Hi,

I have an image that is currently 2590 x 344. It is a footer image to be used in auto generated letters for a bespoke CRM system that is currently being developed. The required dimensions for the image are 790 x 115.

Unfortunately, when I scale the image down to these dimensions, the text included on the image degrades and becomes completely unreadable. The entire image also loses quality which isn't really acceptable, I need it to retain the quality and the text to remain legible when scaling the image down.

Hope someone can help me out!

Gimp is a raster editor (bitmap) editor any scaling up or down degrades the image. Scaling down will 'throw' pixels away.

What might be possible and depending on the complexity of the image, is remove somehow, usually 'clone-out' the text leaving the background and re-make the text in the smaller image.

There is a practical limit on this, I would say anything smaller than 20 pt (that is point not pixels) in the original is too small. 20 pt in the larger image roughly equates to 8 pt in the smaller size.

notes:

2590x344 uniformly scales to 790x105 not 790x115

Avoid exporting in jpeg format, that introduces artefacts around small text, try png.

What is the size of the printed letter? 790 pix is about 1/3rd the width of a regular Gimp 300 ppi US letter template. 790 pix width for a footer seems small to me.

Could you re-work your image in vector SVG format? Will that be acceptable to your software? It might scale in the printed document better than a raster image.

Try making your image at a very high DPI, say 1200 for text. Or, when you scale down, make it 1200 or 2400 DPI. Or, my choice, use a free vector editor like Inkscape and a hi-rez image behind the text at final size.

Rick S.

-----Original Message----- From: CC4581
Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2017 5:01 AM To: gimp-user-list@gnome.org
Cc: notifications@gimpusers.com
Subject: [Gimp-user] Scaling an image down without ruining the text

Hi,

I have an image that is currently 2590 x 344. It is a footer image to be used in
auto generated letters for a bespoke CRM system that is currently being developed. The required dimensions for the image are 790 x 115.

Unfortunately, when I scale the image down to these dimensions, the text included on the image degrades and becomes completely unreadable. The entire image also loses quality which isn't really acceptable, I need it to retain the
quality and the text to remain legible when scaling the image down.

Hope someone can help me out!

CC4581 (via www.gimpusers.com/forums)

On Thu, 2017-06-15 at 11:01 +0200, CC4581 wrote:

Hi,

I have an image that is currently 2590 x 344. It is a footer image to be used in auto generated letters for a bespoke CRM system that is currently being developed. The required dimensions for the image are 790 x 115.

Then develop the CRM system to support SVG vector images, or to be able to add text to an image on the fly (e.g. see the gd library).

Unfortunately, when I scale the image down to these dimensions,

As others pointed out, you can't scale down 2590x344 to get to 790x115 without adding distortion.

Make your larger image be a whole-number multiple of your target size - ideally a power of two larger (2, 4, 8, 16...). It will scale don a LOT better. For example, 3160 x 460 pixels (4 * 790, 4 * 115). If there was a typo in your mail and you didn't mean 790x115, use 4 times the size you meant :-)

Then use tool options to try the various different scaling algorithms to see which is best. For Gimp 2.8 I'd likely do (1) flatten the image
(2) gaussian blur 3x3
(3) scale down with "cubic" or "lancsoz" (experiment to compare) (4) filters->enhance->sharpen (in 2.8 this is better than unsharp mask, or I found it so, for this application).

For gimp 2.8 try without doing the blur first, and then try unsharp mask after.

Then export, then undo to get back to having multiple layers.

You could also add the text later. For www.fromoldbooks.org I add the text to the images using ImageMagick.

Liam

Liam R E Quin 

Web slave for fromoldbooks.org