In article eqqNi.6420$n92.5987@trnddc06, mike wrote:
Paul Bartram wrote:
"mike" wrote

I don't know the proper terms, but here's the idea.
Take a big pix at high resolution (eg spectators at a football game).
Use a combination of pixel scaling and compression to
get a highly compressed picture, small file size, picture 1.
Print picture 1.
Print the original picture.
Take scissors and cut out small parts of the high resolution
(eg a face)
pix and glue them on Picture 1 in the right places.

Wanna do that digitally.

Don't know if this is exactly what you mean, but XAT.COM Image Optimizer has
a 'magic compression' setting that only selects areas of unchanging colour
and density and hammers those while leaving the intricate areas alone. I use
it for compressing files to below a certain size for uploading to a website,
and it seems to work well. I think the older versions are now freeware, or
the current ones are available for trial.

Paul


Thanks for the tip.
I tried it. In an uncontrolled experiment on one picture, I found it
to be ineffective.
Started with an 800KB jpg at 98% quality level.
Loaded that into the xat program. With the quality slider at 50% and
"magicness slider at 50% the
output file size was about what I got with Irfanview.
Maximum magicness reduced the file size a few percent.
Minimum magicness increased the file size 20%.
If you just move the magicness slider, you do see a difference in file
size, mostly on the bigger end.
But when compared to Irfanview, it's not very impressive.
You get more benefit from reducing the quality level a point.

For the pictures I tried, it's not very magic.

As I described in the original question, the crowd picture
is gonna be very busy. I don't expect anything automatic to
work.
I think I need to compress MANUALLY SELECTED areas differently.
I remember tripping over such a program once, but have no idea the
context or location. And my freeware constraint is likely to be
a show-stopper.
mike

JPG Wizard from Pegasus Imaging lets you manually select areas and group
them according to the amount of compression (versus the rest of the
image). V2 is payware but there is a "last freeware" copy of V1.x floating
around somewhere.