Can't import a particular jpeg into aspire 8.5 for bitmap tracing

[Chuck Keysor]

Hello Aspire experts... I created a JPEG in Photoshop, and then imported it into Aspire, 8.5. I brought it in to a new Aspire file, for the purposes of making a 2 1/2D relief image, but I only get an error message which says: "Failed to load image. Check if image is supported type." I can't figure out what is wrong, even though I have done this same type of operation many times without any problems.

Here are some details:
It is a simple line drawing in black and white, (it is not a vector image). I did use the little birdie "import bit map for tracing" icon.

A few hours ago, the first time I imported this JPEG into Aspire, it worked fine, BUT, the image was far too small, (upon expanding it in Aspire, the JPEG became pixelated).

So I went back to Photoshop, and resized my original image so that it would come into Aspire at the right size for the workspace. And I then created a new JPEG of the resized image. From that point on, every time I tried to import the revised JPEG, I got the error message: "Failed to load image. Check if image is supported type."

I have checked and rechecked that I created a JPEG, and I did. The JPEG is 3.5M, and I found other JPEGs of similar and larger sizes which I imported into Aspire without problems. I checked to see if there were any patches available for Aspire, and there was one, which I installed shortly before coming onto the forum. I have made new copies of the JPEG, but to no avail. I have shut down Aspire and restarted it,,,, but I can NOT open this file in Aspire.

Because the image file is 3.5MB, I can't attach it to this post. I'll see if I have some sort of zip application, and will attach with that later.


What do I do????? Thank you, Chuck

[Chuck Keysor]

I posted this question on the Vectric Forum, and I got two good answers. The answer I used was to do a screen capture of the JPEG, (with the JPEG set to fill the screen), then use the screen capture's JPEG for importing into Aspire. I tried this method, and it worked. (Of course it does bother me that I have to use an extra set of steps, when I don't know why my original JPEG won't work,,,,,)

The other offered option that seemed good, was to simply use the first small JPEG that I was able to import, trace that, and then enlarge the vector image as needed.

Any other ideas, or ideas why I can't just import my JPEG into Aspire?

Thanks, Chuck

[dana_swift]

Chuck, the answer is that the "JPEG" must not be a "JPEG". When an image file has a ".jpg" extension, it is sometimes actually a "portable network graphic" file internally. I have seen that problem before, that may not be the case in your issue tho. JPEG is internally one of two specific coding if things are done "per spec". There is the "original" JPEG encoding based on "discrete cosine transforms" (DCT), and JPEG-2000 format which is based on wavelets. Probably more info than anybody who doesn't work with images at the low level cares about. As time goes by more and more programs play fast and loose with the implementation. My suspicion is Adobe puts "extra" information in the image that is confusing Aspire. Without seeing the image there is no way to diagnose the problem, and it may be an error in the Aspire Jpeg decoder. If I were to hazard a guess, Adobe is outputtting a JPEG-2000 format image, and Aspire may not handle those, as they are probably using the "Tom Lane" JPEG reader. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lane_%28computer_scientist%29 The screen shot is almost certainly creating a original DCT format JPEG file, which is why that works. Hope that is not info overload- D

[Chuck Keysor]

Thank you Dana for your detailed answer. Though the details were over my head, at least you have restored the possibility that I am not going crazy! Thanks, Chuck

[tlempicke]

I have found that Aspire 8.5 is not all that stable. I have had lots of problems importing BMP's and JPEG's. I have both 8.0 and 8.5 on my machine and I have pretty much reverted to 8.0. The biggest problem is that once you have done something in 8.5 it will not open in 8.0. Major PITA!