Fixing Screenshots from Camera

[chaos]

In the creation of my tutorial for installing XP, I was forced to use my digital camera to take screenshots of the BIOS as well as the install routine. Unforutnately, these didn't turn out nearly as well as I had hoped for, and I am curious how I would go about fixing them. I read about a Descreen filter, but I don't believe I have that in Fireworks 8, and I have no idea how I would fix the fact that the rounded screen was messing w/ the camera.

Here's a sample of the problem (long loading time):
http://www.jacobschaer.com/IWDN/PICT1967.JPG
http://www.jacobschaer.com/IWDN/PICT1988.JPG

[Christina]

Installing Windows XP? It's pretty self explanetory I think as it already has a walk-through for installation. If you're really into doing this though, there's not much you can do to help your actual camera pics other than trying to de-interlace them with a filter that is common in Photoshop (not sure about the others). But more than likely, you're going to have to cope with your results.

[chaos]

Self explanatory? I think there are a ton of holes in their explanation. This isn't a tutorial for what to do within the XP installation, but rather how completely reset a computer to factor settings with all of the necessary drivers and files. Obviously it can't be that simple, as many people don't know what a partition is :lol: Basically I am almost skipping the well-documented path of telling the computer your name, and time zone, and talking about configuring the BIOS to boot from CD, and determining what drivers you need for your machine. The goal is to make this process simplified to ~2 hours.

[Christina]

Ahh okay. What about the folks that have jumped to Vista? :lol:

[chaos]

Good point, and I have considered this. However, I know many people still using '98, and with me preaching to people not to upgrade yet, I think many people will still need to be able to reset their XP machines. I didn't intend to show this off quite yet, but here is a preview of what I have written.

http://jacobschaer.com/Tutorial.pdf

Notice: I have not even looked over this yet once, so this is very rough.

[inimino]

I think you can make them a little more legible with a few adjustments.

http://mjclement.com/images/etc/PICT1967_2.JPG

I did a couple things to this:


Adjust brightness and contrast up (a lot).
Use gaussian blur, 6 pixels vertical only, to get rid of the moiré effect from the scanlines.


This is only about 2 minutes in the Gimp, but it shows that at least some improvement is possible.

[chaos]

That's awesome! Thanks for the advice inimino. I used to have the GIMP, but now I am definitely reinstalling it. There are a lot of technicalities I am finding with this whole tutorial, and you have just solved the biggest one so far.

Off-Topic: The darn MS EULA is making my attempts to make/distribute an XP OEM disk is impossible. Basically I just realized how few rights anyone actually owns to their own copy of XP. It's no wonder MS is so rich if they can get away with requiring the purchase of an entire OS when you change motherboards. Enough ranting though. :lol:

[Christina]

You should also note that doing the changes with the larger sized photo and then resizing down to something like 640x480 may produce a clearer image as well.