Photo montage going crappy

[BPI]

Just as an experiment you could try what I do,

load raw camera image into GIMP. Crop as tightly around the mini/specific detail as possible. Don\'t worry if they\'re all different sizes. Save each at 100 quality.

Load the 4 prepped images into a vertical \"create montage image\" in Irfanview (free software for Windows) (see how it compares to your GIMP result size/quality wise).

Open that new montage in GIMP, resize image, pixels, horizontal 600 (or 400), scale. Save result at 100.

In both Irfanview & GIMP when you save as a .jpg you get the quality slider (default 100). I\'ve found that the 2 programs produce quite different results even when saving the same image at 95. Presumably because there are different formulas (?) in the background doing the compression calculations. One may look better than the other? Play with saving at different qualities until you hit an image of roughly 200kb.

You say you\'re pasting images onto a black background. Is much of that visible in the completed montage? Every black pixel costs file size without showing off your painting!

Good luck!

B.

 

[War Griffon]

I have a hunch that it is the black background that is causing the problem but I don\'t have the time to try it myself.

Try doing the montage without a black background and sixe your shots to fit, looking at what you have done in the link you could get another shot of the paladin figure in if you wanted to and then one of the whole scene under these two i.e. a 3 shot montage.

Scale down and save the montage once done, I think without the black background you may be surprised at the file size.

Is she supposed to have a blue tint to her?

 

[majestic0110]

That sounds like a good idea BPI, I haven\'t used Irfanview for years though lol. Good software though! And yeah, I have some black background showing in my montage, although I\'d imagine that woud not take up much space memory - wise / or am I mistaken ?

 

[War Griffon]

Originally posted by majestic0110
That sounds like a good idea BPI, I haven\'t used Irfanview for years though lol. Good software though! And yeah, I have some black background showing in my montage, although I\'d imagine that woud not take up much space memory - wise / or am I mistaken ?

You still have the canvas colour underneath the dropped in shots so it probably adds to quite a lot, remove the background colour and try and see

 

[majestic0110]

I started a brand new canvas with nothin on except (598x1847px) a black background and the size is only 7.62kb. It must be that I saved the photos at a higher quality, and therefore they are eating up the kb\'s lol

 

[Shadzar]

Don\'t forget to try saving it as a few different formats to see what comes out best for both picture and size.

PNG, GIF, or JPG.

 

[Ritual]

GIF is not suited for photographic material as it can only contain 256 colours.

 

[BPI]

Re. the black pixels lol I don\'t really know whether pixel save size varies by colour, more a reaction to the galleries where the figure is a 2cm square blob in the middle (if lucky!) of a field of carpet! Cool for a WIP, if unhelpful, a shame for a Gallery shot though.

If you pop over to phreak0\'s thread Mortifactor Telion you can witness me interfering with somebody else\'s photos, I think it relates to this thread.

http://www.coolminiornot.com/forums/viewthread.php?tid=33203

Oh the giddiness of signing up to a forum & flurrying posts willy nilly, I assume I\'ll calm down soon

B.

 

[cleen X]

I just tried to photos, only thing i did prior to putting them in the montage was cropping and changing the color levels. Then I added them in the montage and changed the width to 600 pixels. I could then save them at a 100% quality and at 170 kb or something like that. They came out like this: http://www.coolminiornot.com/225543

Still got waiting on the status but check it out once it been cleared.

 

[cleen X]

Added another picture with what I think is the best painted of the squad, it kind of sucks since most people hate when you have multiple posts of the same squad! Guess they\'ll just have to live with it!