Tesco-direct WTF



  • I know these are getting kinda lame, but anyway, here's one:

     Oops



  • Unparsed template engine code.  Kinda lame...

    The RealWTF is the GIF optimization you used for the screen shot. 



  • That page [BLOW]s.

     



  • I wish my BLOW was auto-installing.  



  • @purge said:

    Unparsed template engine code.  Kinda lame...

    The RealWTF is the GIF optimization you used for the screen shot. 

    Yeah, that GIF looked like whatever combination of screwups is going on between my PS3 and TV.  Thanks Best Buy...



  • @purge said:

    Unparsed template engine code.  Kinda lame...

    The RealWTF is the GIF optimization you used for the screen shot. 

     

    Probably mspaint 



  • with all that [BLOW], how does it ever expect to make it through customs?



  • @Mal1024 said:

    @purge said:

    Unparsed template engine code.  Kinda lame...

    The RealWTF is the GIF optimization you used for the screen shot. 

     

    Probably mspaint 




  • @purge said:

    @Mal1024 said:
    @purge said:

    Unparsed template engine code.  Kinda lame...

    The RealWTF is the GIF optimization you used for the screen shot. 

     

    Probably mspaint 


    That mspaint can save as png is irrelevant to the fact that ms paint does crappy dithering when you choose to save as a gif file (none of this is a deficiency in the gif format itself)



  • agreed.  they could have at least included an advanced options dialog with some dithering.



  • @purge said:

    agreed.  they could have at least included an advanced options dialog with some dithering.

    The real wtf is someone linking the words "advanced" and "paint" in the same idea. 

     

     

     

    (oh wait no it's not



  • @purge said:

    Unparsed template engine code.  Kinda lame...

    The RealWTF is the GIF optimization you used for the screen shot. 


    @Random832 said:

    That mspaint can save as png is irrelevant to the fact that ms paint does crappy dithering when you choose to save as a gif file (none of this is a deficiency in the gif format itself)

    I'm a little confused as to what you both mean here. Without special layering trickery, GIF images only support up to 256 colours. That means that the image has to be reduced down to only 256 unique colours.

    Take a look at the image. The title bar alone might be using 100 different shades of blue to get that gradient. The Back button will be burning through many shades of green. The yellow Favorites star uses plenty of shades of yellow. Every icon is using up a lot of colours, with potentially a thousand different colours or more in the image in total. Of which, three quarters have to be thrown out.

    And you will find that a surprising number of programs fail to achieve a satisfactory result. A lot of algorithms make the fatal mistake above, of dithering a popular, flat colour. Photoshop 5 tended to swap out colours incorrectly, for example substituting pale grey for white, so you'd have to hand-tune the palette to put white back in, by locating another colour you can do without. I've wasted far too much time hand-tuning these palettes.

    Photoshop 7 (6?) has a pretty optimised algorithm but it still makes what I personally perceive as significant errors in some images. A friend wrote a really advanced depth reduction that succeeded where Photoshop 7 failed, but even hers makes small, subtle mistakes, and the palette needs hand-tuning to pick up, for example, single bright pixels that, set against a darker background, cannot be substituted with a darker shade. You can't just weigh the palette entries against each other, you have to consider neighbouring pixels, but that starts to get really painful.

    Modern graphical interfaces are extremely hard to screenshot. Your choices are pretty much JPEG or PNG. There are too many gradients and shades to get good compression out of PNG without dropping to 256 colours and introducing ugly dithering, and JPEG of course introduces ugly artefacts. Either dial-up users and site traffic lose out to 24-bit PNG images, or the images have to look crap. There's no way to win this one.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    (to summarize:  blah blah blah useful information and explanation blah blah helpful stuff blah blah blah) 

    Dude, you're on the wrong site. :-)
     



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @purge said:

    Unparsed template engine code.  Kinda lame...

    The RealWTF is the GIF optimization you used for the screen shot. 


    @Random832 said:

    That mspaint can save as png is irrelevant to the fact that ms paint does crappy dithering when you choose to save as a gif file (none of this is a deficiency in the gif format itself)

    I'm a little confused as to what you both mean here. Without special layering trickery, GIF images only support up to 256 colours. That means that the image has to be reduced down to only 256 unique colours.

    Yeah, but they don't have to be the SAME 256 unique colors for every image, and a sane system would give the colors of large areas of solid color some priority when picking colors - MS Paint doesn't choose a palette at all, it uses the windows default 256. And, on top of that, it uses cheesy patterns rather than error diffusion to actually do the dithering that shouldn't have been necessary at all. And the fact that dithering is mandatory (you can't choose to just have it substitute colors) makes it even more annoying.

    Take a look at the image. The title bar alone might be using 100 different shades of blue to get that gradient. The Back button will be burning through many shades of green. The yellow Favorites star uses plenty of shades of yellow. Every icon is using up a lot of colours, with potentially a thousand different colours or more in the image in total. Of which, three quarters have to be thrown out.

    The gradients, back button, etc are a red herring. You can have an image that is absolutely nothing but a solid area of the default "3d objects" color [a light tan/gray], and it will have the same exact "plaid" look. I've never seen anything but MS Paint do that with default settings.



  • @Random832 said:

    Yeah, but they don't have to be the SAME 256 unique colors for every image ...

    Ah, reading comprehension. They don't have to be the same 256 colours for each frame, either, hence the possibility of a non-looped, zero-delay frame sequence acting like a set of layers to give you more colours. But I've never seen that attempted in the wild.

