Moving an Image from psd to gif to doc

Dennis Hughes wrote:

My Navy squadron is having a reunion. I have been asked to make up a letterhead for the correspondence.

I have the insignia in psd, about 5" high at 300 ppi. When I shrink it down to 1" high and convert it to gif to kill the white background with transparency, the emblem is not nearly as clear on the letterhead of thw rord document as the full sized file.

I take the psd, change it from rgb to index mode, use the magic wand to select the white background, delete it, making it transparent, trim the image, then reduce the image size from 5" to 1" and save as gif.
I then drag the file name into my MSWord 2003 document. The image becomes 3" high and I use properties to reduce the size down to 1" again.

Is my process wrong? Any thoughts on how to do this to get a higher quality image on the Word document?

Thanks,

Dennis

Why do you need transparency? In printing white is transparent and the paper color will show through any (ANY) white areas in your graphic. Keep that in mind if there are areas you want white but will be on colored paper. So you don’t need to save as gif.

Naturally something reduced that much is not going to be as clear as the original. You have far fewer pixels to work with to define the image. If you could start with a higher resolution graphic that would help (from a scan or whatever; just changing the resolution isn’t going to do you much good after the fact). Another possibility is to create it or have it created in a vector drawing program.

I would not use Word, I would use a page layout program, but if you must use Word gif is probably not a good format to use. Can it take tiff, bmp, even jpg?

Good luck.
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does Word accept png or tiff files?
"Dennis Hughes" wrote in message

My Navy squadron is having a reunion. I have been asked to make up a letterhead for the correspondence.

I have the insignia in psd, about 5" high at 300 ppi. When I shrink it down to 1" high and convert it to gif to kill the white background with transparency, the emblem is not nearly as clear on the letterhead of thw rord document as the full sized file.

I take the psd, change it from rgb to index mode, use the magic wand to select the white background, delete it, making it transparent, trim the image, then reduce the image size from 5" to 1" and save as gif.
I then drag the file name into my MSWord 2003 document. The image becomes 3" high and I use properties to reduce the size down to 1" again.

Is my process wrong? Any thoughts on how to do this to get a higher quality image on the Word document?

Thanks,

Dennis

Thanks for the thoughtful answers.

First, the issue of reducing the image to a significantly smaller number of pixels makes sense. I may start at 600 ppi and go from there.

Second, you’re absolutely right about not having to use a transparency, since the printer ignores white. I tried tif with the transparency and it is slightly sharper, but I will start with a higher res image and reduce from there.

I’m using word as it is pretty much standardized and this needs to be sent around in digital form.

What do you use for the vector drawing? That would end any scaleability issues for later use.

Learning every day,

Dennis
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Dennis Hughes wrote:

My Navy squadron is having a reunion. I have been asked to make up a letterhead for the correspondence.

I have the insignia in psd, about 5" high at 300 ppi. When I shrink it down to 1" high and convert it to gif to kill the white background with transparency, the emblem is not nearly as clear on the letterhead of thw rord document as the full sized file.

I take the psd, change it from rgb to index mode, use the magic wand to select the white background, delete it, making it transparent, trim the image, then reduce the image size from 5" to 1" and save as gif.
I then drag the file name into my MSWord 2003 document. The image becomes 3" high and I use properties to reduce the size down to 1" again.

Is my process wrong? Any thoughts on how to do this to get a higher quality image on the Word document?

Thanks,

Dennis

right.. if you do change to size of the image (a lot).. the results ar not for the better most of the time.. you loose quality by modifing th image from his original format.

don’t think it’s a matter of rgb vs index color mode…

as mention.. you should keep the white.. .. I mean you don’t reall need the transparency .. rignt?? ..

on an other note.. when u use the wand tool (in other words making selection).. if you want the edges to be less sharp.. smoother.. increase the feather of the selection..

hope this will help a bit

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Batme
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On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 01:18:48 GMT, Dennis Hughes
wrote:

What do you use for the vector drawing? That would end any scaleability issues for later use.

Personally, Corel Draw or Freehand. There’s also Illustrator. Save as wmf and the file will be useable on any Windows computer.

—

Hecate

veni, vidi, reliqui

Dennis Hughes …

My Navy squadron is having a reunion. I have been asked to make up a letterhead for the correspondence.

I have the insignia in psd, about 5" high at 300 ppi. When I shrink it down to 1" high and convert it to gif to kill the white background with transparency, the emblem is not nearly as clear on the letterhead of thw rord document as the full sized file.

I take the psd, change it from rgb to index mode, use the magic wand to select the white background, delete it, making it transparent, trim the image, then reduce the image size from 5" to 1" and save as gif.

Just save the image as a TIFF at 300dpi. Note that Word may display a low res version of the image, and you’ll only see the true benefits when printing.

If you want a good onscreen display of the graphic, save the image as a JPG at 300 dpi. That way it’ll look good for both onscreen and when printed.