Re: resizing gifs

Subject: Re: resizing gifs
From: Jan Henning <henning -at- r-l -dot- de>
To: "Elizabeth O'Shea" <elizabeth -dot- oshea -at- virtualaccess -dot- com>, TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2004 15:23:26 +0100

They all produce horrible quality. Is there any way I can resize this
image and retain a modicum of quality?

What kind of image is it? It sounds like you're trying to resize a screenshot, and if that is true, the simple answer is: no, you can't.

The reason is equally simple: You can imagine a bitmap image (such as Gif, Tiff, BMP, JPEG, or PNG) as a mosaic of square colored tiles, each pixel being a tile of a particular color (but no tile having more than one color). When you reduce an image from, say 400 by 300 pixels to 200 by 150, you throw away three quarters of the tiles and have to recreate the image with the rest of them that still cannot have more than one color each.

Clearly, you lose information. And if your original, large image contains structures that require only one tile (pixel) to display in one dimension (e.g., a line), the result cannot be anything but "horrible".

This is a mathematical law, and there is no tool or technique to circumvent it. You need to go back one step and examine the reason that led you to decide to reduce the image in the first place. Try to find an alternative solution to the problem you tried to solve.

Regards
Jan Henning

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References:
resizing gifs: From: Elizabeth O'Shea

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