54-D Wheatie

Cannot tell at that magnification. Whatever it is, it is small...very small.

Your image turned out very blocky - probably because you are optimizing it too much. You should attempt to save it at a higher quality and use it that way. There's no way anyone can determine what you have looking at an image that looks like a Picasso block painting...and it's image optimization that causes it.

Image optimization allows you to set the "save" function of your software to "forget" a certain amount of information about the original image at save time. What this does is enlargens the areas it remembers so it doesn't have to remember as much. For instance, if your image is 100X100 pixels, at full optimization it has to remember all the color and shade information for 10,000 pixels. If you save it at 50% optimization, the amount it has to remember is half as much as for full resolution because it doubles the areas it remembers, effectively covering four pixels per area. That turns your 10,000 pixel memorization into a 2,500 pixel memorization, taking the finished file size down by three quarters. If you remember it at the lowest quality, it can sometimes turn what started out as a one for one pixel memorization down to 1:20, effectively making the computer remember 20 times less than it would have, making your image 1/20 the file size as it had originally been. This could effectively turn a 150K image into a 7K image. Problem is, you get all this "blocking" and the detail goes away in the image.

If you have an issue with being able to upload images because they are too large in file size, try the following:

1. Crop out the unimportant parts of the image. This reduces the overall size of the image and still shows what you want. The end result could be an image that's less than half the size of the original, yet still serves your purpose.

2. Save it at 50% optimization. This is a good general level that prepares images for web size without forgetting too much of the original information in the image.

3. Try resizing the image to make it a little smaller. A 20% reduction in size can knock down the file size by 1/3 without losing any necessary detail.

4. Always save in JPG (JPEG) format. GIF and TIFF formats are very filesize heavy and do not optimize well at all.

5. If file size is an issue for uploading to message boards, go sign up with a free image hosting service and link to the image from the message board. This can increase your allowable upload filesize by double.

Optimally, you want file size to be around 75-100K with the image at or around 800 pixels by 600 pixels. Any less and you're cutting out useful memory information in the image. Any more and you start to affect the load time for people with slower connection speeds.

Hope this helps..

Another problem that comes about frequently, and also may be your problem, is that reducing the size of an image is perfectly fine, but blowing up an image and making it larger often does not work well at all. The reason for this is simple...

If you are given a grid with 1,000 squares and told to fill the grid with 1,000 marbles, it would be simple...one marble per grid square. End result looks like a full box of marbles. If you were told to remove half the marbles, yet make the box look full, you'd have an impossible task on your hands. You are doing the same thing when you blow up images in a computer.

Making an image twice the size of its original forces the computer to take each pixel and double it wide and tall, effectively filling four boxes with each single box it started out with. When you do this, the computer tries its best to keep detail, but frankly it cannot make up information that wasn't there to start with, so it simply fills the three expanded boxes with the same thing it had in the one original box. Some software is smart enough to look at the box next door and create new pixels to stick between them that are a half-tone between the two original boxes, but even this produces often less than desirable results.

What we end up with when we expand the size of an image is a blurred image with less detail and less color properties than the original. What can we do to solve this problem?

1. Scan or photograph at a higher setting, so when we crop out our piece that we want, we don't have to blow it up to make it visible. On a scanner, this often means scanning at 600 or 1200 DPI instead of 150 DPI then blowing up the date area.

2. Buy proper equipment for the job...a microscope for $100, decent lighting for $100, a digital camera good for the job ($100-$200), and an adapter for the camera if necessary. Note that there isn't a scanner included in this list...scanners were not made for imaging metal in the first place, and the enlargement properties of scanners are terible at best. Basically, scanners are no good for this job.

3. Buy proper software for image editing. An old version of Adobe Photoshop costs $100 or less, and will go a long way toward giving you the power you need to properly handle your images. 99% of the "free" stuff or the cheap software that comes with digital cameras is crap, and doesn't work well. Photoshop is THE industry standard for photo editing and graphic production, and there's very good reason for it...it is very good at what it does. End of story.

bump

Coins in the 1950's had a lot of problems with the later die states. They literally struck ever Cent (Pun intended) they could with them to get the last one out of them.