Tips for preparing product photos before adding them to Picture objects
In many of our invoice and catalog reports the weakest part is not the layout but the source images: product photos come in different sizes, backgrounds and lighting, and once they are placed in a TfrxPictureView / PictureObject the inconsistency becomes very obvious on a printed page.
A few things that help on the report side: set a fixed object size with KeepAspectRatio and Center enabled, avoid Stretch for photos, and pre-scale large JPEGs to roughly the printed resolution (about 300 dpi for the final size) so PDF exports stay small. Storing images in the database at a consistent ratio also saves a lot of tweaking per band.
On the image side, it is worth normalizing backgrounds before import. Besides classic editors, there are browser-based image to image ai tools where you upload a photo with a short prompt to replace a busy background, extend the canvas (outpainting) to fit a fixed frame, or restore an old scanned picture while keeping the original pose and lighting.
How do others handle mixed-quality images in their reports? Do you preprocess them before loading, or adjust them at runtime in the OnBeforePrint event?