fengshui images

[rahulkothari]

i would be very greatful if anyone could help me out with this problem. i searched on google, picsearch, altavista, thru copernic, but all i found was these tiny low resolution images. i require a similar image(shown below) having resolution more than 300*300.

its called ba gua or pa kua or in simple english "fengshui mirrors".

[kayofcircles]

My friend is the expert on the feng shui stuff. I asked her about your question..and she doesn't know about finding the images you want on the Net, but she recommended you check out The Feng Shui Institute (http://www.windwater.com/) and said that you can either purchase the "I-Ching, Book of Changes" or go to your local library and ask for that book. She says it is pronounced "eee-ching"...lol..so you don't "sound" like you don't know what you're asking for. Then you can get someone with a scanner to do the image you want in the resolution you're wanting.

There was a special on PBS this week on the feng shui..and my friend is helping us "re-do" and "repair" parts of our house..lol. Was teasing my husband last night...because she "counts" the garage as part of our "outline" and most of our "love and marriage" section is in the garage! Told my husband I am gonna have to put some of "me" in the garage...not just his toolboxes and work benches and such...lol. Maybe some nice curtains on those windows..maybe a couple of pics..:D You should have seen the "look" on his face!...

[rahulkothari]

thanks for the reply. i checked out the site but didnt find the required image. its 1:00 am here ... so maybe i will check again tommorow morning and find something useful... maybe some useful links.
thanks anyways.. tell me if you have more links / any material related to fengshui.

btw, there are some really cool windchimes on this site ... www.fengshuistore.com

[Whyzman]

http://taotaichi.info/iching2.html

[kayofcircles]

I didn't see any pics at that Institute either. Whyzman's link looks good, but I can't get it to load at all. I am thinking, though, that what you want is going to be a bit difficult to find on the Net because 300x300 "resolution" is generally way too big, file size wise, for the Net. Plus, the jpeg compression most often used will affect quality too..depending on what you plan to do with the image. I still think that your best bet is obtaining a book with the image, then scanning it..or having a friend do that, but then would run into a "transfer" problem because of file size. I may be misunderstanding though..you did mean 300x300 resolution, not 300x300 pixels? Because "pixels" is a whole different ballgame, and one could maybe find that on the Net.

[Whyzman]

I thought it was pixels Kay! The image I found is 500X500...slightly bigger. But it depends on what the image is to be used for as far as search and what quality. The image furnished by rahulkothari is pretty high tech!

[malcore]

oops, wrong image

[Whyzman]

http://architecture.about.com/library/nbagua.htm

[kayofcircles]

Whyzman ..I am forced to display my ignorance, checked Google, and got garbage..so what does "Petitor Sophiae" mean? Latin for something?

rahulkothari : If you did mean pixels, and one of the pics off Whyzman's site is acceptable to you, then you or someone else could just downsize it. My friend who has the IChing book doesn't have a scanner, or the knowledge...and I have the scanner and the knowledge, but no book and no library....:)

Edit: You said that you did a Google? Because I just got tons of pics off a Google Image search...and one of the pakua gifs was approx the right size (if you do mean 300 pixels), and a nice image, I thought... pakua gif (http://thegeomancer.netfirms.com/images/pakua.gif)

[Whyzman]

Kay,

Solomon already had it...I am a "Seeker of Wisdom!" ;)

I just took rahulkothari's image into Paint and stretched it a bit. Got to about 400X300 before real noticeable degradation in the image....again, it depends on what it's to be used for! :)

[rahulkothari]

thx everyone for the replies.

