Introduction

Scaler & Croppitt is a program which enables you to scale and crop: to cut unwanted parts from pictures and change the size to suit your needs.

This simple five-step utility lets you:

You can use it to:

The five steps guide beginners through the whole process:

Step 1: Choose your picture

Step 2: Choose your finished size

Step 3: Edit your picture

Step 4: Check your picture

Step 5: Save your picture

Installation

Installation is a four-stage process:

Scaler & Croppitt can be uninstalled at any time by using Windows' Add/Remove Programs.

Quick start

The rules are straightforward:

Scaler & Croppitt in depth

About digital pictures

Digital pictures can be photographs taken with a digital camera or brought into the computer with a scanner. They can be screen grabs or pictures created with an art program. They are stored as bitmaps and come in a variety of file formats - BMP, JPG, GIF, for example - each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages. No matter what the file format, digital pictures are made up of hundreds, thousands or millions of squares called pixels. Pixels vary in size and sizes are related to the resolution of your screen. Machines running Windows 3.1 generally displayed screens of 650 x 480 pixels, while more modern equipment can display 800 x 600 or higher on a 15" monitor. Generally speaking, the higher the resolution, the better the picture as the picture will be made up of smaller pixels. When a picture on screen uses large pixels - the sort of blobs that news programs use to mask people's identities - details become lost and edges can become jagged, or pixellated. If your picture is the French flag with strong verticals, you're not going to notice much difference, but the Union Flag would suffer.

Mr Croppitt and Mr Scaler demonstrate the perils of pixellation

The size of the pixels becomes important if you intend printing a digital picture. In this case pixels are translated to dots and it becomes important just how many dots can be fitted into an inch (or centimetre, but high street printers are rather old-fashioned). Commercial printers require all pictures to be supplied to them at a minimum of 300 dots per inch, and this sort of density is also quite good for your little inkjet printer. But you can get away with 150 dots per inch without the printout looking pixellated. A picture that looks perfectly good on screen (which translates to between 72 and 90 dots/pixels per inch) won't make a good printout without being reduced in size.

If you start with a picture that is only 100 pixels wide and use Scaler & Croppitt to rescale to 360 pixels wide, your finished picture is going to look very fuzzy, both on screen and on paper. Rather than just enlarging each pixel, Scaler & Croppitt create new pixels, working out the correct colours by looking at the colours of adjacent pixels. For the technically minded, this is called anti-aliasing and it helps reduce jagged edges, but it isn't going to produce perfect results.

Mr Croppitt and Mr Scaler, in their best anti-aliased attire, show that growth is not always good for the image

Pictures taken with a modest 3.2 megabit digital camera are generally much too large to use in any screen-based application, which means that many digital pictures have to be squeezed to fit on a screen. Many people try to force big pictures into small spaces on websites. This can be done without the picture suffering too much, but a better option is to reduce the overall size of the source picture and, therefore, its pixel density. This means that there is much less data to load without any loss of quality: we've all suffered from slow websites that take ages to download graphics.

The other formats that Windows machines use are WMF (Windows Metafile) and EMF (Enhanced Metafile). These files are made up of mathematical descriptions of the data they contain and can be scaled to any size without becoming pixellated. By definition, Scaler & Croppitt aren't needed to rescale this type of graphic. However, you can open emf or wmf files and Scaler & Croppitt will convert them into a bitmap format.

The JPG (or jpeg) format was designed to compress files because pictures make such big files. Unlike other compression techniques, the JPG system is 'lossy' - in other words, the formula deletes information it considers unneccesary and replaces it with information that takes up less space. Unfortunately, this can create what are called 'artefacts' in the picture. At 80% compression, you probably won't notice these unless you look for them. The problems arise when you resave a JPG, because you can get an 80% compression of a picture that's already had an 80% compression applied to it: you end up with something that's rather like doing a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.

The picture 1 was a JPG picture that was cropped and resized in Scaler & Croppitt and saved as a BMP file and resaved as a JPG with no compression. The picture 2 was saved as a JPG with compression and the differences are clear.

Although both pictures are the same size on the screen, picture 1's file is 4.5 times larger than picture 2's file.

Using the program

Some keystrokes modify the restrictions and these are outlined under each of the five Steps. You don't need a mouse: the keyboard can be used for all of the program controls. For example, you can press the appropriate number key to go to the next Step in the scale and crop process.

