Dear Cool Ones,
I have scanned an old newspaper front page (Taranaki Herald, Wed 5-Feb-1962), resulting in nine overlapping monotone images at 300dpi. The problem is that the previewed image, after compositing, shows the complete caption below the photo in the bottom-left corner and the exported PNG (or TIFF) does not, it is a different image.
Two of the scans relating to the problem area are very similar with one showing the photo and half the caption (sliced horizontally), the other showing the complete caption and a lot of noisy white space beneath. The two images in question are closely, vertically aligned. In the original, the caption in question is followed by noisy white space. It appears that the preview is using one image (with the complete caption) and the export is using the other image (caption sliced in half horizonatally).
I have reproduced the problem with four of the images in question, have a screen-shot of the preview as well as the exported version (Planar 1), the project file, and a screen-shot of the ICE 'about' screen (v1.2r1, built Nov 25 2008 16:39:5), 9356 KB zipped. If anyone wants to look at it, please tell me where to send it.
I am very impressed with ICE, and am now a regular user. Congratulations to the team that created it. I have searched but not discovered if this problem has already been reported - apologies if it has.
Regards Warrick
Hi Warrick,
This is a good question and I don't think that we've addressed this yet in the forum. Unfortunately ICE right now does have the behavior that the preview can differ from the final output. The technical reason for this is that we don't re-use the results from the image-selection/blending phase of the processing between preview and output. We re-run this at the output resolution and the technique ends up making some different decisions. We hope to address this in a future version so that preview really is what you see in the output. Even further out it would be nice to allow users to select what input images they want to see in the composite.
I'm sorry that I can't suggest a way to work around this in the current version of ICE.
Thanks Matt.
I have now, several times had the discrepancy between preview and output. Perhaps the precision of recognition of printed-matter scans means there are image choices that are sort-of equally weighted, i.e. either fit the knit criteria.
It is not a big issue as I have modified my manual scanning process (how I position the larger newspaper page on the smaller scanner) and the problem now does not arise. I guess the immediate solution is, if the output is critical, check the exported version, don't rely on the preview image.