Image Resizing
A comparison of popular CFCs and CFX tags for image resizing.
Original Full Size Photo
This comparison is a simple test of the resize quality of various ColdFusion image manipulation tags. Each tag read the same source file and resized it to 1200x900, 600x450, 300x225, and 120x90. JPEG quality was set to highest where applicable.
NOTE: These resizes are ALL produced from the original file. You can further improve the quality by resizing an already resized image! I will refer to this method as 'multi-pass' - since we will resize in multiple steps, rather than just once. Take the original, then resize it to 75-50% of original. Now resize the newly resized image to about 75-50%. Do again, and make the final resize the size you need. It is more time / CPU intensive, but if you NEED a better quality, this might just work for you. I did this for a customer that needed very small thumbs produced from fresh of the camera photos and it worked great.
And yes, I have changed the tires since those photos where taken! (In fact, car is sold. Corrado > GTI :) )
Open the images that you want to compare in new tabs or windows so you can view them side by side.
CF 8 (Scorpio) (CF NATIVE)
http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/
See For Yourself. Built in CF 8 Image Resize
1200x
600x
300x
120x
CFX_OpenImage (FREE)
http://www.kolumbus.fi/~kr0626/cfx_openimage/CFX_openImage by Jukka Manner. Syntax is clunky. Image manipulation is done by passing ImageMagick commands into single attribute. Pretty good results. Is common on shared Coldfusion hosting servers.
1200x
600x
300x
120x
CFX_Image (FREE - Replaced By CFX_OpenImage)
http://www.kolumbus.fi/jukka.manner/CFX_Image is outdated and replaced by CFX_openImage (same author / creator) I listed this for comparison because some ColdFusion hosts still only provide cfx_image. Among the poorest quality.
1200x
600x
300x
120x
Alagad Image Component (AIC 2.0 $75)
http://www.alagad.com/Native CFC with good quality resizes. Syntax is simple and easy to use. Can be installed on any host that allows you to use CFCs.
1200x
600x
300x
120x
Efflare ImageCR3 (v3.5 $95)
http://www.efflare.com/A CFX tag. Simple syntax, very easy to use.
1200x
600x
300x
120x
ImageCFC (v2.13 FREE)
http://www.opensourcecf.com/imagecfc/A CFX tag.Syntax seems easy enough. This CFC uses Java, so results are similar (same) as other Java methods.
1200x
600x
300x
120x