1 Choose your picture

If there is a bitmap image on the Clipboard, this will always be the first item in the browser, no matter where you go. This image updates dynamically so you can copy graphics at any time. A Clipboard selection is not displayed if there is no bitmap content. Scaler & Croppitt don't understand CONTROL + V (Paste) and CONTROL + C (Copy).

Keyboard assisters:

2 Choose the finished size

This is a list comprising pre-selected finished sizes.

The Jumble Fun series of programs from Resource Education prefer pictures to be 320 x 240 pixels, so this preset is in the list. The other named format is I Can Write/FrameWorks, which work best with graphics of 160 x 140 pixels for the Picture Prompts.

If you are preparing pictures to use as desktop wallpaper, you may want to use the 650 x 480 or 800 x 600 finished sizes (or add your own finished sizes to the list: see below).

Just crop – no scale will let you crop any picture but will not scale it to fit a prescribed finished size.

Some of the choices are greyed. These advanced options can only be selected while holding down the CONTROL key.

When you choose a finished size with both width and height specified, the marquee selector in the program will always be stretched proportionally. But if you are preparing a web page where you know the width (or height) that you have available, but don't mind about the other dimension, choose one of the options with only one dimension shown and the other marked with ?.

If you want to choose your own finished size, click on Choose your own size. You will be shown a dialogue box inviting you to enter sizes for either or both sides of your finished picture. To keep the program manageable, we have placed an upper limit of 9 million pixels for any picture. This is a very big picture.

The list of pre-selected finished sizes can be edited. If you chose the default installation, the full path of the file is:

C:\Program Files\ScalerAndCroppitt\sizes.txt.

This file can be edited in Notepad. The list described above will appear in the file as:

160¬140¬I Can Write/FrameWorks 

320¬240¬Jumble Fun

650¬480¬Small screen

800¬600¬Medium screen

100¬100¬Square

250¬?¬Fixed width, free height

?¬250¬Free width, fixed height

?¬?¬Choose your own size

The Just crop – no scale option is always added to the list by the software.

Any choice with a dimension given as ? will be greyed out on the screen unless the CONTROL key is held down.

Keyboard assisters:

Use the UP and DOWN CURSOR keys to move the highlighter and ENTER to select a highlighted item.

3 Edit your picture

Use the left mouse button to drag any of the marquee handles. Clicking and dragging in an area outside the marquee will close the existing selection and start a new one.

If you have chosen a fixed ratio for your finished picture, you can break out of the restriction by holding down the CONTROL key and dragging any of the handles. Scaler & Croppitt will still fit your picture into the selected size, giving you the option of filling empty space with black or stretching your selection to fit.

Keyboard assisters:

When you zoom into the picture and can no longer see the edges, hold down the SHIFT key and use the left mouse button to drag the visible part of the picture around the screen. If you have a scroller wheel on your mouse, you can use it to zoom in and out if you hold the CONTROL key down at the same time. Click with the scroller button to set the zoom to a 1:1 view. If you hold down the ALT key when zoomed in, the CURSOR keys will move the picture.

Other key operations include:

4 Check your picture

This step shows you a preview or your finished picture. If you chose a fixed size for your finished picture but changed the ratio of the marquee by holding down the CONTROL key, Scaler & Croppitt will still fit your picture into the selected size. The first view offered will fill empty space within the finished size with black. Click the Stretch to fit box at the top of the screen to force your selection to fill the finished size.

5 Save your picture

You can't create a new folder from within Scaler & Croppitt, so it's as well to plan ahead. The program uses a standard Windows menu bar, so you can minimise the window while you go and make a folder in a suitable place. When you return to Scaler & Croppitt, the display will update itself to reflect your changes.

You can choose to save your picture in most bitmap file formats. By default, Scaler & Croppitt will save your cropped and scaled picture in the same format as your source picture. (EMF and WMF files will be converted to BMP.) If you type in a recognised suffix, your picture will be saved in a matching format. Pressing the MENU key will pop up a file format menu so you can simply click on a suitable one.

Keyboard assisters:

Press I to cycle through the location information shown at the top of the screen. There are three options: no information, current folder name only, full pathname of the current folder.

Pressing TAB will move the focus to the picture browser pane or the file name box. When you have typed a name for the file, click the OK button or press ENTER. If you press ENTER with an existing picture highlighted, the program will replace the existing picture with your new one and use the existing name.