Better thumbnail creation of raw images - ruby

I'm building a web application (RoR) that manages images that are in raw image format. I need to create thumbnail/web versions of these images to be displayed on the site. Currently, I'm using imagemagick, which delegates to dcraw to produce the jpeg thumbnail. The problem I'm running into is that the thumbnail deviates from the look of the original; the image gets darker and the white balance is sometimes heavily shifted.
I'm assuming that the raw format default setting can't be read by dcraw, and thus it's left guessing how to parameterize the raw conversion. I can play around with customizing these setting, but it seems getting it right on one image causes others to be further off the mark.
Is there a better way to do this in order to get a result that more closely mimics the what I might see in a raw viewer like photoshop, or even Mac OSX preview? Given that Mac OS X supports a variety of digital camera raw formats, is there anyway to utilize the OS's ability to render preview images (especially considering that result is what is expected).
The raw images that I'm using are 3FRs and fffs (both from Hasselblad).
I can post samples if people are interested.
Thanks

Look at "sips" and "Resizing images using the command line" to get you started.

Related

How computer stores images or videos as data, and where, can i make operations on it?

You know, computer stores images as channels and pixels in those channels. And pixel values are like "00110101" which fills 8 bits at memory. I want to know truly where that bits stored at memory, and how can i make operations on them.
Thanks!
Well, the standard book is Digital Image Processing by Gonzalez and Woods.
Another book, where you can pick up the PDF for free is Image Processing in C by Dwayne Philips - PDF here.
First, you need to get a decent C compiler and development system - personally I use Mac OSX, but I guess you would want Visual Studio free edition on Windows.
Then you need to get started with some simple reading and writing of files and memory allocation. I would go with greyscale images of the NetPBM format - probably just PGM files - described here as they are the easiest. You can download the NetPBM programs and run them in a Windows Command Prompt and see how they work and try and implement them yourself in C. You can also download ImageMagick for Windows and try converting images from colour to greyscale and resizing them like this:
convert input.png -colorspace gray result.jpg
convert input.tif -resize 400x400 result.pgm
When you have got that, I would move on to colour PPM format and then maybe PNG and/or JPEG. Remember there are libraries for TIF/JPEG/PNG/BMP so don't be afraid to use them.
Finally, move on to displaying images yourself with Windows GDI etc.
Come back to StackOverflow if you get stuck - questions are free!
tl;dr wildly different with different encodings/filesystems/os'es/drivers
Well that depends on the image format. BMP is one of the easier formats, details on what these files look like can be found on for instance wiki
And to answer "where its stored", it is stored on permanent storage (hardrive/ssd), where exactly depends on the filesystem (FAT/NTFS/EXT etc).
When an image is to be displayed, its read into memory, where it can be manipulated and through some apis this data can be put into a memory region specifically meant to display the current images on you screen.

How to remove anti-aliasing in PDF images?

I use Abbyy FineReader for ScanSnap to OCR a couple of scanned PDF files. The software claims it retains the original PDF images. The PDF file sizes pre-OCR and post-OCR are almost identical, which is good.
After the software is done, all PDF images appear anti-aliased in Acrobat X. Page navigation is much slower than before, and when I zoom in/out, the images first go to what looks like the pre-anti-aliasing version before quickly changing to anti-aliased images.
Left: Scanned PDF / Right: after OCR with Abbyy
I would like to get the original images without anti-aliasing back. Interestingly, when I open a single page from the anti-aliased PDF in Photoshop, there is no anti-aliasing and the image looks like the left one.
My limited PDF programming experience leads me to believe that Abbyy likely sets some kind of anti-alias flag for each image during OCR processing. How do I un-set this flag?
Any pointers to useful ideas would be much appreciated.
After the software is done, all PDF images appear anti-aliased in Acrobat X. Page navigation is much slower than before, and when I zoom in/out, the images first go to what looks like the pre-anti-aliasing version before quickly changing to anti-aliased images.
Actually in the original file 2013_11_15_22_51_31.pdf contains a JPEG image while the OCR'ed file 2013_11_15_22_51_31_OCR.pdf contains a JPEG2000 image.
Comparing them in third party viewers, it becomes clear that the image in the OCR'ed file is not inherently anti-alias'ed. Furthermore there is no evident flag in the PDF instructing PDF viewers to apply anti-aliasing to the JPEG2000 image. Thus, Adobe Reader seems to automatically render JPEG and JPEG2000 images differently, applying anti-aliasing to the latter but not to the former.
Comparing both images in detail, though, it becomes clear that these images are not identical but instead the image in the OCR'ed PDF is slightly rotated.
I assume Abbyy FineReader recognized that the original scanned image is not correctly oriented. Thus, it rotated it slightly to correct this orientation.
Thus, replacing the image in the OCR'ed version with the one from the original one is no option: Due to the rotation the OCR information would partially be somewhat off.
What you might want to try is to recode the JPEG2000 image to JPEG and replace the image in the OCR'ed version with this recoded one. This will mean some loss of quality but most likely you can get rid of the anti-aliasing this way.
Be aware, though, that the JPEG2000 image is slightly larger than the JPEG image to accomodate for the rotation.
PS: As #VadimR pointed out, there is indeed an /Interpolate true entry in the image dictionary of the OCR-ed version I missed when looking at the file. This does not seem to be the major issue slowing down the rendering.
There is /Interpolate true entry in image dictionary of OCR-ed version, and that's what causes 'anti-aliasing'. Whether that (and not JPEG2000 instead of JPEG compression) is a cause of slow-down, you check on large enough files.
To un-set this key, the best would be to turn it off while creating a file, and if that's not possible, to write and run a small program in suitable language.
But, since your file doesn't sport 'compressed objects' and offending key is in plain view inside a file, in the spirit of 'job done quickly' you can simply process your file e.g. like this:
perl -M-encoding -0777pe "s!/Interpolate true!' 'x17!ge" <in.pdf >out.pdf