Actually my dad's best friend (or my best friend's dad) is a fenshui consultant. he is preparing a slideshow(in powerpoint) for presenting before an "alien" audience (few press reporters may also come ... so the presentation has to be neat) in a gulf country. so i m just helping him with slides and stuff.

ok now back to topic. this pixel thing has always confused me :(. he(read my dad's best friend)wants this bagua /pakua pic to be printed on his business card. so he gave the pic to our local card-printer, but dat guy said the pic is too small. it should be atleast 300*300 resolution.

i checked the properties of the image.
width: 142
height: 142
hor res: 72
ver res: 72

now, i dont know wat reloution he is talking about ... the size of the image that is 300 pixels width and 300 pixels ht. or the resolution i.e. 72 pix per inch * 72 pix per inch.

wat do you guys think ? i think it should be size: 300(width)*300(ht) and not resolution. some of you may be having graphic images on your business cards. so plz tell me wat exactly dat guy at the card-shop is referring to as i cannot contact him directly...

kay, i checked out the links by whyzman but i could only access the homepage. other interesting links didnt work ... although i will definitely try after some time. i asked him about scanning images from fengshui books, but he said he cant copy images from his "master's" books (i.e. Yep Cheng Hai)

whyzman, could you plz mail me (rahulroshan@rediffmail.com) the pic or give the URL from where you downloaded it ?

[kayofcircles]

I have never done a business card, but my guess would be that the shop means resolution in this case...wanting 300x300 resolution..because the image on the actual card should not be very big..inch wise, or centimeter wise. However, you should be able to take the above image, or Whyzman's, and increase resolution. Okay, I just did that with PSP, and resulting image is .47 inches square..but might be about right for business card. Since a lot of the above pic is black background, the "inside" part is even smaller than the .47. Don't have time now, but if you want, I can send you a .bmp file...cuz even the PSP file is only like 57K because image is so small.

[Fruss Tray Ted]

Slides for an overhead projector, or video on a monitor or Big Screen from PowerPoint?

Does the Printshop mean "dpi" (something 'd'? 'p'er 'i'nch) as in something regarding how a printer/scanner or ink cartridge is scaled by?

I would think size is irrelative to picture 'quality' (though I wouldn't want to be viewing great artworks on the head of a pin :eek: ). Fine points like spikes and corners can become squared off or beveled by jpeg's lousy resolution with pixels and low kilobytes normally. A bitmap or other form of picture is most likely the higher quality/resolution the printshop is looking for. This way it can be 'blown up'/enlarged and the detail isn't lost as readily.

You must realise the text you are looking at in the fengshui image is part of a picture and no longer text so the finer points of text, ESPECIALLY the artwork such that Chinese text contains can be SERIOUSLY degraded while transferring from source to final print especially if in some low kilobyte form such as .jpg's.

So I would refine the search to bitmaps or maybe saving the whole webpage (which I usually find the images within get saved as bitmaps) rather than choosing 'Save As' a .jpeg because it will lose most of it's true definition immediately at the press of a button.

Sorry, not much help in the search but hope my two cents worth helps you in some way...

[rahulkothari]

Sorry for the super-late reply. :p Actually i was awaiting the reply of your questions from my "feng-shui" uncle to whom i met just today.

He managed to scan a dragon's pic from some other source (i know he is not completely satisfied) and print it on his business card. So, the quesion regarding DPI is still unanswered as i cant contact that card-printer guy directly.

Fruss:So I would refine the search to bitmaps or maybe saving the whole webpage (which I usually find the images within get saved as bitmaps) rather than choosing 'Save As' a .jpeg because it will lose most of it's true definition immediately at the press of a button.

but most of the images on web are jpeg and not bitmap. So even if i save the images as .bmp, wont make any difference. Quality of an image degrades when converted from bmp to jpg. So, when a jpeg on a webpage is saved as bmp doesnt improve the quality.
Please correct me if i am wrong.

[Paul Komski]

We've been here before regarding pixels! Pixels have no size whatsoever - all they contain is data. A 142 x 142 pixel image contains 142 x 142 = 20164 pieces of information; in this case each pixel holds 24 bits of color information. If you zoom into the image you will be able to see all 20164 of the colored squares.

