Blog photos

Conclusion (Pdf)

1. Blogging with photos – you will need a photo editing program – Picasa is my suggestion or use your favorite. The tools supplied with Vista could be an alternative, but I think they lack my favorite not modifying my original.
2. Word's photo editing tools are not good enough.
3. When publishing JPG:s inserted from a file Word 2007 makes silly resizing of the bitmaps.
4. I publish with Word and catch up the silly names given. After publishing I copy the correctly sized JPG:s to remove the silly copied by Word!!
5. Very, Very Annoying!! Especially after republish my copies are gone again…
6. Don't use the advanced photo effects in Word with pictures copied inside Word. Insert them and edit to achieve the correct result.

     

The story.

Since my blog vision includes posting rocky photos I will have to find out a descent way of handling photos in a smart way. Since more than one year I am a big fan of Picasa from Google. It is a simple tool to keep order on my digital photos and to make them look much better than raw from the camera. I have been a digital amateur since I bought my first digital camera 1999, Nikon Coolpix 100 with 480x640 pixels and storage for 20 pictures on a pcmcia card. Today I am on my third, an Olympus CF-70 I bought two years ago. When I bought my new computer this autumn Corel Paint Shop Pro was available for free for testing. I tested it but didn't manage to get up in speed and didn't find was I was looking for sp I gave it up and uninstalled it some month ago. Many of my friends using digital cameras like me just dump their photos to the hard disk and never tries to edit and correct them.

In this blog I will try to compare the functions offered by Word with those of Picasa to figure out a smart way of doing what I am planning to do. Let us take a photo I shot when I was out walking last Sunday with my wife in our village, Bjärred in the south of Sweden. I downloaded my photos to my hard disk, in my camera I always use best quality JPEG with 7 Mpixels. On many of photos I have problem with the white balance making them look blue, uninteresting and flat. When loaded into Picasa one of them looked like this:

I chose to do some corrections so I chose the middle tab showing the adjustment tools, which are simple to use. With the tool I chose a gray, white or black area. The cover of the field in the foreground I knew was white so that is where I point with the tool. Other spots to look for are clouds in the sky which might be blue instead of gray. You get an instant view of the photo after the correction, and if you fail you could easily undo it.

After grayscale correction you will often find the picture a little bit over exposed, but most of the time I use the upper for my second correction.

As you might see on the sliders that a correction is done for the second and third which are contrast and shade. This auto correction made the photo a little bit too dark in my taste, so I will do a little adjustment of shadow until a result I accept.

With the final correction of the photo will make it look like this :

Picture after what I call 'The three click wonder of Picasa!' Crisp and clear with depth.

 

With the cropping tool I select the part I would like to use in the blog:

The photo ready for being used in a blog.

 

If you leave Picasa all your modifications of the photo is stored so when you return you will see the modified picture. But what has happened with your original – NOTHING. That is the main reason why I like Picasa, in most other photo editing software I have used I have had to store the modified photo somewhere else, with Picasa I keep the original and in a small tine file in the folder a file name picasa.ini the modifications are stored. If you look into a folder you have included for Picasa editing it may look like:

Where my original is saved together with the screenshots, actually there are two copies of my original photo, and if you look at one of them with another program than Picasa you will see it is still unmodified. Looking into the ini file we could see how Picasa stores our modifications in text format. (Happily not in XML so it is easy to understand..)

When all corrections are done I select the photos I want and do an export to another folder in Picasa where. In that process I could decide the width and what quality I want for the JPG:s.

 

I make them 500 pixels wide so they will fit into my 510 pixel width in my CSS for the blog, and the get small and feasible for using for blog purposes.

The cropped and revised photo aimed for publishing in the blog is just 19kb and sized 500x313 and I think it is good enough for a blog.

 With the tools in Word After changing contrast and sizing and cropping I get the following result

Result of editing photo with tools in Word – and the picture is diffuse due to error in white balance.

