Image resolution

[Jim]

Greetings! I wandered in and immediately loved the site. Hope to get stuck into a lot of these plans!

Only have one major reservation: A goodly number of these plans appear to be 72 DPI, which saves space and looks fine when viewed on a computer screen, but invariably dissolves into mush if you try to print it. Even copying the image and trying to sharpen it up in Photoshop doesn't appear to improve it to the point of making these 72 DPI plans useable. I do a fair amount of desktop publishing for a living, and I've alweays been under the impression that if you want it to be clear and sharp enough to print from, a black & white image has to be at least 150 DPI, a color image 300 DPI.

Am I missing something here that I should be doing to make these images useable? Or is it that the contributors need to do things differently.

[Oceaneer99]

Fingers, you need to click on the file to get the original resolution.  The line-drawing plans are usually 300 dpi, while some of the raw JPEG gray-scale images are 200 dpi.

We've slowly been adding the "Click on image to download in original resolution" message to the gallery pages.

Garet

[Jim]

Ahhh, I see! Very nice. Many thanx, gents! And thanx so much for creating this place!

[Oceaneer99]

Fingers,

You are welcome; thank you for joining us!  This site is really a work in progress.  We still have almost 100 plans to move over from the old site, and members are sending new submissions all the time, which has been great.

I just finished adding the "SMM boilerplate" to each image page, which has the "click on image" message. 

Garet

[davetunison]

I suppose the higher dpi is more important with a big model. Most of my planes fit on an 8 x 11 inch sheet so 72dpi has been adequate(with a few exceptions). Lately I've been creating some drawings with vectors (think CAD) using Adobe  Illustrator. These lines never lose sharpness no matter how big the enlargement. Wouldn't it make sense if all 3-views were in vector format? Someday maybe.  They can be formatted for viewing with Adobe Reader.

[Oceaneer99]

Vector is great.  I have done a few three-views using a CAD program when I did not have an adequate 3-view to start with.  Unfortunately, the standards for vector images are far less standard than the bitmap images.  I have a number of drawings made with an earlier CAD program that no other software can read.  I'm still working on a neo-ID plan, and the final output will likely be a PDF file, with perhaps GIF or TIFF versions available.  Certainly for copies of existing plans, we aren't going to have a vector representation anytime soon.

There are a number of uses for the plans we archive here for review.  For building a model, I can use a fairly coarse image.  However, we have another charter, which is to attempt to preserve these old kits and plans.  We are not truly archival, as an archivist would want a full-color uncompressed TIFF at very high resolution, which are far too big and would use far too much bandwidth for our site.  However, if I can print one of our plans on a laser printer and get a reasonable representation of the original plans, I think we have achieved our aim. Too many plans are printed on now-brittle paper, or are being cleared out by uninterested heirs when the original owner passes on. 

There are some markets for these antiques, but I'm usually more interested in the information that the kit itself.  I have purchased a number of 1940s solid kits just to see what they looked like.  Of course, many of these kits are now so rare that you would be unlikely to be able to purchase one, at any price.  Some government plans (the Naval ID airplane plans) are readily available as copies, but the ID model ship plans seem to have disappeared into US Government archives.  One of my main goals in helping at this site (besides learning from the collective experience and having support for my hobby) is to share the plans I've collected so that others can see them, save them, and keep them alive at least a few decades longer.

So a big thank you to Ray for setting up this site and making all of this possible!

Garet

[davetunison]

Garet,
     I totally support the aim of creating a digital archive. It's happening with all types of printed materials at an astounding rate. You're right, one should be able to print a plan the same size as the original with the same quality. One problem is, the original image dimensions are usually not included and it's difficult to estimate unless the model is in a standard scale. We should original size in the document notes (if known).
I noticed that Ray included the finished model size on the most recent ship drawings.
   

[R.F.Bennett]

We're learnin... 

[Jim]

Is there something "wrong" with the B-29 plan? A click on the image to bring up the full-size, 300-dpi plan just elicits a blank gray screen.

[davetunison]

I tried the B-29 link and temporarily got a gray screen but it finally loaded. It' a very large GIF image.

[Jim]

Nope, not on this end. I suspect it may be a javascript issue on my end...

Also, the ship model plan labelled "3 ships" is obviously only part of a plan, or more accurately, one plan and parts of two others. I'd sure like to see the other two...

[Oceaneer99]

I'll check on the B-29 link.  The 3 ships issue is my fault.  I didn't notice that Marsh was bumping up on his quota.  Ray fixed that, so hopefully Marsh will be able to upload the rest now.

Garet

[Oceaneer99]

If the javascript isn't working for you, the direct link to the B-29 plan is:

http://smm.solidmodelmemories.net/Gallery/albums/userpics/B-29Supreme300dpi%7E0.gif

garet

[Jim]

Nope, strike two...Looks like the same problem. Well, thanx for tryin'...

[Oceaneer99]

Fingers, try right clicking on the direct photo link:

http://smm.solidmodelmemories.net/Gallery/albums/userpics/B-29Supreme300dpi%7E0.gif

and then click "save link as" (for Windows, other OSes have a similar selection available).  Hopefully, you can save the file to your hard drive and then look at it from there.

Garet