These squares (and the image) can be made bigger or smaller by zooming the image and that will decrease or increase the resolution without affecting the number of pixels or the material size of the file.

The image's set resolution of 72 pixels/inch means that at 100% magnification it will be (142/72) or almost exactly 2 square inches.

Increasing resolution just results in a smaller image and vice versa. DPI for a printer is something different altogether since a dot (which has dimensions) is not a pixel (which is dimensionless in size).

[kayofcircles]

:D Paul ...sheesh. Your "DPI for a printer is something different altogether since a dot (which has dimensions) is not a pixel (which is dimensionless in size)." lost me, and I know my way around pictures...lol There was a monitor display question here months ago that I should have saved so that I could "study" occasionally the "mysteries of the Universe"...pretty sure it was Rick or Ghost that explained that pixels had no reality. That's real easy for me to comprehend...yes, indeed.:)

rahulkothari : I am assuming that your original problem has been dealt with? Since you said uncle has gotten scanned image and gotten business card printed? I still think it was probably image resolution in this case..they wanted better resolution, which in higher end printers can produce better quality pics. When you do an Image search at Google, you can look at the file ends and see whether or not the image is a bmp file or a jpeg file. But, truthfully, we might need someone like Whyzman to advise here because I am uncertain as to ethics involved. Many places allow one to take pics off their Website "for personal use" but I am unsure as to whether a business card is in that category???

[rahulkothari]

yes, the original problem has been dealt with (quite unsuccessfully :( )

and the pic for the business card has been taken from some encyclopedia or some book. atleast thats what the uncle said.... coz he cant go and shoot a pic of some dragon with his kodak camera ;) and if he were to do that he will have to "create" a dragon first. :D ... hey anyone got dragon's DNA ??? :p infact dragons like the one on his old business card never existed, its all mythology. i havent had a chance to see the new one yet.

kay, this post (http://www.pcguide.com/ubb/Forum8/HTML/000739.html) might help understand pixels and resolution better. (though i am still a bit confused :confused: )

[Paul Komski]

An image file doesn't contain images; only information. Its headers contain information about how many pixels it can use to "draw" an image, how much information each pixel may use for the color, (and other stuff that relates to the file format and compression method and so on). The pixels part should be only be though of as a mathematical array of stored information.

Consider storing the bitmap information of an 8 x 8 array of "pixels" in a spreadsheet like excel. The information would be limited to cells A1 to H8. One might fill in A1=red, A2=green, A3=pink.. etc.

Let this imaginary image file also define the required image to be 8 pixels per inch and store that information in the spreadsheet's header (another part of the image file but not within the spreadsheet array).

Take a deflated party baloon and draw an 8 x 8 grid on it. This grid should be 1 inch square if the header information is followed. Then, referring to the spreadsheet, color in the squares appropriately.

You can "print/paint" this information into the squares using small dots or large dots (this relates to the dpi). When you have finished you will have an 8 x 8 image the granularity of which will depend on the size of the dots used to print/display it - but it will still only have used 64 pixels in all.

Now inflate the baloon (zoom in/stretch/etc); the pixel information still has not changed (nor has the data in the image file) but the image will have enlarged and the resolution will have decreased - that is crucial to understand - and should not be confused with the resolution capabilities of the human eye.

When printing/displaying the enlargement it would be more analagous to computer hardware if the baloon was inflated only after the grid alone had been "sketched" on it. After inflation, the display would be then be refreshed/repainted using the same information from the pixels/array/imagefile and with as many dots per inch that the display or printer had been set-up for. But yet again only 64 pixels would have been used - those bits of information with no dimensions of their own.

That's the best I think I can do to get the concept of a pixel across.

The squares we see in a "pixelated" image may well have a measurable size and be called pixels and to the human eye may appear as "square dots" but they are no more than a square area of uniform color; each square being displayed by one or many real dots; and each square merely being the result of how the software has been written; they are virtual squares - even if they appear to be real! :D

[kayofcircles]

rahulkothari : Thanks for link...that was the thread I was talking about above, and I enjoyed rereading it even though the monitor display stuff still baffles me just a bit.