 

And as expected it is resize after publishing so it is cut to the right when viewed in the blog! Microsoft, please correct this bug ASAP!! I think reading without any picture might make a lot of readers bored!

View on my blog screen in Word it looks like this:

This makes it a PNG with correct size and lost colors – and growing from 15k to 88k!!

 

And now let us have a look on the features available in Word but lacking in Picasa. There are almost endless possibilities to add effect in both programs but I think Word is stronger in this part so here are some variations of the selected photo:

This is called Preset5.

 

Black border with shadow.

 

Soft edges 10 points.

 

As you see above none of the effects where moved to the blog. When looking at my screen it looked like this:

Instead of copying this picture is inserted as a JPG and the softened which make is correct but since it is a JPG it is resized.

 

The solution is that for the above samples I did a copy and paste inside Word, which made Word believe I published the same picture four times and not doing a correct transfer to my FTP-site. If I instead insert my JPG with the insert picture function it will be correctly displayed with the effect, but since it is a JPG is incorrectly resized!

You can't win them all!!!

GIFJPGPNG

Conclusion (Pdf)

1. Use PNG to publish screenshots, a little bit bigger but it will work as you expect, i.e. no resizing.
2. Word behaves strange with JPG:s resizing them when publishing.
3. Picture tools in Word are good enough, no need for a special program.
4. Use Paint for a first preliminary cut, then size or crop inside Word. Avoid sizing if not needed – you will loose in sharpness!
5. Avoid frames in Word they are costly in size and degrade picture sharpness. Frame with CSS.
6. Compress option not worth trouble?
7. The names given by Word is strange but logical and types are kept at least if no modifications.
8. Be careful when moving around pictures after first publish… Word seems to mess them up sometimes!
9. Word's nice tables look great and not too ugly in published HTML, have a look!

What happens with my picture when publishing?

I just thought I have understood how to handle pictures when using Word 2007 as my blog client..

But something happens that I don't understand!

It is always like this!! I took a screenshot with Alt/Prnt Scrn and then opened Paint and pasted it. I cut out the peace I wanted and opened a new picture in Paint and pasted it back with roughly the correct picture size that I wanted to show. Then I saved it as PNG, GIF and JPG with paint. Looking at the pictures files at the hard disk with Windows Explorer they have the following properties: before and after publishing:

File	Pixels local HD	Size local HD	Pixels FTP-site	Size on FTP-site	File type FTP-site
GIF	601x267	28613	605x271	28233	GIF
JPG	601x267	24216	755x338	31437	JPG
PNG	601x267	33194	605x271	37441	PNG

       

I publish to my account on Wordpress with the picture setting to my own FTP-site and it all look great in Word, i.e. the JPG is in the size it was on my hard disk, but when looking at my publish post on Wordpress the JPG is in greater size than in Word. One could wonder why?? In the samples below you see the same screenshot saved under a different formats. I had made up my mind to skip GIF:s because they lose too much of the gradients built into Office 2007 as could be seen. I thought it would be smart to have a look on whether choosing JPG or PNG for screenshots and then this happens. In one way or the other this made my choice very simple, since Word destroys my JPG:s by resizing then I have to choose PNG, which seems to be best quality but with rather high impact on file size.

Another way around could be to let Word publish on my FTP-site and then renaming and copy the correct files manually to my FTP-site, but being lazy….

       

GIF (032607_2103_JPPNGGIF3.gif)

GIF size 606x271, 18k.

     

JPG (032607_2103_JPPNGGIF4.jpg)

JPG, resized by Word!! Why?? To 755x338 and 31k.

     

PNG (032607_2103_JPPNGGIF5.png)

PNG 601x267 -> 605x271 (invisible fram, or??) 33k->37k.

     

Now let us see if we could have any benefits from all the new picture modifications built into Word 2007. The content area in my CSS used at Wordpress is set to 510px, which means that all pictures above got truncated when shown in the blog. We start with adding a border to make the screenshot more precise. Then we will try to resize the picture to get it to fit into 510px. I will also try to crop it with the cropping tool, and then I will test to use compress to save file size when publishing.

