Dave said:
I have a group of jpg images which were scanned into the computer under
Windows 98 using an HP Scanjet IIcx flatbed scanner. The images seem to be
okay except that their widths have been compressed to about 1/3 of the left
side of the page with the remainder of the page being solid black. I have
never seen this before. Does anyone know what caused this and more
importantly how to restore the width of the image without loss of
information? Thanks.
Note that under some circumstances an image viewing program can distort
the display of an image without changing the content of the file on your
disk. Web browsers like Internet Explorer are among the applications
that have this ability. Check your images by viewing the folder with
thumbnail view to see if the distortion appears there. If the images
aren't distorted in thumbnail view, the program you are viewing them
with may be at the root of the distortion.
In many situations the JPEG format is a lossy file that losses image
information each time you load and re-save it. The important function is
the saving part. Load the original file pic01.jpg, save as pic02.jpg,
load pic02.jpg, save as pic03.jpg and the image will deteriorate in a
few generations. Aways preserve the ORIGINAL image, preferably in a
lossless format like TIFF (while still in memory from the scanning
process), and make any further edits after loading that first generation
file. If a camera will only save files to its memory card in JPEG format
save that original file on your hard drive or preferably optical media
like a CD-R. The copy function in Windows Explorer will not contribute
to the deterioration in the manner a save from a graphics program will.
You might be able to compress the vertical dimension of the images with
an image editor like Microsoft "Paint" (there are editors with better
features). In "Paint" you will find a "Stretch/Skew" function on the
"Image" menu. Make sure any version you save after this editing is to a
different folder OR a different file name!
An image can be distorted without modifying the file by displaying it in
a web page with a "height" parameter for the "img" tag.
Example (pic01.jpg is 600 pixels high):
<html>
<head>
<title>My Photo</title>
</head>
<body>
<img height="200" src="pic01.jpg">
</body>
</html>
