LCD display 64 bits by 112

[lapland]

Tourism group in southern Iowa bought an LCD display that is approx 5' tall by 8' wide. Specifically 64 bits tall and 112 bits wide. I have been in charge of its operation since it's purchase over a year ago and it works fairly well. My problem is I am NOT an artist, nor the least bit artistic. I would like it to be special. It can handle various images and videos, and many I can simply convert so they will work. I recently found that MS Word has a somewhat limited word art that does some creative effects to text that I can then bring in as graphics. It sometimes works, but are there any fairly simple tricks in Paint.NET that I can do to make images, videos, etc that would make it stand out at such low res? I use Paint.NET exclusively for trying to resize pictures, blacking out the background, or clean up pictures that just don't look right on the screen. Currently I resize pictures incrementaly. That is when a pic starts out at 1500 pixals and I need it to be 64 I'll resize something like 20 times geting smaller each time. Sometimes I'll mess with contrast and sharpness to TRY to make the image clearer at the end. Any advice for the artistic disabled?

[Ego Eram Reputo]

You mean 64 pixels by 112 pixels? That's a small screen!

The preferred resize technique is to work with a canvas that is 200%, 400%, 800% or 1600% larger than you want. The idea is that you can resize down in one operation. Your incremental resizing is only going to introduce unwanted blurring as pixels are resampled again and again.

64 x 4 = 256 pixels and 112 x 4 = 448 pixels. If you work on a canvas that is 256 x 448pixels you can resize the image to 25% to get your final screen size.

If your software can handle PNG format I'd recommend that. It has support for the Alpha channel (transparency).

If you're really having trouble making images 'pop' on the screen try uploading one and let us see if we can find some more suggestions for you.

[lapland]

Is the PNG similar to the GIF transparency? The sign is suppose to support both PNG and GIF, but I know it doesn't support transparency in GIF images. I've tried that one. Didn't know to try the PNG. My big problem is getting an image to post, such as a corporate logo, or a photo and having to scale the image down to a usable size. Although the software imports any image and resizes it, sometimes it looks horid after resizing. Yes the image is about the size of a thumbnail image, but displayed on a big sign along the road. The resolution isn't really a problem because people are usually driving when they read or view the sign. It's basically used for advertising such as birthday, community events, anniversaries, etc. There is a limited supply of specilized videos for the sign but most are product advertisements, which we don't need. Thanks for the advise on resizing by whole numbers, instead of just randomly resizing down. If I can divide the image by whole numbers it may look better.

[Ego Eram Reputo]

PNG is unlike the GIF transparency which only has one level of transparency (either a pixel is or it isn't transparent).

PNGs support an entire alpha (transparency) channel. This means you get 256 levels of transparency along with the RGB information.

Scaling: As I said in my previous post - make sure the image is a power-of-two multiple of the final image size. That way the image will resize as nicely as is possible. If you resize the image yourself the software driving the screen won't be at liberty to make any decisions on how the resizing should be applied.