GIF to JPEG

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I hope that I’m posting this in the right place. I need to change some pics from GIF to JPEg format. Does anybody have a relatively painless way for a newbie to get this done?

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Are you talking about a large number of files? If so, many graphcs programs have a Batch option that will convert a large number of files automatically.

Otherwise, you can use almost any graphics application to Open and Save As… into the format you’re looking for.

One shareware program that comes to mind is IrFanView. There are certainly many others out there!

Post back if you need more help with a specific application.

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I don’t know about painless. That depends on how many images and if you need to do anything else with them. If it’s only a few and you’re just changing the file format, you could use the copy of Paint that comes with newer Windows versions (2K and XP, probably 98, ME) and can Save As… JPEG. Since you’re going from GIF to JPEG, the quality shouldn’t degrade too much.

For anything more than that, you might try geting a trial version from Ulead (PhotoImpact or PhotoExpress) or JASC (PaintShop Pro) that will handle the conversion, among other things. The nice thing about the trials is that you can also get a sense what’s available. PaintShop Pro has a batch conversion utility that’s very handy for jobs like this.

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And there’s always SuperJPG which comes in handy as an image viewer/slide show program but will batch process as well – and it’s only about $24 US…..

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Thanks to all. I have downloaded IRFAN View and used it to convert the GIFs to JPGs. That worked pretty well, although some of the images still are a little fuzzy. I’ve also downloaded the trial version of Paintshop – hopefully that can help with the fuzzy issue.

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Bob,

Keep in mind that GIFs are limited to 256 colors. If a GIF is fuzzy to begin with, converting it to a JPG will not help much. Once the file has been converted to a JPG it will support up to 32-bit color (16.7 Million colors), but it will only have the 256 colors it started with (plus any other “smoothing” that comes with JPG compression).

Hope this helps.

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JPEG uses “lossy” compression, which means you give up quality to reduce file size. The level of compression is adjustable, so you might try raising the quality setting and check to make sure the file size is still acceptable. In PaintShop Pro, I think the setting is in the Options for the Save As…, and probably there for the Batch Conversion too.

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In IrfanView, you can adjust the degree of compression using the Options button in the SaveAs dialog box. There’s also a tab for using lossless compression in JPEG2000 format, which I haven’t tried.

Sometimes resampling an image can help. Select Resize/Resample on the Image menu. You might also try this after Increase Color Depth (also on the Image menu). You can’t really get better “resolution” of a blurry image this way, but the eye can interpret increased color depth as equivalent to an increased pixels density.

You could also try the Sharpen command on the Image menu.

Good luck, and let us know if any of these techniques help.

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