Export in .jpg format

• Feb 24, 2017 - 08:33

I would like to have the capability to save the newly created music pages in .jpg. Storing in .png cost me a lot of conversion work as the file is too huge for all programs to handle. (I need to work in a big format as I use the result for beamer presentations in the church, requiring a high quality format).

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• Feb 24, 2017 - 11:02

I'm pretty sure jpg files would be much larger then png files, at least in this case of Images exported from MuseScore
And I've just tried, exported to png from MuseScore, opened in MS Paint and saved as jpg (using default settings), it is more than 6 times bigger (and lost transparency)

You could use PDF to feed the beamer, that should give you pretty high quality, as these are vectorized, so do scale very well

Regardless, adding the option to export to jpg shouldn't be too difficult to implement, probably just a handfull of code lines. And we do allow jpg import...

So at https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/3023 you'd find the code. Let's see whether this passes muster and gets merged

Attachment Size
My_First_Score-1.png 70.23 KB
My_First_Score-1.jpg 463.89 KB

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• Feb 24, 2017 - 12:45

No GIF because of copyright restrictions, (see http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/png-gif:
One of the issues surrounding the GIF format is that the LZW algorithm was protected in the USA by a patent held by the company Unisys. The Unisys LZW patent expired in the USA on June 20, 2003. LZW patents are expired in Canada, France, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan.)
Similar reason as to why we don't directly support mp3, I believe?

No TIFF because it is rarly used, never heared about WEBP. (and also as per the above link: PNG provides a patent-free replacement for GIF and can also replace many common uses of TIFF. )

But I'm not too wild on JPG either, see above.

JPG Export might make some sense for scores that imported JPG images. Not whole lot otherwise

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• Feb 24, 2017 - 16:23

It's somewhat of a myth that JPG is always the best format for images. It was specifically designed to produce good results on *photographs*, but the algorithm it uses is nowhere near as optimal as it could be for *graphics* - things that are basically just black and white lines and solid shapes. PNG is usually better for these. Not only are the resulting JPG files bigger than necessary, but the "lossy" compression scheme used produces some pretyt obvious and annoying artifacts such that the results often don't look as good either unless you use the very highest quality setting.

All that to confirm: there are good reason why PNG is the main option provided by MuseScore. JPG would be worse quality and/or larger file size.

If you are looking to save space, try SVG.

However, I wonder whjy you don't simply use PDF? That would be way easier to deal with - no messing around with separate pages, etc - and it's extremely high quality and pretty space-efficient as well.

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• Feb 25, 2017 - 20:58

Thanks for all your comments! I realize I need to make myself more clear. It is not the file size but the amount of pixels that is my problem. In order to be able to get a sharp picture for the beamer presentation, I enlarge the page format as far as possible. When I save the file in .PNG, there are typically over 400 million pixels in the file. Most photoprograms do not handle this.
Second: why do I not save in PDF: I need to project the song on the beamer in negative colour, this is black background and white letters. I perform this change (inverse colours) in a photoprogram. But typically it does not do the trick as a .png file. I also now think that if I could start with a back background using white text, bars and notes, this would also work fine. However I did not succeed to set that up.

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• Feb 26, 2017 - 09:37

I believe Adobe's Acrobat Reader DC can do the inversion for you, I am sure the app on Android can (it has a "Nighrt mode"). See also http://www.howtogeek.com/258313/how-to-invert-the-colors-in-a-pdf-file-…, which I've verfied to work on Windows 7 (in Addition to the Setting shown at that link, uncheck the box at "Only change color of black text or line art"). It is for display only though, it does not change the PDF file itself.

And even the standard MS Paint on Windows 7 can deal with the PNG files MuseScore generates, no problem with their size at all. It can't invert though.

Inverting PNG files should work too, with a decent image editor, but I've never tried this. Have never tried with JPG either though, but I'd be quite surprised if an image editor that can convert PNG to JPG and invert JPG, cannot invert PNG.

The JPG export I've implemented has the exact same amount of pixels (it uses the same DPI settings as for PNG), only your conversion later might reduce this (or, as Marc mentioned, by lowering that setting in MuseScore)

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• Feb 25, 2017 - 21:49

Number of pixels has nothing to do with file format. If you want fewer pixels, then simply lower the resolution. If you are using File / Export to export the entire score, then see Edit / Preferences / Export to set the resolution. If you are using the image capture tool, you can set the resolution directly from the right click menu.

Chances are there is a PDF inverter utility out there, I'd probably spend some time looking for one if I were you as that still seems the simpler way to go.

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• Feb 27, 2017 - 08:39

Well, there maybe reasons to add JPG Export:
it is relativly easy to do (and done already, see the PR)
JPG is a well estabilshed format for images
Scores with embeded JPG images might benefit from this

There are cons too:
One more feature to maintain
The OP's Problem could get solved without and probably even better.

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• Feb 28, 2017 - 14:43

First let me thank all the people who provided quickly a lot of feedback. It challenged me to continue searching for new settings in the musescore program. Specially the setting to change the resolution in the export tab was very useful and solved my need to go via a number of steps to reach my end result. So the need to be able to save in JPG has minimised for me. It would save me one more step in the conversion as not every program allows to 'negative' .PNG files.

Second: on the function 'negative'. Using .PDF allows indeed you to invert the image, however, I cannot save a PDF file in negative to re-use it in PowerPoint. (Once imported in PowerPoint, I see a completely black picture)

I also tried to invert all colours in musescore. This is possible for everything except the notes themselves. (At least I could not find a way to do it) So this alternative seems also not possible

But again after many hours of try and error, I have now detected a reasonable style that I can use to create music sheets in PowerPoint. So at this moment I am a reasonable happy customer of the musescore program!

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• Feb 28, 2017 - 17:32

aha, so you are using Powerpoint in the end.

Have you thought of looking if it perhaps has some builtin color options for images?

LibreOffice Impress for example can make use of Musescore's transparent png's. So you only see the black notes on transparent background. Then you can set the RedGreenBlue-values all to 100% which will render the "Black" as "White":
Transparent png in LOImpress.PNG

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