Using Pictures

[Steve E]

Hello all.

 

It can be helpful to have a picture of a character (man, woman, monster) or setting (cave, castle, forest) available to you as you write. Doing a drag and drop to the picture field of a Storyist sheet serves this purpose nicely. So I recommend the following guidelines for now.

 

1. Use pictures with minimum detail. Fine features will be lost anyway.

2. If possible, use faces instead of full body shots.

3. JPG seem to work better than GIF with respect to color and detail.

4. Don't panic when your file size grows unpredictably. (I've added a 28K picture that had grown the story file by 56K, and I've added an 88K picture that had only grown the file by 84K.)

5. Choose carefully. Replacing a picture currently does not delete the old one from the file. (Steve is working on this.)

 

My experiments seem to suggest that there is currently no advantage to a file-size exceeding 24K for a color JPG.

 

Steve, if you're reading this, would you post the display stats for the sheets' picture fields?

 

-Thoth.

[Steve]

Hello all.

 

It can be helpful to have a picture of a character (man, woman, monster) or setting (cave, castle, forest) available to you as you write. Doing a drag and drop to the picture field of a Storyist sheet serves this purpose nicely. So I recommend the following guidelines for now.

 

1. Use pictures with minimum detail. Fine features will be lost anyway.

2. If possible, use faces instead of full body shots.

3. JPG seem to work better than GIF with respect to color and detail.

4. Don't panic when your file size grows unpredictably. (I've added a 28K picture that had grown the story file by 56K, and I've added an 88K picture that had only grown the file by 84K.)

5. Choose carefully. Replacing a picture currently does not delete the old one from the file. (Steve is working on this.)

 

My experiments seem to suggest that there is currently no advantage to a file-size exceeding 24K for a color JPG.

 

Steve, if you're reading this, would you post the display stats for the sheets' picture fields?

 

-Thoth.

 

Thanks Thoth.

 

The images in the sheets are 96x96. There are some image-related enhancements coming in 1.3, and I would recommend 128x128 or 256x256. Storyist will take care of the scaling.

 

JPEG will give you the best compression, and most image tools will allow you to trade off quality for file size.

 

And yes, I'm working on fixing the issue you mentioned in step 5.

 

-Steve

[Steve E]

The images in the sheets are 96x96.

 

Thanks Steve.

 

So to recap, we can get maximum resolution for a black and white (1-bit depth) at 1.1520K and a good color shot (32-bit depth) at up to 36.8640K. I just tried it but I still didn't see a significant difference between 37K and 24K files for the same color shot. Of course, this could be my screen (or my eyes).

 

Thanks again.

-Thoth.