The best way to convert 16:10 wallpapers to 16:9?

[synaesthetic]

Accidentally posted this in the wrong subforum, putting it in the right place now.

So I've got a big pile of wallpapers, a veritable moe explosion of cute girls. This is happy.

The wallpapers are all either 4:3 or 16:10. My LCD is 16:9. This is not happy.

I seriously don't get it. Why in God's green earth do people keep making 16:10 and 4:3 aspect ratio wallpapers when nearly every goddamned laptop and desktop LCD panel made in the past year and a half is 16:9?!

I need some tips on how to make these usable on a 16:9 aspect ratio desktop without black bars or stretching.

Please don't say "just crop some off the top and bottom." It insults my intelligence. I know that much. But you cannot do that with the vast majority of anime wallpapers; the focus characters are usually framed too tightly for that to work. Simply cropping the image results in absolutely atrocious image composition.

So, brushes, patterns, any neat tricks to make them look good? I have a lot of vectors, which typically have solid-color backgrounds--those are easy to deal with. It's the artbook scans, the original artwork and the vectors with backgrounds that are problematic.

[Vexx]

I'd be interested in this too.... I'm even lamer, I just shrink the entire image because I prefer my screen icons to be on a mono-color background (I have trouble spotting them against busy wallpaper). I suppose it means I need to sit down and really learn GIMP.

[Claies]

I think the better method is to not get a 16:9 screen. It's quite the abomination. :P

I don't *think* there's a way to shrink wallpapers in that fashion without significantly compromising the content.

[Random32]

Buy a used 4:3 screen. I found a used QXGA 22" CRT monitor for pretty cheap at a local store.

btw, if you think its hard to find wallpapers for a 16:10 screen, think about people who have 5:4 or 25:16 monitors.

[synaesthetic]

Urgh my post just got nuked.

ANYWAY I am not trying to shrink anything, and also I can't just replace the LCD--it's built into my laptop! And I don't have a desktop; if I did, I would be using a 1920x1200 LCD.

Shoulda got the damn MSI GX640. =|

Anyway. I don't want to shrink them, I want to make them wider without making them taller, without distorting anything. Now most of them I was able to crop and fuck with to make them fit, but there's a few images I really cannot figure out how to make work. This is upsetting because these are some of the ones I'd like to use most!

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...0962sample.jpg
This one has a weird aspect ratio, it's like 16:10.4 or some weird crap. Resizing it down to 1920 width results in a 1300 height. The characters are framed too closely for me to crop without either cutting off the blond girl's head or the Nanoha lookalike's body.

http://kuro.hanyuu.net/sample/b85e1b...2%20sample.jpg
This one is 16:10, but whacking some off to make it 16:9 causes it to compose awfully. I can't figure out how I can crop it without ruining the composition. The damn artist just had to put her foot sticking out of the water in a really obnoxious place. ><

http://img4.sankakustatic.com/wp-con...kantoku-21.jpg
This isn't wallpaper sized, but I want to make it so. The problem is... the image isn't wide enough. I can't crop it to compose well in any widescreen resolution; it only looks good in 4:3.

Originally Posted by Claies

I think the better method is to not get a 16:9 screen. It's quite the abomination. :P

I don't *think* there's a way to shrink wallpapers in that fashion without significantly compromising the content.

I would love to have 16:10 but the LCD industry is totally intent on shoving 16:9 down our throats. You can get laptops with 16:10 screens now, but they're all old stock--almost all of them are WUXGA 1680x1050 CCFL backlit LCDs.

New 16:10 laptop panels just are not being made at all anymore.

[Neat Hedgehog]

If it were something simple, like a repeating background, you could use the clone tool.

Unfortunately, with images like that, you're not really going to be able to make them wider (without just doing a dirty resize, thus wrecking the aspect ratio) unless you really want to spend a lot of time and effort interpolating the extra parts of the picture, and then trying to add them by hand.

Also, that image from Sankaku doesn't like to be hotlinked.

[synaesthetic]

Huh it's working for me.

Think I may just have to give up on those (though the bath girl I might be able to make work by cropping closely around and erasing any part of the foot that creeps into the frame)...

Blah. Fuck you very much LCD manufacturers, 16:9 sucks, bring back 16:10.

[spikexp]

16:9 cost less to make than 16:10.

I have a 16:10 LCD and I don't want a 16:9 as main screen, It's really stupid to use 16:9 when computer need more space onscreen, the space the 16:10 give us. I hope some day 16:10 return.

For my wallpaper, I have a lot of different size, I just use blackbar option for the wallpaper, I don't really care about the 5:4 ratio wallpaper on my desktop with black bar.

[synaesthetic]

top and bottom bars don't bother me much.

The ones on the side, though, drive me batty and I have no idea why.

[Revenger1589]

I feel your pain synaesthetic, I have a lot of images I would like to use as wallpapers but I can't because of the aspect ratio. Black bars are of course unacceptable

Cropping is the only real solution, but it doesn't work all the time.