HTML5 Canvas toDataURL 8 bit?

In a webappp I am currently creating the user has to provide images that get stored server side in a database. To minimize server load I am handling image resizing client-side courtesy of the HTML5 Canvas and getting the user to pre-approve the quality of the resized image.
The issue I have run into is this - the file size of the resized image is big. If I resize the same image with Paint.NET I can get a perfectly decent light weight 8 bit PNG image. Even the 32 bit Paint.NET image is smaller than the one that turns up on the server via toDataURL. I tried playing around with the toDataURL quality parameter but changing it has no effect whatsoever - exactly the same data size.
I should mention tha t I am testing with Chrome 20.0.1132.57 m and that the only browsers that are relevant to the app are the desktop versions of Chrome and Safari.
I know I could do some server side image processing but I want to avoid that if possible. Question - what, if anything can I do to cut down on the image file size sent out from the browser?
Browsers may happily ignore any quality parameter given for the toDataUrl and such. I don't believe honoring it is mandatory by the specification.
The only way to control the quality exactly would be
Write your own PNG compressor in JS or use something you can steal from the internets https://github.com/imaya/CanvasTool.PngEncoder
Dump <canvas> data to ArrayBuffer
Pass this to WebWorker
Let WebWorker compress it using your PNG compressor library
I believe there exist JPEG/PNG encoding and decoding solutions already.
Alternative you may try canvas.mozGetAsFile() / canvas.toBlob(), but I'll believe browsers still won't honour quality parameters.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/HTMLCanvasElement/

How can I store raw data in an image file?

I have some raw data in a file that I would like to store in an image file (bmp, jpg, png, or even gif (eegad)). I would like this to be a two way process: I need to be able to reliably convert the image file back later and get a file that is identical to the original file.
I am not looking for a how-to on steganography; the image file will probably be one pixel wide and millions of pixels high and look like garbage. That is fine.
I looked into the Imagemagick utility convert, but am intimidated by the large number of options and terse man page. I am guessing I could just use this to convert from a 'raw' black channel to png, but would have to specify a bunch of other stuff. Any hints? I would prefer to work within Imagemagick or using Linux utilities.
If you are wondering, there's nothing black hat or cloak and dagger about my request. I simply want to automatically backup some important data to a photo-sharing site.
I'd plow into ImageMagick if that's what you'd prefer anyway.
Specific image formats support storing text data to different degrees, and ImageMagick supports all of the formats you mentioned. I'd choose the one that lets you store what you need.

What image format is fastest for BlackBerry?

I'm trying to load some images using Bitmap.getBitmapResource(), but it takes about 2 or 3 seconds per image to load. I'm testing on the Storm, specifically. The odd thing is, when I install OS 5.0, the loading goes in a snap, no delay at all.
Should I be looking at the format used? Or where the files are stored? I've tried both 24- and 8-bit PNGs, with transparency. The files are stored in a subdirectory in the COD, so getBitmapResource is passed a path, like "images/img1.png" instead of just "img1.png".
Is any of this making things slower?
If you're looking for the most efficient format for storing image data within your application binary, the recommendation is PNG with the 565 colorspace. The BlackBerry Theme Studio toolkit has the ability to load any PNG and export it in this format. Its the best one because its what the BlackBerry uses internally.
Try to use EncodedImage, see Is it better to use Bitmap or EncodedImage in BlackBerry?
In case you need Bitmap class, try also bmp (don't forget to turn off "convert image files to .png" option in BB project settings)

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