We recommend a minimum of 128Mb of virtual
memory on your system, or 2 x physical memory for systems
with more than 64Mb. If you're going to work with very large
images, you may need to increase it even more. However, access
to such very large images without enough physical memory will
be quite slow.
To check the amount of physical memory on
your system:
Right-click My Computer, and select
Properties. The General tab shows the amount of physical
memory on your system.
If you have plenty of free disk space on your
C: drive, you can let Windows manage your virtual memory.
However, this does cause the system to run somewhat slower,
as Windows has to increase and decrease the swap file size
as memory is allocated and released. Other problems with letting
Windows manage virtual memory:
- Once other things make less disk space
available on your C: drive, the amount of virtual memory
available will decrease.
- The virtual memory file is much likelier
to be fragmented, further reducing VM performance.
- The virtual memory file will always be
on the C: drive. You may want to put it on a different drive
or partition to free up space on C:.
To check and set your Virtual Memory settings:
Right-click My Computer and select
Properties. From the Performance tab, click
Virtual Memory.
- Let Windows Manage My Virtual Memory
Settings This will place the virtual memory file (a.k.a.
pagefile or swapfile) on your C: drive, and Windows will
increase and decrease its size depending on requirements.
While Microsoft recommends this option, it's not the best
one for doing lots of graphics work.
- Let Me Specify My Own Virtual Memory
Settings Using this option, you can select the drive
and size of the VM file. If you have multiple disk drives
on your system, select the fastest drive that has enough
free space.
Minimum: 128Mb or 2 x physical memory (or
more for large images)
Maximum: same as minimum
By setting the minimum and maximum to the
same size, the amount of virtual memory you need or want is
always available, and the file is likely to not become as
fragmented.
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Hold down the ALT button and press the Print
Screen button in the upper right hand corner of the keyboard.
This will copy to the clipboard a screen shot of the active
window. If you want a screen shot of the entire screen, just
press the Print Screen button without holding down the ALT
button. Once you have copied the screen shot to the clipboard,
go into ThumbsPlus and go to Edit | Paste. This
will paste the screen shot into a ThumbsPlus view window.
In the view window, go to File | Save As to
name and save the file.
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If you plan to edit, crop or adjust them,
I recommend storing in LZW TIFF format. This format is widely
supported and provides good compression. Storing with separate
color channels sometimes improves the compression ratio, but
is not supported by all applications. For compatibility with
applications that do not support LZW TIFF, I recommend PackBits
compressed TIFF or Targa.
If your image is "final form," and
you do not intend to edit it further, JPEG is a reasonable
option for storage. It offers excellent compression, but there
is some loss of image accuracy associated with it. I recommend
a quality setting of between 70 and 90.
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GIF or TIFF work well for these. TGA, PCX
and BMP can also be used; BMP loads the fastest but is not
compressed.
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We recommend TIFF with CCITT Group 4 compression.
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The JPEG format is designed to compress real-world
24-bit color images. GIF files have already been reduced (usually
by dithering) to 256-color (8-bit), so most of the original
color information is lost. When they are converted to JPEG,
the sharp transitions between neighboring pixels are not handled
very well. The Smoothing option in the Save JPEG
Options dialog box may improve the situation somewhat.
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ThumbsPlus quickly dithers 24-bit images for
display on 8-bit displays. This does not show the true color
detail of the original file; you will get much better display
results by running a Truecolor (24-bit) or Highcolor (16 bit)
display driver, if you can for your display adapter.
Note that you can set JPEG files to load as
8-bit images, using a dithering algorithm in the JPEG library
which is better (but a bit slower) than the internal dithering.
PhotoCD files may also be dithered to 8-bits while loading.
Both of these loading options are available from the Options
| File Loading property sheet.
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When you are saving as a JPEG, make sure you
are not saving the file using the Use Original Quality
option or that you are not smoothing the image. When saving
the JPEG, you will receive a screen that reads Save JPEG
Options. Make sure the Use Original Quality option
is not checked and the settings on this screen are 75%
Quality and 0% Smoothing. This will give you the
smallest, prettiest JPEG image. These settings will now be
the default jpg saving options. Note that you can do this
in batch also. Just choose jpg as the output format and choose
the same settings as above. 
When saving JPEG files, you can now (release
v4.50) select the horizontal and vertical sub-sampling to
use for chrominance, from 1:1 (highest quality) to 4:2 (highest
compression). The values for loaded files are shown with the
quality in the View Window status line.
JPEG format should not be used for "works
in progress." Re-saving JPEG files introduces another
generation of loss error. We suggest saving your files as
TIFFs (LZW-compressed) during interim steps, and only convert
to JPEG for external release (i.e., to a Web page).
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Resolution usually specifies how an image
was generated; for example, if it was scanned in, the resolution
tells how many dots (pixels) per inch (DPI) or dots per centimetre
(DPC) were used in the scanning process.
Resolution may also specify a recommended
size for output; for example, an image that is 600 by 600
pixels may be specified at 300 DPI to print as 2 inches by
2 inches (600 dots / 300 dpi = 2 inches). Some page layout
and word processing programs use the DPI to size a graphic
when pasted from the clipboard or loaded from a file.
Regardless of how resolution is obtained,
it has no effect on the actual disk
size of the file. The disk size depends solely on the dimensions
of the image in pixels, the file format, and the compression
amount.
ThumbsPlus retains the resolution for file
types that support it, and converts to the units for file
types it saves in. T+ itself does not use the resolution at
all.
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If you zoom to actual pixels in Photoshop
you will see the same graininess. You are actually seeing
the grains in the negative.
In ThumbsPlus, to get the view you desire,
go to Options | Viewing | Appearance and
check Resample images when reduced. Now go
to the Window tab in the same dialog and
choose Reduce to window under Initial
stretching. Your view will now be as it is in Photoshop.
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