[nflug] bash syntax problem - picture printing problems

Mon Nov 10 10:19:35 EST 2008

My Camera is 5.1 MP, and I don't use it at max resolution (always one
step lower, at least).  I always just send the pictures to walgreens.com
online, and pick them up.  I don't do any pre-processing.  When I pick
them up, they are indistinguishable from what I always got with a 35MM.

Try just dumping them from the memory card directly to a cd, without any
software interference, and see how they turn out, just as an experiment.
That will at least let you know if the problem is at your end or the
photo lab's.

You could also try a different lab, but the goal is to determine where,
exactly, the problem is occurring.  It could be the camera (unlikely),
the processing happening within picasa, or at the lab.

On Sat, 2008-11-08 at 17:11 -0500, Joe wrote:
> My partner has a digital camera and she's been taking a large number of
> pictures of wild animals, etc. The pictures look great on the camera
> screen and on my notebook screen. Most were taken at the second best
> resolution - 1536x 2048. I used Picasa (under Linux) to export an
> "album" of them to a CDROM (I made sure to set jpeg quality to maximum
> during the export) and took it to the drugstore photo lab. When we got
> the normal-sized prints (I think they're about 4 x 5") back, they all
> looked grainy - almost pixelated. Is that res too low for even for that
> size print?
> 
> I talked to the photo tech who is pretty sharp and he said something
> about their computer messing with the images because the originals were
> not the same size (aspect ratio?) as the prints. He also said that
> regular film images were equivalent to up to 20 or more megapixels.
> 
> As a precaution, I have switched the camera to use its max resolution of
> 3072 x 2304. That really eats up memory cards fast. Is it really
> necessary if most of what i want is just prints and I don't do a lot of
> cropping or other editing? The only editing I've done so far was to
> rotate some 90 degrees when the shot was taken with the camera in
> "portrait" orientation.
> 
> But, I still have several thousand pictures, many of which I want to
> print, or perhaps even sell that seem to print grainy. These cannot
> easily be recreated. Some are of fauns as they grew up over the summer
> or as they were leaping in mid-air. Some are close-ups from a few feet away.
> 
> Any thoughts on how to debug/fix this and get it right from now on would
> be greatly appreciated.
> I'd RTFM if I knew which ones.
> 
> BTW, I still don't know why my script (the original question) didn't
> work as originally written.
> 
> TIA
> 
> Joe
> 
> Daniel V wrote:
> > What printing problems are you having?
> >
> > I think that picture printing is one of the main reasons people don't completely switch over from MS products to GNU/Linux. 
> >
> > Daniel V.
> >
> >
> > --- On Mon, 8/18/08, Joe <josephj at main.nc.us> wrote:
> >
> >   
> >> From: Joe <josephj at main.nc.us>
> >> Subject: [nflug] bash syntax problem
> >> To: nflug at nflug.org
> >> Date: Monday, August 18, 2008, 12:03 AM
> >> Bash syntax often drives me batty.
> >> I'm having a problem printing some digital camera
> >> pictures, so I wrote a
> >> quick and dirty script to verify that the pictures I took
> >> to the photo
> >> shop are the same as the ones that were on the camera flash
> >> card.
> >> The script "chkpix" and it's output are
> >> below.
> >>
> >> The problem is in the cmp command line which can't seem
> >> to find the
> >> second file to compare.  The ls and md5sum commands find
> >> the file just
> >> fine, so the path is OK.
> >>
> >> When I run the cmp command by itself directly from the
> >> command line
> >> (with no shell variables), it works fine.
> >>
> >> I modified the script, eliminating the '\' at
> >> the end of the first cmp
> >> argument and made the command one long line and it worked.
> >>
> >> So, what's wrong with breaking up a long command line
> >> with one or more
> >> escaped carriage returns?
> >>
> >> Thanks.
> >>
> >> Joe
> >>
> >> chkpix:
> >>
> >> #!/bin/bash
> >> ## compare two pictures for identity
> >>
> >> cmp "/media/windoze/Documents and Settings/Owner/My
> >> Documents/Images/Rita/Olympus/${1}" \
> >> "/media/windoze/Documents and
> >> Settings/Owner/My Documents/Images/Rita/Even Less
> >> Prints/${1}"
> >> ls -l "/media/windoze/Documents and Settings/Owner/My
> >> Documents/Images/Rita/Olympus/${1}"
> >> ls -l "/media/windoze/Documents and Settings/Owner/My
> >> Documents/Images/Rita/Even Less Prints/${1}"
> >> md5sum -b "/media/windoze/Documents and
> >> Settings/Owner/My
> >> Documents/Images/Rita/Olympus/${1}"
> >> md5sum -b "/media/windoze/Documents and
> >> Settings/Owner/My
> >> Documents/Images/Rita/Even Less Prints/${1}"
> >>
> >>
> >> bigbird at sananda:~/bin$ bash chkpix P8063647.JPG
> >> cmp:  "/media/windoze/Documents and Settings/Owner/My
> >> Documents/Images/Rita/Even Less Prints/P8063647.JPG":
> >> No such file or
> >> directory
> >> -rwxrwxr-x 1 root ntfs-3g 634499 2008-08-06 17:10
> >> /media/windoze/Documents and Settings/Owner/My
> >> Documents/Images/Rita/Olympus/P8063647.JPG
> >> -rwxrwxr-x 1 root ntfs-3g 634499 2008-08-16 22:05
> >> /media/windoze/Documents and Settings/Owner/My
> >> Documents/Images/Rita/Even Less Prints/P8063647.JPG
> >> 5a54b325abb196f4806edb5d7a4cbf2b */media/windoze/Documents
> >> and
> >> Settings/Owner/My
> >> Documents/Images/Rita/Olympus/P8063647.JPG
> >> 5a54b325abb196f4806edb5d7a4cbf2b */media/windoze/Documents
> >> and
> >> Settings/Owner/My Documents/Images/Rita/Even Less
> >> Prints/P8063647.JPG
> >> bigbird at sananda:~/bin$
> >>
> >> bigbird at sananda:~/bin$ cmp "/media/windoze/Documents
> >> and
> >> Settings/Owner/My
> >> Documents/Images/Rita/Olympus/P8063647.JPG"
> >> "/media/windoze/Documents and Settings/Owner/My
> >> Documents/Images/Rita/Even Less Prints/P8063647.JPG"
> >> bigbird at sananda:~/bin$
> >>
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> >>     
> >
> >
> >       
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