Opnion needed on image manipulation (not neccesarilly PHP)

[frizzle]

Hi there,

i have a site for some friends who are abbroad for school.
it has a mysql guestbook and a few other things to communicate.
it also needs a photo-album on it.

now since my friends don't have a computer of their own over there,
they can't install a small app to reduce the size of the digital cam's
pics.

now my question, what would be the best way to reduce the size of the
pics
to approximately max. 500 px * 500 px.
I could use PHP of course, but i'm not really satisfied with the
quality of
PHP-resized images... (it's ok for thumbnails, but not for the large
versions...)

i hope it's all clear..
any clues out there?

any help is greatly appreciated!

[Andy Hassall]

On 30 May 2005 03:10:26 -0700, "frizzle" <ph********@gmail.com> wrote:

now my question, what would be the best way to reduce the size of the
pics
to approximately max. 500 px * 500 px.
I could use PHP of course, but i'm not really satisfied with the
quality of
PHP-resized images... (it's ok for thumbnails, but not for the large
versions...)

PHP's image functions are based on GD, which as you say are not great for
photographic images.

ImageMagick does a better job on photographs - although you usually have to
call it as an external process. It's also faster.

--
Andy Hassall / <an**@andyh.co.uk> / <http://www.andyh.co.uk>
<http://www.andyhsoftware.co.uk/space> Space: disk usage analysis tool

[Daniel Tryba]

Andy Hassall <an**@andyh.co.uk> wrote:

PHP's image functions are based on GD, which as you say are not great for
photographic images.
Funny, I never noticed this... What is the problem of GD with
photographs? I don't see anything wrong...
ImageMagick does a better job on photographs - although you usually have to
call it as an external process. It's also faster.

I've heard this before somewhere else about a year or two ago. I
searched for benchmarks and found that sometimes gd is faster, sometimes
imagemagick IIRC. A link to usefull benchmarks would be nice.

[Andy Hassall]

On 30 May 2005 12:36:47 GMT, Daniel Tryba <pa**********@invalid.tryba.nl>
wrote:

Andy Hassall <an**@andyh.co.uk> wrote:

PHP's image functions are based on GD, which as you say are not great for
photographic images.

Funny, I never noticed this... What is the problem of GD with
photographs? I don't see anything wrong...

I haven't got any side-by-side examples to show here, just vague memory of
last time I used it (for a bunch of employee photos) where I'm sure I got very
slightly better thumbnails out of imagemagick.

Although the difference likely isn't huge unless you hit one of the gotchas
such as not using true colour mode in GD.

ImageMagick does a better job on photographs - although you usually have to
call it as an external process. It's also faster.

I've heard this before somewhere else about a year or two ago. I
searched for benchmarks and found that sometimes gd is faster, sometimes
imagemagick IIRC. A link to usefull benchmarks would be nice.

Michael Rostkowski posted a set of benchmarks a while back:
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/com...76e8f1a175b4ed

--
Andy Hassall / <an**@andyh.co.uk> / <http://www.andyh.co.uk>
<http://www.andyhsoftware.co.uk/space> Space: disk usage analysis tool

[Chuck Anderson]

Daniel Tryba wrote:

Andy Hassall <an**@andyh.co.uk> wrote:

PHP's image functions are based on GD, which as you say are not great for
photographic images.

Funny, I never noticed this... What is the problem of GD with
photographs? I don't see anything wrong...

I find that nearly all resized photo images need some touch up with the
unsharp mask or they look a bit blurred. That is why I started using
ImageMagick.

--
*****************************
Chuck Anderson • Boulder, CO
http://www.CycleTourist.com
Integrity is obvious.
The lack of it is common.
*****************************