Saturday, June 24, 2006

Pastels


One dimension, three dimensions, multi-dimensions.
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By the way, blogger converts graphics to PNG files. I am not sure why, because it seems to me that those files are usually larger than my JPGs or GIFs. Anybody in the know on this?

8 comments:

  1. This is great! Very balanced and yet so dynamic. Just out of curiosity, are you doing these with Procreate's Painter or what?

    GIF is deprecated and being replaced by PNG. PNG's compression factor depends on a number of internal parameters. You don't want to use JPG on line graphics.

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  2. Thank you very much.

    I use Adobe Illustrator for this. It is much easier to make nice lines with a vector app.

    I don't find any parameters to set when I make a PNG with Photoshop, though... ?

    (I forget, who are you, TTL?) (Through The Lens?)

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  3. :-( I like GIF. Not everything ancient has to be abandoned.
    This format is excellent for images with clear lines and a limited number of colors. I think it is THE least memory-expensive in these cases. Two-color, black-and-white images shrink down to a ridiculously small memory size, ideal for scanned text and ink sketches.
    Besides, it's the only format I know for transparency over the web page's background, and for animations (very easy to make).
    In a nutshell, I'd be very upset if GIF died.

    "Little girl... Don't touch the squirrel's nuts, you'll make him mad!" -- (Willie Wonka, renowned candy maker)

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  4. Even for text or line drawings (two colors) I recommend scanning in color and saving in 8 colors, no more no less. I drastically reduces jaggies.

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  5. The problem with GIF was that it was mixed up with various patent issues. These have more-or-less disappeared now (the patents which were being enforced have lapsed). However, that's left a bad taste in the mouth of many software developers - hence the preference for PNG in those circumstances where it is applicable (i.e., all uses of GIF except animations and where transparency is required).

    Here's a quote from the Wikipedia article on GIF:

    "There have been occasional mistaken claims that PNG files are larger than GIFs. These claims can generally be traced back to poor PNG support in older versions of some image manipulation programs, such as Adobe Photoshop."

    If the size bothers you, you could try recompressing the images with other software. E.g., the GIMP which is free. Because GIF is lossless doing multiple steps like this should not affect the image quality.

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  6. Thanks for info.
    I wonder what Blogger is using. A GIF I uploaded at 150kb was over 500kb as a PNG on Blogger.

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  7. No, I never save as png.

    But thanks, I had not noticed that all three formats are used. I wonder when blogger uses what? (Maybe it just changed recently.)

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  8. In that case, maybe you'd better save your own PNGs before uploading, then you'd have control over this oversizing business.

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