Proof Microsoft is truely affraid of Linux
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It took a minute or two for what was going on to really hit me. When I first clicked the download link and the blue status bar showed the file was completely downloaded, I figured there was just an error in downloading and I would have to do it all over. Then I noticed the file size was correct, as was the amount downloaded, time left, and speed of download. When the percent completed finally changed in my taskbar... that's when I realized things weren't quite right.... I guess Microsoft is so affraid of Linux they were actually REMOVING it from my hard drive!
(Sorry for using Image Station, I'm not at home and it was the easiest place to toss the image up to!)
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lol ok I give up with these apparently sucky free img hosting sites. When I get back I'll upload the pic onto my server.
[:@]
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Try pasting it as a link rather than in a img scr=.
http://www.imagestation.com/album/pictures.html?id=2106728522&idx=1
Like many programs, IE cant handle files > 2 GB.
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Actually, I think it's simply a bug with files over 2Gb. They are probably signed using a 32 bit integer to store the file progress or something like that.
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By the way, screen shots look a lot better when saved as PNGs than as JPEGs.
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They come out a lot smaller when saved as JPEGs, though. Lossless compression may look better, but I've seen PNGs be an order of magnitude larger than a tolerably high-quality JPEG image even on things like Windows screenshots that should by all rights compress very well.
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@Iago said:
They come out a lot smaller when saved as JPEGs,
though. Lossless compression may look better, but I've seen PNGs
be an order of magnitude larger than a tolerably high-quality JPEG
image even on things like Windows screenshots that should by all rights
compress very well.
It totally depends on the nature of the image. Photographs and anything
with lots of colors in gradients plays hell on lossless compression,
but anything with lots of sharp edges (such as text) plays hell on
JPEG. I guarantee you that that dialog would have been both much
better-looking AND considerably smaller in PNG than in JPEG. If this
was not the case with a screenshot, than it contained some photograph
or painted image, probably the desktop background.
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@Iago said:
They come out a lot smaller when saved as JPEGs, though. Lossless compression may look better, but I've seen PNGs be an order of magnitude larger than a tolerably high-quality JPEG image even on things like Windows screenshots that should by all rights compress very well.
Actually not, Windows screenshots compress extremely well to PNG/8, unless you want to get those god-awfull low quality JPEGs that make your eyes bleed.
Proof (File-open screenshot under Windows XP SP2, classical windows theme, default colors):
JPG quality 30% (Photoshop Medium, under that the artifacts become annoyingly noticeable), progressive JPEG to reduce size further, saved via Save for Web in Photoshop CS1... 29.4K
PNG/8 using full 256 colors (you still get very readable screenshots at or under 64 colors btw, i'm doing this for the sake of quality and objectivity), saved via Save for Web in Photoshop CS1 then optimized through PngOptimizer... 16.4K
And for the reference, PNG/24 (aka lossless), saved via Save for Web in Photoshop CS1 then run through PngOptimizer... 28.2K
Fact is, non-photographic type screenshots (e.g. anything short of complex themes or image viewers) come out a lot smaller as PNGs without any tweaking, and one could tweak the hell out of them to lower their size much further (screenshots can usually be published in PNG/8 using 128 or even 64 colors while keeping a viewability comparable to JPG/Medium, this screenshot as a PNG/8-64 colors is around 12K)
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Additional things:
- PNG is better at compressing noise than GIF
- GIF is better at compressing big flat areas than PNG
(the above was empirically tested by yours truly using Photoshop's Save For Web)
- for GIF, Save For Web offers a "lossy" slider that pre-tenderizes the image, allowing GIF's alogrithm to digest it better, making GIFs even smaller than before, sometimes without noticeable quality loss. I have no idea why this option isn't there for PNG, because: a) it compresses noise better; b) the "lossy" slider is preprocessing and isn't connected to the actual agorithm.
- That IE download screenshot was obviously sharpened by someone or something, making it slightly harder for GIF or PNG to compress, though it'd still come out smaller than JPEG and at better quality.
- For any kind of compression: YMMV, YMMV, and YMMV some more -- sometimes less.
- PNG-24 photo-like images can sometimes be smaller than a JPEG counterpart, but this is rare.
- IE7 supports PNG alpha, but still fucks up PNG gamma. Usage of PNG in websites for design-critical purposes is not recommended.
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SilverDirk wrote:
To cite Wikipedia: Indexed color pngs are allowed to have 1, 2, 4 or 8 bits per pixel by the standard; greyscale images with no alpha channel allow for 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 bits per pixel.
Actually GIF has the best compression of them all, assuming you can find an image editor that lets you reduce your palette. For instance, if you have a screen shot that only uses 16 colors (anything with simple widgets and simple oldschool icons), you can actually save as a palletized 16-color gif, and it will mock the size of PNG and JPEG.
I don't know PNG very well, it might also have options like this.
So PNG will probably beat GIF hands-down when it comes to, say, an image with 4 or less colors, even if its compression algorithm doesn't win for some images.
Incidentally, pmt.sf.net/pngcrush does a pretty good job of optimising PNGs, AFAIK.
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@SilverDirk said:
Actually GIF has the best compression of them all, assuming you can find an image editor that lets you reduce your palette. For instance, if you have a screen shot that only uses 16 colors (anything with simple widgets and simple oldschool icons), you can actually save as a palletized 16-color gif
Guess what? you can do that for PNGs too, when you're using PNG/8 (palettized PNG, as opposed to PNG/24 "Truecolor PNGs".
