[Psymon]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

This is only a problem with the ADE. RMDSK (used in Readers) does not have this problem.

That's so mindboggling, that a company like Adobe -- of all companies! -- can't get their ebook reader to render images effectively (at least, not with images like this). Totally weird, in fact, that it's an Adobe product that has that issue.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

The image you posted is not 8-bit (indexed colour) but 24-bit. That is, 8 bits each for Red, Green and Blue. You won't get any benefit from going to 16-bits per colour.

Oh, I'm not too up on that "bit" stuff (although I do know Photoshop very well, otherwise), but when I go into Image -> Mode it was set at 8-bit before. Perhaps when one uses the Save-for-web feature that converts it? I don't know, but in any case changing the mode for my working PSD file to 16 bit didn't change anything with how it ends up looking in ADE (as I mentioned earlier).

The problem is as Jellby said - moire patterns from the poor resizing algortihm. Looking at the image you posted, that doesn't look like a scan of an actual print from an engraving, but a halftone image of an engraving.

Unfortunately, those images are all that I have to work with, public domain pics I got off the 'net.

The way I'd handle it would be to apply some guassian blur to rmeove the halftoning, and then apply just a little unsharp mask, barely enough to be noticeable at 200%.

And doing that gets the image I attach (in the zip file - MobileRead auto-converts pngs to jpgs!), which should look pretty good, even in ADE.

I guess that would be an alternative, but I suppose there's a couple of considerations with taking that approach...

I really wanted the "engraving" look, as the whole look-and-feel (so to speak) of my ebook is that of an early printed book -- so it would be nice if those illustrations actually looked like engravings, rather than "semi-blurry paintings or drawings." I do realize that even on my iPad, especially in two-page mode where those full-page images are even smaller, one doesn't quite see that they're engravings, but you certainly do if you click/zoom in on them, and at any rate I'd still like to keep that "engraving look" as much as possible.

And perhaps, in that regard, to some extent my query here has been moot anyway, because I was only planning on distributing my book on the iTunes Store -- and yeah, yeah, I know, there's a LOT of reasons why I should go for more options than just that, but I'm not selling this, I'm just giving it away, I don't care about "sales" but rather that things actually look/work how I'd like them to. Let's leave the iBooks trashing for another thread, thank you.

However, despite that latter, naturally it would still have been nice if I could get my book (i.e. the images in it) to look good in ADE, too -- but if the end result is that it doesn't, and it won't, well, it's "only" those engraving images, everything else in my book does look just fine (the text, and all the other "non-engraving" images).

Not to be redundant, but it's so weird, though, that Adobe can't get it right with their ebook reader! Of all companies... strange...