Technical Note: Photo editing

I spend a lot of time on photo editing. There is a big difference between images and text reproduction for printing books. Newspaper text when scanned at 600 dpi will still not print clearly for books. Portraits and photos scanned at 600 dpi turn up sufficiently good in printed books. The text-based images have to be edited separately from the portraits. Photos have to be edited in many ways before they will be good for printing in books. Sometimes photos are too dark and making them "light" destroys even the figures in the photos. Sometimes an artificial background needed to be created as the original background was too dark or of various tones. Sometimes images taken off printed pages are pixelated and beyond what I can manage to salvage for use in my books.

There are many useful tools or software but they have to be tried to see how they can improve photos or images. Portraits are the hardest objects in photo editing.

Here are some tools for photo editing:
http://softwaretopic.informer.com/photo-alignment-software-download/
http://www.imageskill.com/magicdenoiser/magicdenoiser.html
http://www.imageskill.com/magicenhancer/magicenhancer.html

Tan Sri Dr Salma Ismail

I didn't have time to write about her 94th birthday which was yesterday. I didn't have time to go and buy a newspaper today. I searched the Internet but obtained nothing about her tonight except for an article that mentioned her at SAHC (Sultan Abdul Hamid College).

Sultan Abdul Hamid College (SAHC):
http://www.thefullwiki.org/Kolej_Sultan_Abdul_Hamid

HAPPY 94th BIRTHDAY TAN SRI DR SALMA

MANY HAPPY RETURNS OF THE DAY

MAY YOUR LIFE BE BLESSED

Technical Note: Portraits

Portraits came in many sizes, shades and textures. It was difficult trying to make all the portraits approximately the same size. I didn't have the right tool to work with but I remembered the magic ratio (1.618) that was used by ancient Arabs and Persians when they designed diagrams of the human face. Leonardo da Vinci also used the same ratio in his paintings. I also taught my students such ratio when I covered history of medicine.

Here is one website that can assist with portraits.
http://travel.state.gov/_res/flash/cropper/FIG_cropper.html#

It is easy to use and the portraits are cropped online (on the fly). However, it can only work with certain portrait sizes and requires a minimum of 600 x 600 pixels to work. So it won't work with small photos.

It will also not work if the height of the photo is not over the edge of the frame at the top. It will give an error message.

This online tool gives almost a square image but it is good for setting faces of the same size.

I tried working on some of the portraits.

Re-sizing portrait to a preset fixed size or alignment grid