This is why PNGs beat GIFs most of the time (the only instances I found of GIFs beating PNGs was for very small images under 1kb), and why you should replace GIFs by PNG/8 period. Every feature GIFs have are already available right now in every software able to read PNGs, plus PNGs have some more features, and even more features that common softwares don't always implement (for example the PNG specs specify that progressive transparency aka Alpha Channel should be available not only to truecolor PNGs but also to palettized PNGs, as opposed to the "true/false" transparency of GIF [which is the only one Photoshop currently allows for PNG/8 at the moment too, I think])
@SilverDirk said:Now, I don't know PNG very well, it might also have options like this. The problem is I can never find an image editor that does color reduction/dithering, and then also writes a GIF with a tiny palette (gimp is probably capable, but I doubt I'd ever find the series of operations that makes it happen, heh).
While earlier versions mostly sucked, Photoshop CS 1 and 2 have become quite good at handling PNGs, whether they are PNG/8 or PNG/24. It only has two issues: the support could still be bettered for compression (which is why you should always run the output of Photoshop through PNG Optimizer or PNGCrush [I use PNGO because it's easier and faster, PNGCrush produces a smaller output 90% of the times]) and features, and you have to use Save For Web, for the default Save As (png) feature of Photoshop plain sucks (there is a free plugin that hooks into that and makes things much better btw)
@SilverDirk said:Anyone curious about the GIF format can read about it on www.wotsit.org
Anyone curious about the PNG format can read about it on the... duh... LibPNG website.
Seriously, there is no reason left to still use GIF on the web, your choices should be between JPEG (for photos), PNG/8 (for simple images with binary transparencies) and PNG/24 (lossless or complex images, or need for progressive transparency)
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Oh, and PNG is Deflate/Inflate-compressed in Zlib format (in fact, the libpng reference library simply uses zlib)
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@masklinn said:
Seriously, there is no reason left to still use GIF on the web
In an ideal world.
But, as I said, IE6 and 7 fuck up this pointless "gamma" feature of PNG, and display PNGs slightly darker than they really are.
That makes it completely impossible to match PNGs with a CSS-defined background colour. Unless that colour is black or white.
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@dhromed said:
But, as I said, IE6 and 7 fuck up this pointless "gamma" feature of PNG, and display PNGs slightly darker than they really are.
A failure of software to deal with a feature doesn't make it "pointless". It just makes it badly implemented under certain software.
One could argue that IE6 (and to a certain extent IE7) fuck up this pointless "CSS" feature of (x)html, after all. So why bother?
Simon
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@ammoQ said:
@SilverDirk said:
GIF is a bit-packed LZW-compressed (zip file algorithm)
LZW != ZIP
...that's not how I read it. I read it as saying that ZIP uses LZW. Which it does.
(point of note: deflate, used in gzip and PNG, is based on LZ77 and Huffman encoding)
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@tufty said:
@dhromed said:
But, as I said, IE6 and 7 fuck up this pointless "gamma" feature of PNG, and display PNGs slightly darker than they really are.
A failure of software to deal with a feature doesn't make it "pointless". It just makes it badly implemented under certain software.
I never said IE's failure makes the feature pointless. I just meant to note, in an offhand way, that a file format should lay off its content. Do DVDs contain internal gamma settings? Do audio formats include EQ settings?
It's the core data. It should be objective and uninfluenced. If it displays differently on different monitors, then so what? You can't fix that by adding gamma data to the file itself. All you'd do is shift the problem a little to one side, while not reducing it in the slightest. Instead, inform people on how to use their monitor's Brightness knobs.
My final point, in the End, is that as long as IE still modifies PNG Gamma display in any way, GIF remains the only viable choice for crisp layout-images that need to match CSS colours.
However,
I've repeatedly and quite happily implemented PNG with alpha channels in areas where the PNG was 'stand-alone', such as an icon, or a content-image.
There is talk of extending PNG to support full alpha channels while in 8-bit colour mode. <3 <3 <3 Finally no more 24-bit bloat. I can't wait.
And I will never pronounce it "ping". "Ping" sounds dumb.
Pee-enn-gee: good enough.
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@powerlord said:
@ammoQ said:
@SilverDirk said:
GIF is a bit-packed LZW-compressed (zip file algorithm)
LZW != ZIP
...that's not how I read it. I read it as saying that ZIP uses LZW. Which it does
I've been using (not very precisely) ZIP as a synonym for DEFLATE.
From Wikipedia:
The specification for ZIP indicates that files can be stored either
uncompressed or using a variety of compression algorithms. However, in
practice, ZIP is almost always used with Katz's DEFLATE algorithm.
DEFLATE is not the same as LZW. The most important difference: until recently, LZW was patented and DEFLATE not.
(point of note: deflate, used in gzip and PNG, is based on LZ77 and Huffman encoding)
exactly
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@ender said:
PNG has supported alpha in paletized images since the beginning - but the only software I know that can produce such images is an ancient version of PNMTOPNG for DOS I've had for a long time (newer versions will always produce a 24bit+alpha PNG, even if the number of colors is low enough).
The avatar I use is an example of such PNG (assuming, it'll display on this forum).
I see.
You're right about its support, then.
Your avatar is not visible in FFX.
