Vertical Lines in Images

[seacue]

A nephew created a CD of 503 images of my brother's family slide collection (whew!). Lacking a slide scanner, the images were digitized by projectiing them onto a screen and photographing with a two-megapixel digital camera. Gasp!

Each JPEG image is about 400 kilobytes.

Many look surprisingly good when viewed by the builtin viewer in Win XP.

With any other software, most have a serious narrow vertical line pattern (especially nearer both left and right edges). I've tried IrfanView, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe PhotoDeluxe, iPPlus4, and Photomax SE. The problem exists in Netscape and OE5.

I've tried bluring, but picture quality degrades long before the line pattern. I've tried rotating by 45 degrees and blurring a little, which helps a lot - but I'm not about to do that to 503 images. Resizing to a different number of pixels often results in terrible moire' patterns.

What is the magic used by the XP viewer? I'm pretty sure that the problem isn't isn't related to hardware, since IrfanView has just as bad results on an XP machine where XP's builtin viewer works fine.

Is the XP viewer available for older versions of Windows?

My brother uses ME (and OE5 IIRC). Maybe the latest version of OE would be the answer?

I've offered to rescan a small fraction of the slides on a real slide scanner.

Any other suggestions? Please!

SC

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

seacue,

Since the WinXP Viewer by default fits the pixs to the size of your screen, you might not be seeing it. Try within the WinXP Viewer clicking CTRL+A, which will make the picture show its actual size.

Let me know if you can see this line then?

Take Care,

Richard

P.S. That line you are seeing could be the reflection off the wall of the projectors light source.

[seacue]

Thanks Richard, but Ctrl+A made little difference with the XP viewer. The picture is still OK, though not perfect.

And the problem isn't "the line", there are dozens of closely-space light/dark vertical stripes. The stripes are really just a modulation of the image brightness. Sorry for the poor initial description.

I'm guessing that the source of the problem could be if the pics were projected onto a beaded screen and there is a "beat" between the bead spacing and the camera's pixel grid. But how does the XP viewer suppress this effect?

If only the nephew had "done it right" in the first place and didn't have so much time invested in the CD.

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

seacue,

Could you link a picture so we could see what is happening? (I just hope the picture is work safe.) :eek:

Take Care,

Richard