Quoting Borg561:

Quote:
I scanned into Macromedia Fireworks MX at 400dpi, cropped and resized to a max of 500x700, sharpened, then saved using the highest compression that didn't put file size over 200Kb (noticed in a later post that 195Kb was mentioned so I'll shoot for that next time).

I beleive the 195Kb was mentioned because the max file size for images is 200,000 bytes. since one Kb is 1024 bytes, the max size would be 195Kb and not 200 (you can also right click the file, select properties, and then check the what the file size in bytes is and make sure its not above 200,000 - question regarding this, would it be the size or the size on disk that can't be more than 200,000 bytes)

-Agrare

Quoting Agrare:

Quote:
(...question regarding this, would it be the size or the size on disk that can't be more than 200,000 bytes)

I'll give you 2 answers depending on how much you really want to know.. 

Short answer: It would just be the "size" as that is the actual byte count of the file.

Long Answer: "Size on disk" is referring to the amount of cluster allocation the file is taking up on your hard drive.  A cluster is the smallest unit of storage space on your hard drive.  If you are using XP or Vista your drive should be formatted as NTFS and assuming your partition is larger than 1 GB your cluster sizes are going to be 4kb each.  Multiple files cannot share the same cluster so once a file uses any part of a cluster the rest essentually becomes "wasted space".  So if you have a file that is 10kb it's actually going to take up 12kb of your hard drive space.  Since you can only "waste" a piece of a 4kb block per file, calling it "waste" is probably a little too strong since it's so minimal but I didn't know how else to refer to it.  It was a lot worse with older file systems like FAT 16 that had 32kb cluster sizes.  So then a 33kb file would take up 64kb on the disk.

Personally I found out that all this fiddling around with the size of the image file does not improve the quality that much. My experience has learned me that if you create an uncompressed image of max. 500x700 in an image edit program and copy-paste that image into DVD Profiler with a compression factor of 90%, it will always be under 195Kb and the quality will be good enough, even after contributing.

Yes, good enough is often good enough.

I've come across some very good scans that weren't close to the 195K limit.  I couldn't really improve on them even using the full 195K.

Others have obvious artifacts and can be easily improved.  I'll scan the cover and maximize the amount of the 500x700x195K used to get the most (hopefully) good info i can.  I've already done the work of straightening, cropping and touching up so the additional effort to optimize the file size and copy it straight to the Images folder is minimal.