CAN YOU MAKE A WAP PHONE MESSAGE PICTURE FROM A PHOTO?

MESSAGE PICTURES FOR OLDER PHONES

Can you use a photo to create a really tiny black-and-white picture?

The short answer to that is not very easily

You may have a multi-megapixel camera phone with video calling and a whopping great screen that shows more colours than the eye can see. All set to send wonderful message pictures. But unless your friends have similar phones, you're all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Even the biggest phones have comparatively tiny screens, and very old ones may show only black and white images.

You can of course send pictures at larger size to any mobile. If they can't be displayed, they'll arrive as a web address where your recipient can go and see them. But what if you want to send a tiny black-and-white image that a friend with an old phone can view then and there?

You may have one or two ready-made greeting images that came with your machine. Take a look in your gallery.

You can't find the greeting you want? It ought to be pretty simple to make your own. After all, it's only tiny and it's only got two colours.

Unfortunately, that's just what makes it trickier than it seems. It's interesting to see what happens to a photo when reduced in a desktop art editor (Photoshop).

JPEG 72 x 28 pixels	greyscale GIF	2 colours no dither
2 colours 100% dither diffusion	2 colours 100% dither pattern	2 colours 100% dither noise

A photo with only two colours will often disintegrate at tiny size

You see what happens to a photo when it's reduced to an inch wide - and then on down to only two colours. You don't even have shades of grey. Dither (various patterns of dots) helps to model the main shapes, (Photoshop offers three varieties.) But most of the detail is gone.

Drawing your own message picture could be the answer. If you don't feel you can tackle a wbmp design a whole inch wide - you can always stick to extra small drawings like the sunflower below.

You could clip a small area from a larger picture. Preferably your own artwork. Be sure to observe copyright if you're chopping chunks off somebody else's work. Even more than photos, drawings are very much the property of the person who created them.

Since tiny black-and-white phone screens are already pretty rare, why not heave a sigh of relief and scale up to colour? Photoshop or Photoshop Elements works wonders to reduce coloured GIF drawings to tiny files.