[Workaround] Improve imported image quality

[badinsults]

Hey, this has been driving me nuts, and my searches have been fruitless. I am creating a presentation in Impress, and the images I import are imported at a very low resolution and look terrible. I've tried importing with different image formats (png, gif, jpg), and they all have jaggies and defects when imported. Are there any settings to force Openoffice to import the images without decreasing the resolution?

As an aside, is there any way to force resizing of images and objects to maintain aspect ratio?

[RoryOF]

Normally I find images of about half the screen resolution will stretch to full screen with OK quality, provided they are pictorial images, not fine-line detail. If I am preparing a presentation from very large resolution images I normally resample them in a bitmap editing program to 1.5 times my screen resolution (1024 x 768, so I import as 1536 x 1152 ish).

If you insert your image and drag a corner handle while holding Shift key it maintains its proportions.

[badinsults]

Ok, I think I found the problem. I made these images for my masters thesis about 2 years ago, and I didn't realize how large they were (they were basically exported png files from original Corel Draw images). It seems that Openoffice has problems resizing images that large that contain text and lines. This problem isn't restricted to Openoffice, Gimp has the exact same issue. The workaround I have is to do a view resize in Gimp, take a screenshot of the window, then crop out the image at the size I want it. What a pain.

[RoryOF]

I have Corel on one Windows machine as most of my graphics files are Coreldraw/Photopaint. I use Photopaint to crop, resampling the image down to the sizes given before, then import as tif or jpg (usually) into Impress. If I download a smaller image from the web I stretch it in Impress, but always check its quality before moving on (two screen setup). If the quality is too bad, I search again until I find a higher resolution, which I often can.

[badinsults]

I tried exporting the presentation as a PDF, and the exported images look perfect. Go figure.

The only issue is that my presentation has custom animations in slides, and that doesn't translate well into a PDF. Is there any way to export it so that each animation is exported as a single slide?

[RoryOF]

I can't help on the subject of the .pdf file.

With regard to your quality, it strikes me that your manipulations in Gimp are not the best. I'm not a Gimp expert, but you should be able to Import your Corel image, crop it to the content you require, save that as a new image, then finally Scale it to the resolution you need or better, before placing this image in Impress. Your loss of quality may be because you are capturing a View resize rather than directly manipulating your file.

[Cambirder]

This problem isn't restricted to Openoffice, Gimp has the exact same issue.

Gimp can handle large files, so I suspect it may be your technique rather than a limitation in Gimp. Any chance you could upload one of these image files to a file sharing site such as MediaFire ?

[jruhym]

I tried exporting the presentation as a PDF, and the exported images look perfect. Go figure.

That was the key for me. I then opened my .pdf in GIMP, selected 300 DPI anti-aliased, auto-cropped it, and converted it to a .png from there. Extra steps but it does look a lot better than the .png exported from, in my case, Draw.

[John_Ha]

the images I import are imported at a very low resolution and look terrible. I've tried importing with different image formats (png, gif, jpg), and they all have jaggies and defects when imported.

That's because the images have too few pixels. You need images with more pixels. AOO does not change an image pixel count when you import it.

it does look a lot better than the .png exported from ... Draw.

You can specify the image pixel count (actually the dpi) when exporting from Draw - you have specified too low a value.

See [Tutorial] Some useful hints on using images for a discussion on how best to handle images.