I work mostly with print, and unfortunately for you, am not good with metrics..but it's fairly simple to explain in inches. Say you have a 3 inch pic..3 inches by 3 inches. If you scan that pic at 100 resolution, you get 300x300 pixels. (3 inches times 100 pixels per inch, okay?) Total file size reflects that 300x300..hence 90,000 pixels. Okay, say you scan it at 200 resolution..then 200 times 3 inches..so 600x600 pixels, and a total of 360,000 pixels. Notice the dramatic increase in file size..because that's where newbies tend to make their mistakes by not realizing the huge difference that resolution (pixels per printed inch) makes in file size. As Paul points out, each pixel in a file (a pic file) has it's own "coding"..to make it simple, the code says "this much" blue, "this much" red, "this much" green to display the color of that pixel. Let's say that you have scanned that 3 inch square pic in the 200 resolution, and you want to enlarge it. If you have a program to do that, it's really simple to just tell your program to change resolution to 100 pixels per inch, and poof, you have divided your 600x600 by 100 resolution, and now have 6 inches by 6 inches in print.

Monitor display "measures" differently, as explained in that previous thread, and varies according to size of monitor and resolution of monitor (which is not quite the same sort of thing as print resolution). I haven't worked with Web pages yet..so inexperienced, but assume that although a person has no control over "size" of displayed pic, one would have control over how much of the page size the pic consumes, and most definitely the file size. For the Web, you really need to grasp the concept of file size!

Sniff and wail...just went to my favorite "educational" website to get you a link to a LARGE web pic so you could see the difference in download speed and size of file and display size...but it's gone. Sniffle...they had wonderful, free for personal use, wildlife pics in 200 resolution..sob.

[Paul Komski]

I think it is unfortunate (though understandable) that the word resolution has been taken up and used so widely with respect to computer graphics. This is because how and what is being resolved is not the same for different hardware and software; yet the same term is used throughout. In the end, what we can actually see or perceive is the resolution that matters most of all.

In many instances the word grid might be a much better substitute and less open to misunderstanding. To state that a monitor display with a resolution of 800x600 was in fact simply a programmable grid with 800x600 squares seems (to me) a much clearer concept. Each of those squares can only be given one depth of colour, be there one or many phosphor dots within each square.

When scanning, the imaginary programmable grid would be placed over the image; such a grid's dimensions having been pre-set. Even though the scanner could detect many points of light and color in each square it can only store one value/average for that square in the array of its image file.

When printing, the same imaginary grid is laid out and the printer fills in the grid in whatever way it has been programmed to do, using rows of much smaller dots of "paint", each row separated by the lpi of the printer settings.

So I humbly recommend conceiving of grids (which can be stetched or contracted) the sqares of which relate to specified positions in the array of stored information. A pixel then just becomes a relationship; a relationship between a grid-square and its associated data source. A pixel can then become any size or color you like because it is a totally imaginary thing.

As for WebPages!! There are so many ways to manipulate images that its not worth starting. At the simplest they will display like any image file - but at 100% of the zoom size for that monitor. The "grid" would be set by the image's headers, but could have been squeezed or stretched inside a "box", or thumbnailed, etc, etc. Happy imaging everyone! :D

[rahulkothari]

Paul, your ballon-pixel explaination was superb. simply superb... rather simple and superb. now i have this pixel thing nailed firmly into my head. :cool:

Kay, thanks for the explaination.... i understood the concept of dpi, how can we increase and decrease the resolution of an image and more importantly you explained the concept in plain words. :)

now only i could talk to that printer-guy directly .... :mad:

EDIT: hey if anyone wants some high-resolution beautiful animal and nature pics, mail me. i will be glad to share them.