pouët.net

For scene.org I have been working on converting our lbm(s) into proper png as was lamented here. I started this work back in december but have not advanced again since.

Anyway, Raven, I have been doing some scaling and normally you're not supposed to do 640x256 to 640x512. Why? Because the aspect ratio of the amiga is not equal to the aspect ratio on the PC.

Another thing I've been toying around is with adding scanlines-in for such 640x256 images.. What do you people think?

imho that's a bad idea. if anything, people should mess with the displayer and not the files themselves.

See that is a problem from the start.. as soon as we start changing the resolution of the originals we are starting to mess with the files. Another thing is that simply displaying a 640x512 picture is kind of wrong: when the client is a browser, most people will see the picture with some horrible bilinear filtering added to it.

So I think it makes sense to bump the resolution of the originals so as to preserve the "pixelness" of it.. And why not take care of the non-square pixels of the amiga/c64 at the same time?

I agree though that most of the things should be done on the client side rather than on the file themselves.. Though this goes against the ease of use. Maybe a client-side actionscript/java viewer would fit the bill.

_-_-__ (knos?): Ok, that's pretty much what I'm doing too (even though it havn't become much of that recently). How far have you come? Perhaps we should coordinate so we don't do double work.

As for stretching I have chosen the option of having the unstretched version of the picture included in the gallery. Then one can choose if one like squashed aspect or "horrible bilinear" aspect :)

el-topo, It's rather dormant at the moment since I had to diverge my attention to other scene.org projects (awards and some internal stuff)

I have an "imagemagick"-based script which does the re-sizing. Nothing too fancy yet.

I do have a lot of pictures (2gb -- with lots of duplicates and triplicates) I got from various sources which need to be sorted etc, and am working with thor/tpolm to assemble some list of artists to contact for their approval.

That's basically it.. juggling with too many things happening at the same time.

Why not make the a web based viewer to support different rendering modes and leave the raw file rendering down to the end-user - with a few friendly pointers?

sometimes we don't even have the original files, for example some collections came with .pcx instead of the original .lbms

pcx is really crappy: I think we would like a format that supports:
- pixel aspect ratio
- gamma correction / colorspace

Apparently png fits the bill nicely with its special "PHYs" chunk. (I know .lbm do have a pixel-aspect-ratio field, but it's sadly often incorrect)

It's a difficult dilemma. On one hand looking at pics the size of a thumbnail is not too appealing, but as a former pixelller, I'd strongly object to any kind of scaling or even compression because I like to see the pixels exactly as they were laid down...i.e. the dithering and anti-aliasing styles.

Personally, I like Rc55's suggestion to give the user different rendering modes...or maybe just a fullscreen and original mode.

yeah but like I said, if you precisely want to see the hand-made dithering, that's where you need to bump the resolution "before-hand" so to say, in order not to let the browser do its crappy bilinear filtering. (I'm assuming low resolution, hand pixelled pictures are best scaled up by using nearest-pixel filters .. In my experience it is)

(there is no controversy here)