Images & conversion posts

Compression, resizing, format choice and measuring quality loss.

Single-colour cut file traced from a photo of a lettering stencil, rendered as black shapes on white.

How to turn a logo into a cut-ready SVG for vinyl

Trace a logo into closed contours a vinyl plotter can cut: what the 0.5 mm minimum feature means, how the blade-width clean-up works and how to scale on import.

October 18, 2026

Layered cut file of a British-style ambulance clipart, each colour drawn as its own flat layer.

Images & conversion5 min read

Layered multi-colour vinyl from a sticker photo

Turn a sticker photo into one cut layer per colour: how the katman-N-rrggbb groups are built, why layers sit side by side, and how to cut and register the sheets.

October 18, 2026

Print-purpose vector of the lesser coat of arms of Portugal, rendered from the SVG the tracer produced.

Images & conversion5 min read

Print-ready PDF/X-3 or EPS from a raster logo

Trace a raster logo for the press: PDF/X-3 with a FOGRA39 CMYK output intent, transparency flattened to paper white, EPS for older RIPs and a preflight checklist.

October 18, 2026

Layered cut file traced from a photo of a black-ink sticker tag, the ink reduced to flat colour layers.

Images & conversion6 min read

Reading the cut report: enlargement hint and detail retention

What each line of the cut report means: the status badge, the contract's three mm values, clean-up rounds, the enlargement hint and the detail retention warning.

October 18, 2026

Diagram of a Google Photos Takeout: a folder tree with a photo and its supplemental-metadata.json, an album copy, and the JSON fields that hold the date, location and caption.

Images & conversion6 min read

What is inside a Google Photos Takeout, and why dates go missing

Year folders, album copies and one JSON sidecar per photo: what Google Photos Takeout contains, which fields hold the date, and why photo apps ignore them.

October 1, 2026

Diagram pairing photo names with their Takeout JSON names: a supplemental-metadata name cut to supplemental-met, a moved counter, an edited copy and a JSON in another ZIP part.

Images & conversion6 min read

Why some Takeout photos do not match their JSON

Truncated supplemental-metadata names, moved (1) counters, edited copies and JSON in another ZIP part: why Takeout photos lose their JSON and how to match them.

October 1, 2026

A hand holding a phone up against a sunset over the sea; the phone's screen shows the same horizon it is framing.

Images & conversion7 min read

Compressing images without visible loss

What a quality setting really controls, what chroma subsampling throws away, which SSIMULACRA 2 scores map to which settings, and why re-encoding hurts.

September 18, 2026

Someone editing a long-exposure photograph on a laptop while drawing on a pen tablet beside it.

Images & conversion7 min read

Removing an AI watermark from an image

What removing an AI badge actually involves, when inpainting gives a clean result, and why erasing the visible mark leaves the embedded provenance intact.

September 18, 2026

A photographer in a wet black rain jacket holding a DSLR up to her eye, blurred conifers behind her.

Images & conversion6 min read

WebP vs AVIF: which format wins, and where

Measured compression figures with sources, WebP's 8-bit and 4:2:0 ceilings, AVIF's encode cost and missing progressive rendering, and how to choose per content type.

September 18, 2026