<div>Throwing out a general question to this list because I know that many of us use a variety of different applications to "get the job done", but use the GDAL tools as the common unifier (at least I like to think so). I'm putting together a Mapserver-driven web map that uses OpenLayers to get data via WMS. It's all working quite nicely, except for my aerial photo layer, which I am not incredibly pleased with. Despite using every tweak I could find (convert from RGB to 8-bit with pct2rgb.py, use OUTPUTFORMAT with GD/PNG, and use "DITHER=YES" in mapfile, I cannot get a very high quality rendition of the photo layer in my WMS output. It looks grainy in areas with solid color and generally a bit "pixelly". So I have a couple of questions.</div>
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<div>1. Is some loss of image quality an unavoidable side-effect of using Mapserver?</div>
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<div>2. If not 1, then are there other tweaks that can be done to further improve the quality of my output? (Note that I intend to use Tilecache, so maybe slow initial performance may is an acceptable trade off, I dunno.)</div>
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<div>3. If yes to 1, then what other open source tools do a better job of rendering photo data? (I intend to test some of the data in GeoServer, but I haven't done so yet.)</div>
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<div>Thanks in advance for your feedback.</div>
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<div>Roger</div>
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