You can easily put two picture files together with just a few clicks
You can easily put two picture files together with just a few clicks
Hey, what's the easiest way to fix this without losing too much picture quality? I have two separate .jpg files (one for the top and one for the bottom). For now, I'm using Windows Paint like this: I open both photos in Paint and make them look big by zooming out. On the top half, I drag down the border of the image to stretch it so it's almost twice as long as before. To fix the bottom file, I choose Select All and then Copy, before pasting it into the stretched space. When I put it all together, I noticed that the quality on the bottom is way worse than the top... What can I do to make the whole thing look better? Do you think something's wrong with my trick?
Windows Paint is not great at this. paint.net looks like a much better choice, and it's free too. Paint.NET lets you edit pictures on computers that run Windows. You can get it here or from GIMP. But getting used to it might take a while. GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program: The Free and Open Source Image Editor. You can find it at www.gimp.org
Windows Paint is not good enough here. There are much better options like paint.net, which is also free. Both programs offer free software for editing pictures on computers that run Windows. You can find them online at getpaint.net or gimp.org. However, the learning curve with GIMP might be quite steep.
Any time you do something with JPGs that isn't lossless, you'll either end up making your picture worse because it's being re-encoded, or you have to choose a larger file size if you want the original quality.
Save your original photos as high-quality files like tifs or bmps...if possible in Paint. I don't do that much editing myself. Instead, edit and mess around with those tifs or bmps rather than jpegs. When you're done editing, maybe resave the tif or bmp as a jpeg if you have to, but it's better to keep them as tifs or bmps so there is less quality loss. At small sizes, you probably won't be able to tell the difference between them.
Irfanview Go to image, select create panorama, add your images, and sort them, then you are done. When you go to file and save as..., a window pops up letting you pick the quality settings for the final picture. It takes a lot of trying and making mistakes to get the best balance between size and quality.
Depending on some specific situations, you can completely loselessly merge two files using the hex editor. You just need to put RST markers there first. To do this work, both pictures must be exactly the same width. The height of the first picture has to be a multiple of the MCU height (usually 8 pixels). Both pictures use baseline Huffman codes. They also have to rely on the exact same Huffman and Quantization tables.