File talk:167th Infantry Regiment DUI.png

Ouch! This is manipulated from a JPEG in a way that made mediocre image quality go bad. It would have been better to upload the original JPEG... AnonMoos (talk) 19:11, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

I originally did just that - upload JPG files - except I got beat up by the Image Police who told me I had better upload PNG. I agreed to do just that only because I use Nuance's Paperport as my scanning and file conversion software, and Paperport has a native ability to convert JPG to PNG - among others. What I have to do is cut and paste the IOH images to Paperport, then Save them to a new filename with a file type of PNG, Full Color resolution, and 300 DPI. That results in the image you see. Just to let you know, IOH is in the middle of relaunching their website with higher resolution, and have switched to a digital method of creating replacement images. They are currently using the new digital process to post new files not already posted, and will take down the old pen-and-ink-and-paint images once they finish the uploading of new files. The old files were scanned in as-is, warts and all.

SSG Cornelius Seon (US Army, Retired) (talk) 23:46, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

In general, if all other things are equal, "lossless" PNG is better than "lossy" JPEG for images which have flat single-color areas (which includes many heraldic-type images), and ideally an SVG is even better than PNG. But it makes very little sense to coerce a JPEG into PNG if all you're going to do is record the distortion artefacts and quality problems exactly in the PNG image. Thanks for uploading File:167th Infantry Regiment DUI(2).jpg , but that's also not the original JPEG, but rather a JPEG which has been manipulated to increase its pixel dimensions, but also ended up magnifying and increasing all the underlying JPEG quality problems. AnonMoos (talk) 01:23, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

The original file on the IOH website only has 6,800 Bytes (6.64K), and is 145 Pixels by 150 Pixels in size. I am sure you will agree that that is not much resolution to work with. I will upload the original files so you can see what it is I am talking about. -SSG Cornelius Seon (US Army, Retired) (talk) 05:19, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

I also found an alternative method of conversion to PNG,with no increase in file size. As you can see, it is still a very small file. Incidentally, if you look at the Category all of the files are in, you will see that - when viewed as thumbnails - all the files actually look the same. SSG Cornelius Seon (US Army, Retired) (talk) 06:19, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Sometimes it's better just to upload an honest 145x150 pixels image file, rather than try to phoney it up into a 604x625 pixels image with fairly wretched image quality (especially if the images are intended to be mainly viewed as thumbnails anyway). Anyway, I made a partial vector conversion at File:167th-Infantry-Regiment distinctive-unit-insignia.svg . By far the best visual quality of the files in the category is actually File:167InfantryRegtCOA.gif... AnonMoos (talk) 10:46, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

I went looking at IOH's new website, and checked out how they are posting their new images, and found out a few interesting things. First of all, the thumbnails that are seen when you first enter a page are all JPG, and they are split between the traditional images that are scanned versions of their pen-and-ink-and-paint originals and the new digital originals, both at thumbnail size. When you click on the image, you are diverted to the full resolution version that is a GIF. I brought up the full resolution GIF for the 167th Infantry Regiment JPG image, and it is 64.1 KB (65,641 bytes), that is 982px × 1,016px (scaled to 746px × 772px), and - most important - it is drawn to the same color set as the original, which your SVG version is not. I will admit that my adjusted versions weren't to my liking either, but I was operating under the knowledge that - until recently - the IOH images posted ran the gamut from scanned versions of hand-drawn images to early digital images. I will upload the new full resolution GIF of the 167th Infantry Regiment so you can see what I mean. SSG Cornelius Seon (US Army, Retired) (talk) 14:02, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

I found an online converter that can go from GIF to SVG, and uploaded a new version of the 167th Infantry Regiment DUI. Take a look, this one is in the proper IOH colors. SSG Cornelius Seon (US Army, Retired) (talk) 14:50, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Your "SVG" file was actually a JPEG, not an SVG at all (though it was a high-quality JPEG...). My SVG was intended as a starting point, not a fully-finished product (one of the good things about SVG format is that it's relatively easy to edit things like colors_). AnonMoos (talk) 14:48, 17 March 2010 (UTC)