PNG with border in gray. (032607_2103_JPPNGGIF6.png)

Done with 'Picture Tools','Picture Border' choosing 50% black. What happens is a little bit strange, the picture gets dimmed and the sharpness seems to be lost in the picture shown in Word.

     

Size by 84%. (032607_2103_JPPNGGIF7.png )

With 'Picture Tools', 'Size' I make it to be 84% of original size, 605px -> 510px is about 84%.

     

Cropped only.( 032607_2103_JPPNGGIF8.png )

With 'Picture Tools', 'Crop' I make it 13,34 cm (5.25" for 'inci-people') wide and cut off some of the under part. Exatly the same width I have got on my printout from Wordpress!! I am impessed!

     

Sized and compressed. (032607_2103_JPPNGGIF9.png )

This one is sized to 80% and then compressed with these options set. -6%! Not impressed!!

     

     

Cropped and compressed. (032607_2103_JPPNGGIF12.png)

Cropped to same size but also compressed with the options above.

     

Publishing the pictures after modification and then copying them back to my local HD gives the following result:

Let summaries these figures, you have to excuse my computer is talking Swedish. Headings in the picture above are Name, Size, Type, Changed and Pixels.

Pic		Picture		Sizechange	Comment
5		PNG origin		=	+16% than JPG
6		Gray Border		+65%	Costly!!
7		Size 84%		+40%	Fewer pixels but bigger!!
8		Cropped		-29%	-63% in pixels!!
9		Size & Compress		-6%	Compress, not worth it!
12		Cropped & compress		+4%	As above!

Let us look into the docx-file of the saved document to see how the pictures are stored there, it is done by renaming the docx-file to zip, and then 'Exploring' gives:

Some pictures seem to be missing in the saved document?? (Only 9 out of 12??) No clue about what has happened. Feel free to investigate and tell the World more about these pictures and you picture of Word 2007! Send me a post and I'll post it!!

Start blogging experience

Conclusion

To be done!!

Vision.

A month later! And a lot of adrenalin and frustration… I will try to save you all my troubles and just tell you what to do and why.

My vision was and is:

1. I want to blog, and I want to do it to reach more than Swedish talking people.
2. I want to be effective, using the right tools to make it happen.
3. I need to use screenshots pics in my blog.
4. I want my blog to have inspiring picture to make my boring text more interesting.
5. I want it to be found and hopefully read and inspiring.
6. I would like to see that I manage to reach out…

And that is about all… I think my vision could be shared by many, i.e. nothing strange at all. Though I had to invest a month to get going, my personal problem maybe…..

Reality – client tool.

I have tried three popular blog-places: Blogspot, MS Live and Wordpress. After a long evaluation period I have made up my mind about what I hope is my optimal blog strategy. I will use all of them! If that is a correct decision, I DON'T KNOW!

I will use Word 2007 to create all posts. The primary reasons being: It is an editor where I feel comfortable, all other I have tried have got me feel inconvenient. I would like to have WYSIWYG and I need good spellchecking support. The standard tools offered at any of the three above mention places are good, but not good enough. They all offer a tiny spot in an IE window where I could enter my thoughts.

This is the interface in BlogSpot (Google).

This is the offer from Live Space (MS).

This is Wordpress window for entering thoughts.

A Word 2007 tool seems appealing… My choices are space, spellchecking but no WSIWYG unfortunately.

The interface of client tool MS Live Writer 1.0 (beta)

Life Space has no spellchecking what so ever. Blogspot and Wordpress offers insulting spellchecking, you have a tool to active when you like that tells you what it think is wrong. I want to know the correct spelling I don't want to be insulted!! Live Writer is far much better, a tool you active that give you suggestion, like MS Word ten years ago. The polite way of telling that I think is unique for MS Office, telling you right away when you type. There is just one choice!! What so ever if you need spellchecking like I do. I could of course use Word for spellchecking and then past it in the silly window offered, but then I will miss the features of pictures inserted into the text.

