Quote:
Originally Posted by lhommealenvers
Hi.
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Edit : I found and processed a few pictures. As lampman did post his folder I am going to do the same here : https://imgur.com/a/FcNXr |
I checked out a few of those images and some are not black and white and are not PNG. I do not know how strict the Kobo is about this but I prefer to have full control.
I wrote out a long and detailed post but I lost it when the forum logged me out when I clicked preview.
I included 2 attachments, one is an animated gif showing the power of the black and white converter in photoshop. you can read the preset on the left. there is default which is mediocre, a few awful ones and a few good ones.
the other is the original color image, credit goes to an anonymous photographer.
My experience with Paint.net;
you can set an aspect ratio to select with, make a selection and crop to selection. It is possible to have control over the black and white conversion by manually adjusting curves and brightness/contrast before selecting black and white. and of course you can resize.
there is one fatal drawback to Paint.net; when you save as a PNG, there is only "bit depth" to choose from. the lowest number of 8 is much too high. a 16 value grayscale is 4 bits. I would not use paint.net because of this limitation alone. It can work for very contrasty and sharp images like some of the ones lhommealenvers has in his folder.
The GIMP does have what I am looking for and I will list steps for conversion here:
* Play with the color curves and brightness/contrast. my method: the colors I want to be light, I make light. Same for dark.
* make other adjustments you wish to
* colors -> desaturate, and I use the luminosity setting because of my previous curves adjustments
* resize to 1440x1920, or whatever resolution you have.
after you adjusted everything you wanted do this step last:
* image -> mode -> indexed
*generate optimum palette: 16 colors (maybe less for older models? I know the kindle 3rd gen uses 8 levels)
(IMO the most important part: )
* color dithering: choose from any of the Floyd-Steinbergs. I do not see a difference in grayscale. 'Positioned' looks similar to 'patterned' in photoshop. this might work better for images with very fine (near pixel sized) noise that you want to keep
* save your image
the biggest benefit photoshop brings is how easy the black and white conversion is. it combines the many seperate steps that you need to do in paint.net and GIMP, if you really care about which colors appear bright in your final image. I think sometimes it really matters, as I hope you can see from my attachments. also photoshop has really easy and quick previews of the indexing and dithering, which it also forces to be a last step.