Re: Images Turn Blue

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Hi Steve:

Yeah, there is a layer of bugs in play here, like the skins of an onion.

This is a "channel inversion" problem, and we have had that for years in Mac
Word.

Word 2008 has some of the same input filters. If the input filters can't
handle the format, they convert it to a bitmap, and that's the issue you end
up with.

There's a trick you can do with a .docx: internally, it's a little packaged
"website". If you make a copy and change the extension to ".zip" (because
that's the compression in use) you can then open it up, and in there you
will find a folder containing all of the graphics, normally in .PNG format.

But if the filters were able to fin any vector images, they will be in there
too. You might get lucky... Note that for this to work, you would have to
open the Word 5.1 files in 2008 ? once they have been through an earlier
version, the images will down-level to bitmaps when Word 2008 gets hold of
it.

Cheers


On 19/04/09 12:21 AM, in article
5c135ec1-6df3-47a9-b853-d97bf83a8fa6@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Steve C."
<splicehere@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Unfortunately, these were almost certainly RGB images from the
beginning. They started as screen grabs, went in to Clarisworks, text
was added, and then were cut and pasted into Word (5.1). I doubt that
any of those steps would have involved CMYK.

Part of what makes no sense here is the difference between how Word 04
and 08 handle these images. In 04 they're blue but the text is
scalable, which is critical. In 08 the text looks terrible but the
images are full color. Same file -- just saved in two different ways
(doc and docx).

I suspect that there are several bugs, layered one on top of the
other, in the style of an archeological dig. I'm waiting for delivery
of Word 08. But I won't be trusting Word nearly as much now as I used
to.

Thanks again for your thoughts --
Steve



On Apr 17, 7:47 pm, John McGhie <j...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Steve:

Yes, I would suggest that in computer graphics, images are composed of
either three (R,G,B), four (C,M,Y,K) or five (H,S,B,L,A) "layers" or
"channels".

My guess is that the images were originally in CMYK and in the conversion to
RGB they have dropped everything into the Blue channel instead of converting
the colours accurately.

Word 5.1 was Word 6 and Word 95 on the PC.  You will still find some PCs
around that have them installed, or at least have the disks for them filed
somewhere.  That might get those pictures back for you...

Cheers

On 15/04/09 11:52 PM, in article
a3511986-c84e-4e13-b961-a38663c9e...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Steve



C." <spliceh...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
John,
Thanks for responding. Yes, I'm pretty sure these are Quickdraw images
(or Picts, which is roughly the same thing, I guess). But Pages
(v2.02) and TextEdit can't handle them at all. Pages almost seems to
do okay -- you can see the images -- but then, before actually letting
you work with the file, it says that it can't handle the image
borders, and after that all the images are blank rectangles. TextEdit
does even worse -- none of the images appear at all. NeoOffice doesn't
help either. Nor does Nissus.

I've been able to get some of the images out of the Word file using
FileJuicer, but even with that, many can't be opened.

I relied on Word for all this and everything worked fine in Word 5.1.
In fact the whole workflow was very easy -- just create the image and
drag it over. But Word has totally failed me now. What I need is the
vector text of Word 04 and the color handling of Word 08. Can't seem
to have both.

Any idea why those images are all blue? Maybe there's a clue in
another post talking about color space?

Thanks again,
Steve

On Apr 15, 3:15 am, John McGhie <j...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Steve:

What is happening here is that you are being hit by a succession of bugs in
Word's ability to handle the graphics format in those documents.

It sounds like the original images are QuickDraw format, and Word has never
been able to handle them properly.

Try opening in Pages or TextEdit and see if they can get the pictures out
undamaged.

Cheers

On 15/04/09 1:31 AM, in article
980ecbb5-2914-4e2d-877a-af8e65441...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Steve"

<spliceh...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I've got a long document that I created in Word 5.1 and updated in
Word X. It includes literally hundreds of inline illustrations that
were all created in ClarisWorks and just dragged over into Word. They
started as screenshots and I added additional explanatory text in
Clarisworks. Thus they contain bitmap and vector art.

I now want to update this thing and create a PDF. If I stay in Word X
all the images look okay but the text in the images have become
bitmaps and they look badly pixelated. If I import into Word 2004
every image with text  turns blue -- there's nothing in the yellow
channel -- but the text looks good. If I import into Word 2008 the
same thing happens, but if I save as a docx file and then reopen the
images change. No more blue -- but now the text looks bad again.

Does anybody have any idea what's happening here? The notion of
redoing literally hundreds of illustrations is pretty daunting!

Many thanks in advance for any help anybody can offer.

Steve Cohen

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here:http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group.  Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia.   mailto:j...@xxxxxxxxxxx

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here:http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group.  Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia.   mailto:j...@xxxxxxxxxxx


--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:john@xxxxxxxxxxx

.

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