Comic Life + iPhoto

[dans595]

Hello,

Today when I launched ComicLife is said there is a new version available, so I agreed to download it. Then when I went to install it it said "Are you sure you want to replace the newer version with the older version." I assumed it was mistaken, since it had found an auto-update, and so I accepted. When I loaded ComicLife and tried to drag pictures from my library into a frame, and here's what happened:

1) For photo-booth pictures, it worked as usual.
2) For non photo-booth pictures, when I drag them into the frame, they appear as a tiny thumbnail, and when I resize them to occupy the frame, they are in horrible quality, as if I truly resized a thumbnail. Early that day using the old version of ComicLife, this did not happen.

It's not that ComicLife is super important, but I was a fan of the way things *appeared* to just work easily, and I liked Comic Life. Does anybody have a similar trouble or know how I might change some settings to fix it (not that I want to have to change settings! I'd much rather it just not break on me, but whatever).

 

[dans595]

This image loads in at thumbnail size for me

http://magazine.uchicago.edu/views/view1_800x600.jpg

This image loads in at full size

http://www.grpg.org/Wallpapers/RoseL-14-7Anabell800x600.jpg

Note that both are 800x600. Now I'm just confused.

 

[dans595]

Well

I solved the problem by reverting to the version included with my Mac. I'll wait for a version that works properly. Thanks for taking the time to read, and if you're having this problem, just stick your OSX disc in.

 

[Kramy]

Hello there dans595,

Kramy here from plasq.

What you are experiencing is a fix/improvement in Comic Life 1.3.x.
The difference between the two photos is this:

view1_800x600.jpg = 300dpi with a document size of 6.77cm Width and 5.08cm Height

while:
00RoseL-14-7Anabell800x600.jpg =72dpi with a document size of 28.22cm width and 21.17cm Height

What this means, is that when you drag an image that is too small for the panel box - it will not expand to fit the panel, meaning it will not degrade the resolution. If you make the image larger the .dpi effectively reduces (for example, if you were to expand the image a little bit to say 10cm Width with 7.5cm Height the dpi would become 203.2). Now this isn't as much of a problem with a 300 dpi photo - but is with a 72 dpi (you start to notice lots of pixels on your screen when it goes below 72 dpi).

We added this improvement to Comic Life to try to help those that were having problems with pixelated images.

If you resize the view1_800x600.jpg image to around the same size as what it was doing by default in 1.2.x you may need to wait 10-15 seconds or go to Print Preview and back to the application to have the image look perfect again - because the pictures displayed in Comic Life (when creating the comic) are low-res cached images; used to enhance performance (they update periodically or after zooming/print Preview etc).

Hope this helps explain things.. I hope you go back to 1.3.3 -- it has a number of improvements over 1.2.x

/send Kramy