Still elusive likeness, new scan
 

Hi everybody,

I am trying again for a decent upload of a scan of my oil portrait painting.
By the way, I would swear I already introduced myself to this distinguished forum. But as it turns out, it was at a different forum where I formally introduced myself. I have been painting for many years now with a lot of interst for portraiture, especially with pastels. This is my first attempt at oil portrait.

Please, let me know what I can fix to bring this portrait to a successful level of likeness. I have reduced the compression level to 20% from 50%.

Thank you for your help.

Best Regards,
Frantz Pr

Frantz,

This is going to be difficult for anyone to critique with the extreme pixelation. Perhaps you could write step-by-step in detail exactly what you are doing with your image when you scan and afterwards how you save it. What software are you using? At what dpi are you scanning?

As I mentioned before, this appears to be an image that is small and has been resized larger.

Cynthia,

Thank you for your reply. After scanning with Paperport ScanSoft software, I reduced the 1700 X 2200 pixels picture to 20% to fit in the forum's maximum of 400 X 600 pixels. I then saved it in JPEG format.

On my first post I uploaded it with a 50% compression then tried a 20% compression on the second post. That obviously didn't help. Is it the scanner itself that is at fault or something that I did? I am using a model 3300 Visioneer scanner.
Thank you for any suggestion.

Regards,
Frantz

Try not compressing nearly so much. I think that's the problem. Simple resize your image to the required size and put the compression at about 10% only.

Thanks, Cynthia, I'll try that.

Regards,
Frantz

Here is one more try at 10% compression.

It looks as if these images are being saved as small GIF files at some point, perhaps with "web-only" colors. This dramatic pixelization is definitely not the result of over-compression in jpeg mode.

Michele,

Thank you for your input. I'll keep on trying to solve the "mystery".

Regards,
Frantz

Frantz,

I don't wish to discourage you, but I tried out a Visioneer PaperPort scanner in about '95 or '96 and couldn't ever get good results from it. But that was a small-footprint roll-type scanner -- maybe PaperPort has a flatbed now.

If you'd like, you can have Kinkos (or the local lookalike) scan your image to disk for you, and then just work on it from your photo imaging software. (And if you don't have that on board, have Kinkos resize it for you, or just send your image to a moderator and we can do that for now.)

Cheers

Hi Steven,

Visioneer does have a line of flatbeds, one of which I am using. I have had acceptable results with it until now. I can't even tell whether it is the culprit in this case.
Thank you for the suggestion. I'll be looking into it.


Cheers,
Frantz Presume