Wikipedia talk:Graphics tutorials

Help with Photoshop and PNGs
From village pump 7 September 2003

Wondering if some helpful party could aid me in resolving a problem I have - I assume it's with Adobe Photoshop, which I use in making PNGs for use here on Wikipedia. They always turn out much, much darker than they appear in the program. Check the history of Image:mtl-metro-map.png - to create an acceptable image I finally had to bombastically lighten the original image in Photoshop. This happens whether I save it in RGB mode or indexed colour mode. Is there a way to ensure that the colours in the file are the same as the colours I see when using the program? - Montr&eacute;alais 20:10, 28 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * is it only PNGs? P-shop has its own gamma correction -- check that. -- Tarquin 20:21, 28 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * Montrealais: what browser are you using? Some have broken gamma correction in their display engines. --Brion 21:35, 28 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * IE 5.5. Does the image look too light on some other browser? And (at least out of the formats I use) it's only PNGs as far as I know - all the GIFs I created for my website look fine. - Montr&eacute;alais 23:44, 28 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * The first three versions are too dark, the last two are fine (I use IE 6). The only parts that could be even lighter (not the whole thing) are the small words to the right to the blue signs with white rectangles and an up-arrows in them. Like the lower-left one that says: "TRAIN DE BRAMIUE MONTRÉAL DELSON"(?) --Menchi 23:56, Aug 28, 2003 (UTC)


 * Try fiddling with the color settings in Photoshop. On my Mac at work w/ ps 7 I loaded the (older version) of the file, saw it looked fine, went into the Color Settings (in the apple menu on Mac OS X; probably under File on Windows) and switched the 'Working Spaces' / 'RGB' to 'ColorSync RGB - Generic RGB Profile', and resaved. The resaved file looks great in Safari and Mozilla, at least for me... but I don't know how reliable this is. --Brion


 * Alternatively, try resaving the files from the Gimp. --Brion 00:07, 29 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * I noticed a problem with photoshop's png module also -- depending on how its displayed, it can even be chopped to bits (AcDsee) - with browsers, the transparency quality is inferior to that of the Gimp. Maybe try something like this (I havent tried it yet) http://www.freephotoshop.com/html/png.html - &#25140;&#30505sv 00:22, Aug 29, 2003 (UTC)


 * I'll experiment with that later. Thanks so much for the help, folks :) - Montr&eacute;alais 04:33, 29 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I have since discovered that if I save the image from Photoshop as a .gif, I can use Thumbnails Plus 4 to convert it into .png with correct colours. - Montr&eacute;alais 09:45, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Transparent Background
Does anyone know how to make the background of this transparent so it won't look like heck on the Main Page? jengod 22:51, Feb 23, 2004 (UTC)

I don't know if jpegs can have transparent backgrounds. Resave as a .png and set the tranparent colour as white. (I'll do it for you if you have trouuble)theresa knott 00:36, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)


 * Sadly, I don't know how to do that on the free version of VicMan's Photo Editor. >g< jengod 00:41, Feb 24, 2004 (UTC)

To turn a solid background colour transparent using free GIMP editor use the option Filters > Colors > Color to Alpha and specify the colour to be removed. For more detail (including adding a different background) see: http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Changing_Background_Color_1/

Should these be moved to wikibooks?
Should these all be moved to individual modules in a single wikibook? - Omegatron 20:46, Apr 8, 2005 (UTC)


 * I think so. -- Beland 03:23, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * But some of the guides are rather Wikipedia-centric. For instance, ordinary websites haven't automatic image resizing. But the feature has influenced on the recommendations in Preparing images for upload. -Hapsiainen 09:47, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)


 * No. These are guides aimed at Wikipedians to help create graphics for wikipedia. The guides should be focusing on the requirements of Wikipeida rather than being graphics tutorials in general. Finally they are not in the main namespace so don't need to be an encyclopedia article. --MarkS 07:28, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Adding A Vector Graphic Software
Don't you think that we should add "Microsoft Powerpoint" to the softwares of vector Graphics? From my own experience, this program is a huge aid and qualifies as a vector graphic software.

If you'd like, you can see an example photo of Jennifer aniston on this link:
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jen_vector.png

Or these other ones, done by me - Using MS Powerpoint (published on Deviantart)


 * http://www.deviantart.com/view/25657695/


 * http://www.deviantart.com/view/23703977/


 * http://www.deviantart.com/view/21484610/


 * http://www.deviantart.com/view/24131306/


 * http://www.deviantart.com/view/20867087/

I hope these are enough to show that Powerpoint is capable of handling vectors. (Though it is a vector-based program, but never used for art/graphical purposes). Omernos


 * I had no idea you could user powerpoint like this. Could you wrote a tutorial? I suggest changing the Word processors with vector-graphics facilities heading to Office software with vector-graphics facilities and sticking it in there. Theresa Knott | Taste the Korn 23:19, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Fourier transform tutorial
I wrote a tutorial on cleaning up interference using Photoshop and a free Fourier transform plugin at Commons:Commons:Cleaning_up_interference_with_Fourier_analysis. This probably belongs somewhere other than Commons, I'm not sure, but I put it there because I often clean up images on Commons. Any feedback/edits would be great. I'm especially looking for a section on how to do this with the GIMP. Deco 18:55, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Encouraging user to modify JPEG would lead to loss of info
We shouldn't encourage users to modify JPEGs if the JPEGs are photos. Shrinking JPEG photos would likely cause loss of quality and loss of EXIF data.

JPEG is lossy, most JPEG editors handle JPEG in a lossy manner. (Even ImageMagick's JPEG handling is lossy.) In addition, shrinking would likely lead to loss of EXIF info. While most EXIF are useless, two useful ones are color space and date. While most cameras use sRGB color space (same as the web), some cameras have other color space settings. --Voidvector (talk) 05:17, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Graphs
I have created the Graphs page. There probably is the need for a WikiProject Graphs as well. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 07:51, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

i can't do SVG...
I really need some simple help. As i said, i can't do SVG. I'm looking to make an image and upload it that looks like the small flag shown at the top of this image and the top of this image. Just a simple, 450 x 300 red square, with a white star in the centre. Anyone think they can help me out? --SteelersFanUK06  ReplyOnMine!   13:57, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Discourage SVG
This is an open request to whoever sets the standards at Wikipedia to discourage people from illustrating articles with SVG files, and instead use one of the common formats such as JPG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, etc.

The reason for this request is that, apparently, most users of SVG files have NO CLUE as to how to render them with a fixed background. Consequently, in many browsers they "appear" as black on black -- which is to say, when SVG graphics are used there often do not appear to be any graphics at all.

This has not been a problem with the other file formats. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.95.43.249 (talk) 19:51, 1 October 2013 (UTC)


 * On what browser do the images appear black on black? Wikipedia has a white background. -- intgr [talk] 08:23, 2 October 2013 (UTC)