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Artist => General Art Discussions => Topic started by: Dottonedan on August 21, 2012, 12:38:22 PM

Title: Poor quality jpgs for CMYK?
Post by: Dottonedan on August 21, 2012, 12:38:22 PM

Speaking of art clean up tricks, (not that anyone was), but how about poor quality jpgs for CMYK?


I occasioanlly get art from customers who "got this art" from some customer...who wants it separated. Sometimes it's sim process and some times it's to be cmyk.


When you convert a rgb (low rez jpg), the compression can be horrible and once converted, can leave BLOCKS of compression or color break downs. Why or how it does te break dwon method, I do'ntknow, but the end result is that some of the colors (mostly yellow) will have those BLOCKS in it.


I ran across someone who thought they had a method to handle this but it didn't work. So, outside of doing a gaussion blurr,  does anyone know of any technique to improve on this?


Once it's a turd, it only stays a turd from my experience.

Title: Re: Poor quality jpgs for CMYK?
Post by: ScreenFoo on August 21, 2012, 01:41:14 PM

No firsthand experience, but I remember seeing an article a while back on cleaning up JPGS with a plug-in called 'Alien skin Image Doctor'. 

The JPG part of the plugin looked to me like what I already do--a combo of blurring and unsharp mask--makes for a cartoony, smooth, clean lined turd.  :)
Some of the other stuff looked kind of interesting though.

Title: Re: Poor quality jpgs for CMYK?
Post by: mk162 on August 21, 2012, 02:39:16 PM

Dan, it is possible to polish a turd...

Mythbusters Polishing a Turd (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI#)

Title: Re: Poor quality jpgs for CMYK?
Post by: PixelPimp on August 21, 2012, 02:49:15 PM

heya ScreenFoo!
yup that AlienSkinImageDoctor doesn't do much more then what you would do with filters (if i'm not mistaken, it's an action script so you could expand the action and see what steps it's using). There's some things you can do to improve and remove the jpg artifacts but it will only get so much better, as we all know, garbage in = garbage out. in most cases a compromise should be meet (by altering the design) or the art needs to be redrawn/created.

Title: Re: Poor quality jpgs for CMYK?
Post by: Frog on August 21, 2012, 02:55:39 PM

Our friend, sponsor, and fellow Forum owner Scott over at T-Biz has an article on cleaning up crap in PS

http://t-biznetwork.com/computergraphics/improving-poor-photographic-images-in-photoshop/ (http://t-biznetwork.com/computergraphics/improving-poor-photographic-images-in-photoshop/)

He actually has one for Corel products as well

Title: Re: Poor quality jpgs for CMYK?
Post by: Sbrem on August 21, 2012, 03:49:50 PM

PhotoZoom Pro does a decent job, depending on your expectations. Turds can take only so much polishing...

Steve