,
    Thank you for your very thorough (complete!) guidelines. A very good reference point for all of us when posting bottles, and especially the newer members on this forum.
    Unfortunately, due to technical problems by the hosting service, we are unable to view your sample images. George is hopeful that the problem will be solved soon, and we can all resume enjoying the forum.
Regards,
Tom
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Fiveroosters aka clayandbrush
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« Reply #2 on: January 25, 2016, 06:18:59 am »

Dear Tom,
thank you. Let see if it is working now.
Kind regards
Giovanni


* IMG_1.jpg (599.3 KB, 800x1105 - viewed 91 times.)

* a1.jpg (58.63 KB, 800x1105 - viewed 109 times.)

* IMG_2.jpg (427.93 KB, 800x800 - viewed 83 times.)

* b1.jpg (57.51 KB, 800x800 - viewed 101 times.)
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Wattana
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« Reply #3 on: January 27, 2016, 12:33:52 am »

Dear Giovanni,
    You have raised an interesting point with your photo comparisons. I see hardly any difference in quality!
    But I have a question (because I have never really understood how to control this). I use a photo management program called ACDsee. With this I can change the size of an image. But when I resize, all it does is reduce the number of pixels (and the kB goes down in same proportion). For example, if I want to reduce an image which is 3200 x 2400 to 25% of its original size, I can make it 800 x 600. And it will be 25% of its original kB size.
    However, when I look at your examples I see that you have managed to create 2 images, both 800 x 1105 pixels, but with 2 different file sizes (599kB and 59kB). How do you change the file size while keeping the pixel count the same?
    This must sound like a silly question to ask, but I have never understood how to control kB size!

Regards,
Tom 
« Last Edit: January 27, 2016, 12:36:52 am by Wattana » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #4 on: January 27, 2016, 04:52:31 am »

Dear Tom,
I use a very, really very simple program that is of the type that I prefer. Very small, it doesn’t need to be installed so it will not affect your pc, it is free and, very important to me, it does just and only what it is request to do. I find really crazy to use enormous programs like Photoshop et similar, that does almost everything, while indeed most users will use almost a small fraction of what it can do. The name of the program is JPG Resizer and while it was at hand a few years ago, it is quite difficult to find it today on the net because the site of the producer seems disappeared. I did some searches and one of the places where I find it is here:
http://jpeg-resizer.software.informer.com/
Be aware that this is one of the sites where you click on a Download button thinking to download something while instead your are downloading something else. So be patient, I did some try and here is how to correctly download it, and only it.
By clicking on that link, you will find the page seen in the first picture below, named step 1.
Once there, be sure to click only on the green “Download” button that I have highlighted in red.
Then you will access the page seen in the picture here below named Step 2.
Wait for the small window on the upper left corner and click on OK pushbutton. In the picture, the text in the small window is in Italian but you should reach the same window in English.
By doing this, you will download the compressed zip version of the program.
Click on it and extract the real program, which has a small icon in the shape of a brushpot with brushes inside it.
By clicking on the program, it will start You will see then why I like this program so much. It is extremely light, and it is very intuitive. You can copy it wherever you want on your pc, having it in many places because as said it doesn’t need to be installed. What is very interesting is that you can resize all the images that you have stored in a folder at once, without the boring task of having to handle each one of them.
A brief how to use instruction.
The program start with the first window, which is 1.Files
From there, you can either press “Add File(s)” and choose the files you want to resize, or press “Add folder” And choose a folder with all the images that you want to resize at once.
Once the images are selected, click on the left side on the second pushbutton, 2.Size
You will see a window where you can select the amount of pixels of the largest size of the final image. If you click on the first round pushbutton, you can tell there that all the images must be 900 pixels wide. Or you can use other options there by clicking on another round pushbutton. Be always sure, in this and the other windows, to check that the correct round pushbutton is selected.
Then click on the third window, 3.Output. This si the more important window.
Here you can, by means of the first round pushbutton, select to save the resized images in a different folder. I always do that, just to be sure to not affect the original pictures. I have created a folder named “Resized images”  and save there  the new images. You should do that just once, the program is storing your choices.
Then there are two round buttons, which let you choose if keeping the original name or generate a new incremental name for the resized images, which are IMG 1, IMG 2, and so on.
Then check the small square box named “Change JPG compression factor” and move the slider under it which gives you a compression factor. You will not be able to tell the program that you want the final image of let say 80 kb, you just tell it how much to compress. It is not a big problem, you will manage it soon. To have an idea, I leave the slider usually at about 24 or 28 per cent and that is fine for almost all the images, In some case, if the image is still too heavy, then I increase the compression factor to let say 36, or 40.
Then press the green button on the left, 4.Resize
That’s it, but there is a very important thing to keep in mind. Every time you press Resize, new files are generated and overwritten on the previous ones. So if you are resizing a new batch of images, remember to move the resized images stored previously in the resized images paste, or they will be overwritten.
Hope this help
Kind regards
Giovanni


* Step 1.jpg (71.02 KB, 900x670 - viewed 66 times.)

* Step 2.jpg (82.18 KB, 900x678 - viewed 61 times.)
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YT
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« Reply #5 on: January 27, 2016, 08:12:56 pm »

Dear Giovanni and Tom,

This is a very interesting area where I have always been wanting to try but my limited IT skill avoided.
Taking Giovanni's advice, I took a shortcut and installed a free program from PIXLR. Noting to untick all the unnecessary ads, newsletter..., it is quite easy to use.
After cropping and resizing to 800 pixels, I go to 'Save As'.
This allows me to decide how big the file is from 1-10.

Attached is a photo that I took of the Bloch 10 bottle from a friend.(Pin compared this with his bottle in another thread). I have saved them under a big and a small file. There is slight loss in quality though.

Cheers,
YT


* big.jpg (284.91 KB, 506x800 - viewed 76 times.)

* small.jpg (24.53 KB, 506x800 - viewed 67 times.)
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« Reply #6 on: January 27, 2016, 08:26:45 pm »

Dear Giovanni,
    Many thanks for your extremely detailed instructions for Jpeg-resizer! I will try it out on the weekend, when I have more time. But just in case the Forum mal-functions again, I copied your instructions and screenshots onto a Word.doc file !!!

Dear YT,
    I will download your program too, and try it out. Yes, there is a little loss in quality when comparing the two sample images you posted. But considering the second is 10 times smaller than the first, it's not bad at all!

Regards,
Tom
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Fiveroosters aka clayandbrush
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« Reply #7 on: January 28, 2016, 07:00:44 am »

Dear YT,
consider that your resized picture is only 24 kB, a bit more than a icon! With less compression, let say keeping it above 40 - 50 kB, the results will be excellent for sure.
Thank you and thank you Tom,
Kind regards
Giovanni
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« Reply #8 on: January 28, 2016, 08:03:08 pm »

Dear Tom,

Hope to hear from your experience.


Dear Giovanni,

I was just trying to put the test to the extreme. To see fine details, it will still be at least a 70kB. Thank you for all the patient instructions given.

Cheers,
YT
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« Reply #9 on: January 28, 2016, 11:57:30 pm »

Dear Tom,

Hope to hear from your experience.

Dear YT,

This will have to wait until the weekend.  Wink

Tom
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