Blurry text in jpg image

Chemsicles · Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 3:58 pm Post subject: Blurry text in jpg image

Hey Everyone,

I am a total noob to PS but i'm hoping it can help me with a problem i have

I have just started emailing out monthly newsletters to my customers, i do this through "constant contact" email service. Up until now i have been creating the newsletter in publisher and then printing the PDF. Unfortunately constant contact only allows you to upload images so i can't use the PDF or publisher file as the email.

To work around this i have been converting the PDF to an HTML document, then i save the HTML page as a jpg...i know this process sounds a little crazy but it is the best way to use my pre-existing newsletter. I then upload the newsletter (now saved as a jpg image) to constant contact, the problem i am experiencing is that the text becomes blurry when i resize the image to a larger size. This is obviously to be expected when stretching an image but i was just wondering if i can use photoshop to increase the clarity of the text.

I apologize for my inexperience when it comes to image clarity and resolution, but any help is greatly appreciated!

jerryb4417 · Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 4:45 pm Post subject:

hi,
that appears to be a hassle the way you get to save to a jpg file... and it seems like there should be a better way...

now i don't know about publisher so iwent looking and found this little page that told me what formats it can export to...
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/publisher-help/file-formats-that-publisher-converts-HP005124146.aspx

and it seem you can save your publisher file directly to either jpg or png or bmp ot gif or tif formats.. without saving as a htm and then converting that to jpg... .......

now with jpg formats... you need to be carefull about file compression if you compress a jpg file too much you start to get colo shade r shift, bluriness, artifacts, etc.... so if youdecide to save to jpg, your quality setting is set high or the compression setting is set low... generally a compression setting of about 80-85 is satisfactory for a balance between file size and quality ... but you may need to experiment....
note: when you do resaves of a jpg... it get worse..smiling...

however png or tiff format would be much betterformat, don't have to worry about compression issues--i would use them unless there a file size issue involved....

i would suggest look at what i said above.... ithink you would get much better results and much quicker... by directly saving your publisher file to either png or tif .. or even gif ....

now can you sharpen text in photoshop... yes.... however if too blurry may not be able to sharpen enough... plus it will take time... and don't forget if you decide tos ave in jpg and use too high of a compression ratio... you may lose it... smiling.... sometimes it a lot of work trying to increase sharpness of text in a image...

Chemsicles · Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 9:48 pm Post subject:

Jerry,

Thanks for getting back to me!

i took your advice and saved the original publisher file as a PNG image. In the end i still ran into the same problems, probably due to the fact that constant contact will automatically compress any image that is bigger than 350kb or 800 pixels in width. I also tried saving the PDF directly to a PNG image but with similar results as above.

So any other ideas how i can do this? How would i go about re-touching the text in photoshop if i decided to try this route?

jerryb4417 · Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 9:49 am Post subject:

hi
i always got ideas...lol ... and before i start apologies on any grammer or mistakes...lol i rattle off post very quickly and get sloppy , plus i need to get a good keyboard this one here is a bit too small and cause alot of problems typing.. anyway..

first--
with any issues i generally go with the most common and easiest fixable solutions.. if they don't work then we go deeper

with text conversion to a bitmap (that your jpg png tif etc graphic formats)
there is a lot of issues involved and there always problems getting a nice sharp results .....

1. now one possible solution but to me it alot of work although it maybe the best solution for high quality ... and that is print the publisher newsletter and then scan at a high ppi/dpi ... and then save as png ...
the reason is those characters will have morepixals .. and hense more pixal data avail to make thing alittle nicer how much not sure... i just got a new machine haven't replaced the old scanner (won't work with new system) with a new scanner yet..

2. a little back ground on text conversion and some other possible solution .... but keep in mind nothing going to be 100% perfect...

ok..
the problem with converting text to graphic is that your characters are in a vector format.. now this allow you to increase/decrease font size without any loss of quality ... however when you convert that vector text to bitmap converting programs have a hard time converting the real thin part of a character to a pixal .... or try to convert the round part of a character

now what i did was do some test to help show you the results.. now i used printshop to create the test file.. it used vectorize text and bitmap graphics and you can export to bitmap format... i saved to jpg and png and i used different programs toview the results such as the browser, my gwspro viewer , mspaint and even photoshop ...

a. my first test was using new romans at size 10 ..
both thejpg and png format poor quality although png was alittle bit better
--by poor quality mean when view at appx 120% edges of the text were very raggid and in fact in some then parts of the character missing a pixel... smiling ..
and all viewers it was the same ...

b. i then went tofont size 14 and added boldness doing this basically adds more pixals when converted to text ....
Things improved a lot.... when viewed at 100% very readible, quality factor fair.... when viewed at 100-140% still very readible but you do start to see a little raggidness when viewed at 200 % still reaible but you can definitely see raggedness on the character's edges ... this was basically true with all the viewer i used... although there was viewer (image codecs maybe poor) it viewer not as good as the others.. butshowing the image in my ie browser seems gave me the best results with my gwspro and mspaint gave pretty fair results... using photoshop ad a viewer actualy gave very very poor quality results... but that maybe the resolution aspect issues...

so the end result on this... is maybe use a good font where it has some thickness and the thickness of the character is even withing the character, go to a larger fonts size, and maybe if required add the BOLD atribute...

basicslly what your doing is making character alittle large so that when converted there more pixels in volved in the character..

you may want to experiment which combination give the best results

thehermit · Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 11:04 am Post subject:

Why not write the newsletter in HTML, surely your mail service could handle that? That would seem to be the easiest solution, that or the more drastic, change your provider if possible.

Chemsicles · Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 3:17 pm Post subject:

Jerry,

Thanks again for your response! The thought didn't cross my mind to try scanning at a high ppi/dpi but it makes sense that it would increase the pixels of the text! I will also try to change the font/size to see if i can find a combination that would be more conducive to a higher pixelation. I will give these suggestions a try and post the result, Thanks again!

thehermit,

It's true i could write the newsletter in HTML, however i am not very fluent in HTML code, and seeing that i have already created the newsletter in publisher finding a solution that doesn't include me rewriting the newsletter would be the best option. That being said, i can save the publisher file as a HTML page and then copy and paste the code into the advanced editor in constant contact... in a round-about-way thanks for the suggestion! haha

jerryb4417 · Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 5:00 pm Post subject:

hi,
one added thought on the scan and print idea...
besides setting the scanner for some thing like 300 ppi and also using good high contrast white paper...

when you go to print... print at 300 dpi ....
the characters are a lot sharper, which you need, than printing at 100 dpi ...

Chemsicles · Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 8:44 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the additional info!

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