On Fri, 16 Apr 2004 01:48:03 +0100, Colin Wilson
wrote:

. I use a program
(free) called Irfanview for most of my simple image manipulation,



I'll give my vote to Irfanview too - it's an excellent utility.

Remember that you may not need a camera if you have a scanner - for
articles that are essentially a relief moulding or have a plane
surface you can get rather good results by placing the article
directly on the scanner bed (taking care to avoid scratching) and
covering with a black matte fabric rather than trying to close the
lid.

In past years there's been quite a bit on using scanners instead of
camera on the jewellery and craft USENET groups.

If you save the image as a .jpg file you will typically see the best
compression. A .jpg may also give you a "quality" option that allows you
to alter the compression ratio - the lower the %percentage, the lower the
resultant image detail -

In most cases that's quite true - however if you've a picture/image
that has large blocks of similar colour (eg black/white or charts for
eg. ) you may well find that .gif provides a lower file size for the
same visual quality. JPEG optimisation is a bit of a black art (or
red/green/blue one!) and the compression/quality trade-off isn't that
straightforward. It's possible to have a small file size that your
machine expands massively in memory whilst retaining a lot of the
original detail. (IN SOME CASES!)

Irfanview - http://www.irfanview.com/

Regards,

DN