What makes MS Live Writer great is the possibility to view your post and what it will look like. For both Wordpress and Blogspot you get a nice way 99% WYSIWYG, but for MS Live Spaces it misses…

My other big issue has been good support for screenshots and nice photos so you won't get bored. After much consideration I think for my purposes I have better store the picture files on my own FTP-site. If I ask Word 2007 to handle the pictures for me, I could do but often it will either fail or recopy them so I get thousands of copies of the same picture, which happens if I do a republish a lot of times. If I have had a descent prewiew before publishing I would not have needed to publish…..

Last testpost – translation Swedish to English

Conclusion

1. I have tried translation before so I was eager to see if it has gotten any better with Office 2007.
2. It had not – still need for many humans to do a decent job, at least for Swedish – English!
3. So you have to stand my English, it is not native so in this blog there will be a lot of errors. But please forgive me, I will try to do my best and Word 2007 will help me with the spelling!

The story.

Highlight the text and right click to get the offer of translation!! Normal ie this means the normal text I have to enter into to get going. It shows up with all my spelling errors which are very comfortable to correct in MS Word. I will also try to use the translate function in Word 2007 to see if I could blog in Swedish and get it well translated into English. We try by typing the above text in Swedish and then I will do a translation. The first test failed. Word 2007 crashed but it managed to restore my document.

Normal dvs det innebär normal text som jag måste skriva in för att komma i gång. Här visas alla mina felstavningar som jag enkelt kan korrigera i MS Word. Jag ska också prova att använda översätttnings funktionen i Word 2007 för att se om jag kan blogga på svenska och få det bra översatt till engelska. Vi provar med att skriva in ovanstående text på svenska och sedan kommer jag att göra en översättning. Första testet gick inget vidare. Word 2007 bombade men det klarade av att återställa mitt dokument. Första testet misslyckades.

This is what I got from 'Lingo': Normal i.e. it means normal text that I must enter in order to come in time. Here, all my error spellings are shown that I simple can correct in MS Word. I will also try to use översätttnings the function in Word 2007 in order to see if I can blogga on Swedish and few the good translated to English. We try with entering the above text on Swedish and since comes I to do a translation. The first test went nothing furthermore. Word 2007 bombed but it coped with of restoring my document. The first test failed.

What is your opinion is it readable? I think NO.

• 'Come in time' – phrase in Swedish that failed. 'komma i gång' is similar to 'get going' or maybe 'start up'.
• 'error spelling' – understandable but wrong order used the Swedish order.
• 'översättnings' – didn't find the word, ok if failed. Means translation the 's' is to connect it with the rest.
• 'blogga on' – blogga is a new Swedish word coming from blog, on is a direct translation of 'på' which is a preposistion but the wrong one in English 'in' sounds better.
• 'few' – funny mistake Swedish word 'få' has many translations into English both few and get is correct, but since it is a verb here it should be 'get'.
• 'the good translated' - ?? good try…
• 'on' – should be 'in' or maybe 'into' I am not sure.
• 'since' – 'sedan' has many meanings in English 'later on', 'then', 'since' (from my dictionary). 'Later on' or 'Then' would be correct.
• 'comes I' - ?? I Swedish we have two construct for future with a verb, either 'skall' or 'kommer att' both should be translated into English with 'will' or 'shall', I think..
• 'nothing furthermore' – 'gick inget vidare' is a kind sort of 'failed' if I have used 'misslyckades' it would have worked. But in Swedish that is much harder and asks for sympathy.
• 'coped with of restoring' – 'managed to restore' I think sounds more correct.

So for the time being and with my budget there is no option. If I want to reach out in the world outside of Sweden I have to use my English from high school (8 years). I hope you could cope with it but probably there will be many errors. So please forgive me…