This one doesn't look THAT bad, the bottom is too busy, but it's passable.



If you don't mind cutting off the feet this one looks good, I think I'm going to use it myself.

The third one is impossible to simply crop, the foot is a problem.

Maybe someone with knowledge of photoshop can make some decent walls out of these, but I have resigned myself to not use some pictures.

[synaesthetic]

The first one is probably doomed to never look right, but the second one could probably be made to work as a composite image, using the crop with some fade/transparency effects and a shrunk-down version of the whole image bordered or with a drop shadow.

I'd try it myself but GIMP is really annoying to work with after being so used to Photoshop.

[Vexx]

Aye, virtual framing mattes (virtual versions of the cardboard used with pictures so they'll fit in the selected picture frame) are probably the solution... but me myself would probably stick with something simple like subtle gradients. It still involves resampling the picture to a slightly smaller size, no way around that.

[synaesthetic]

Resampling smaller is not a big deal, GIMP handles that just as well as Photoshop. If I had to make it bigger, that would be a real problem.

[spikexp]

Cropping don't always look good,
Redrawing is way to hard to do,
If you don't like black bar (I don't really care about them),

When I use Windows 7 background changing at each 10 seconds, I use black bar and I don't really care.
But most of the time I finish using a single wallpaper and keep it for some time. When this happen I use photoshop to make it more "acceptable" or I use black bar for something (put some icon in it). I take 16:10 wallpaper or I use 5:4 wall and take 2 or 3 hours of my time to make it better.

You could always do something like that to make then look better than with black bar:
http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/359...972samplec.jpg
http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/6...962sample2.jpg

It don't look that good when you look at it like that, but on a desktop if you don't look too much at it, it's okay.

[TheFluff]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

I need some tips on how to make these usable on a 16:9 aspect ratio desktop without black bars or stretching.

Please don't say "just crop some off the top and bottom." It insults my intelligence. I know that much. But you cannot do that with the vast majority of anime wallpapers; the focus characters are usually framed too tightly for that to work. Simply cropping the image results in absolutely atrocious image composition.

troll answer: content-aware fill/content-aware resize

serious answer: resizing an image to a different aspect ratio without cropping, black bars or stretching is obviously impossible
you seem very taken with your own intelligence (so much that the idea of cropping an image insults it), so it's kinda surprising that you haven't realized this

(hint: content-aware resize doesn't count because it's essentially extrapolation, while resizing is interpolation)

[Daiz]

Frankly, I think you're thinking way too much about it. Just crop things to make them look as good as possible and be done with it. Remember that 30-40px of it will be covered anyway from the bottom due to your taskbar (if you're on Windows (7) anyway) as well. This is what I'd probably do with those linked images:

http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/7122/cropped1691.jpg
Turned out just fine in my opinion.

http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/3727/cropped1692.jpg
The bottom of the visible feet being cut off is slightly annoying but since it's still quite clear where it's coming from I probably wouldn't be bothered by it too much, especially since the bottom would be partially covered by my taskbar anyway.

http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/5410/cropped1693.jpg
This works quite well cropped, in my opinion.

In other words, just learn to crop in the most pleasing manner. You're way better off in this situation than people who have 16:9 wallpapers that they'd want to convert to 16:10 (like me).

[synaesthetic]

Originally Posted by TheFluff

troll answer: content-aware fill/content-aware resize

serious answer: resizing an image to a different aspect ratio without cropping, black bars or stretching is obviously impossible
you seem very taken with your own intelligence (so much that the idea of cropping an image insults it), so it's kinda surprising that you haven't realized this

(hint: content-aware resize doesn't count because it's essentially extrapolation, while resizing is interpolation)

Your troll answer is better than other troll answers, which is what I was attempting to prevent by saying "do not say crop the image" because I already know how to do that, and didn't want 4 pages of people saying "hurr just crop it hurr."

I was asking if anyone more artistically-inclined and perhaps skilled in the manufacture of interesting wallpapers had any tips, brushes, patterns, fills or other little handy methods for filling the empty space.

The answer is apparently no, so I'll just deal with what I've got.

Originally Posted by Daiz

Frankly, I think you're thinking way too much about it. Just crop things to make them look as good as possible and be done with it. Remember that 30-40px of it will be covered anyway from the bottom due to your taskbar (if you're on Windows (7) anyway) as well. This is what I'd probably do with those linked images:

http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/7122/cropped1691.jpg
Turned out just fine in my opinion.

http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/3727/cropped1692.jpg
The bottom of the visible feet being cut off is slightly annoying but since it's still quite clear where it's coming from I probably wouldn't be bothered by it too much, especially since the bottom would be partially covered by my taskbar anyway.

http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/5410/cropped1693.jpg
This works quite well cropped, in my opinion.

In other words, just learn to crop in the most pleasing manner. You're way better off in this situation than people who have 16:9 wallpapers that they'd want to convert to 16:10 (like me).

I'm not the most artistically-inclined person in the world. Your crops look better than mine did by a lot.