    @Random832 said:

    ... and a sane system would give the colors of large areas of solid color some priority when picking colors - MS Paint doesn't choose a palette at all, it uses the windows default 256. And, on top of that, it uses cheesy patterns rather than error diffusion to actually do the dithering that shouldn't have been necessary at all.

    As I recall, error diffusion is one of the most hideous schemes, that looks like the image is on torn-up paper. Floyd-Steinberg is more conventional and looks a lot better, but even on the Mac, it's scary how many programs will refuse to not dither large, flat areas. Photoshop 5, as I said, would replace all the white areas in a screenshot with grey, for no obvious reason.

    I just took a screenshot of the screen as-is, pasted it into IrfanView 4, and reduced it all to 8-bit. I stared at it ... did it work? Did it ignore me? Nothing happened. But zooming in, it had simply done a very good job of it. Of course, as always, the flat areas of the screen in the widow background colour (Firefox's toolbars and menu bar, and the taskbar etc) were dithered as three different colours, as most programs seriously can't identify areas of flat colour and preserve them, but on my CRT you can't tell. That's not bad. I don't have Photoshop 7 around to do a comparison, although I could start Linux and try my friend's algorithm.

    @Random832 said:

    The gradients, back button, etc are a red herring. You can have an image that is absolutely nothing but a solid area of the default "3d objects"
    color [a light tan/gray], and it will have the same exact "plaid" look. I've never seen anything but MS Paint do that with default settings.

    Sadly, a lot of depth reduction algorithms choke horribly on things like that. The plaid pattern aside, Paint's attempt really wasn't that bad. And it all depends on your monitor type and resolution. JPEG artefacts for example suddenly look a lot worse when you start using a flat screen, as you're no longer able to rely on the softness of a monitor to hide the effects. Dithering likewise is a lot less effective. And often, what happens is that flat areas survive, and things like taskbar buttons lose all their colour and shape. It's an extremely hard task, effectively impossible for a computer algorithm to perform. Photoshop 6 (I think it was 6) made it easier to hand-tune the palette to correct for algorithm inadequacy, plus providing multiple algorithm modes to help find one that will work effectively. I had a pretty simple Safari error sheet that it failed to handle no matter what settings I chose, although my friend's code managed first time.



  • For GUI screenshots, I might be more inclined to simply change ever pixel in the source image to the most similar colour in the pallet, and not dither at all. Gradients will look a bit ugly but I expect the overall result will be better than dithering, which to me ALWAYS looks ugly. Pallet selection may remain a problem.

    I'll give it a crack in The GIMP later.
     



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Ah, reading comprehension. They don't have to be the same 256 colours for each frame, either, hence the possibility of a non-looped, zero-delay frame sequence acting like a set of layers to give you more colours. But I've never seen that attempted in the wild.

    No, but using a different set of 256 for Image1.gif than for Image2.gif is quite common. MS Paint uses the same colors in EVERY image. 

    @Random832 said:

    ... and a sane system would give the colors of large areas of solid color some priority when picking colors - MS Paint doesn't choose a palette at all, it uses the windows default 256. And, on top of that, it uses cheesy patterns rather than error diffusion to actually do the dithering that shouldn't have been necessary at all.

    As I recall, error diffusion is one of the most hideous schemes, that looks like the image is on torn-up paper. Floyd-Steinberg is more conventional and looks a lot better,

    Floyd-Steinberg is a form of error diffusion. You may be thinking specifically of one-dimensional error diffusion, which displaces error entirely onto the pixel to the right rather than to any below



  • @Random832 said:

    No, but using a different set of 256 for Image1.gif than for Image2.gif is quite common. MS Paint uses the same colors in EVERY image. 

    I fail to see why you still think I don't know this. Besides, it's pretty irrelevant anyway. In the screenshot in question, like many screenshots, the range of colours was so diverse that it's pretty much impossible to generate an optimised palette. You lose out somewhere or other and the Windows system palette is a reasonably suitable distribution of hues and shades; it also stops optimised palette generation focusing so greatly on a shadow or gradient area -- painfully common -- that everything else is reduced to a handful of left-over colours. The horrible pattern dithering of the beige was rather weird though ... I'd have to take a similar image and see if Photoshop does a better job with the Windows system palette.

    @Random832 said:

    Floyd-Steinberg is a form of error diffusion. You may be thinking specifically of one-dimensional error diffusion, which displaces error entirely onto the pixel to the right rather than to any below

    That sounds about right. I forget what I used that did that. Probably a work machine years ago with Photoshop 6, with a CRT that I was forcing to high enough a resolution that the effect wasn't very visible. (Odd, since Photoshop 5 has high-grade dithering.) Some of the older images in my screenshots gallery are damaged that way. Kinda sad.




  • %EXPLATIVE% Darn, the site no longer [BLOW]s. [BLOW]{%WTF%}



  • @Mal1024 said:

    @purge said:
    Unparsed template engine code.  Kinda lame...

    The RealWTF is the GIF optimization you used for the screen shot.


    Probably mspaint


    @vt_mruhlin said:

    @purge said:

    Unparsed template engine code.  Kinda lame...

    The RealWTF is the GIF optimization you used for the screen shot. 

    Yeah, that GIF looked like whatever combination of screwups is going on between my PS3 and TV.  Thanks Best Buy...

    Your PS3 uses MS Paint? 



  • I took a screenshot of my system, PCLinuxOS 2007 running firefox, almost everything as default, and tested some different file formats. These were made with The Gimp. Conversion to indexing is done by Image > Mode > Indexed

    318K snapshot1_dither.gif // this is a dithered gif allowing The Gimp to choose an 'optimum' pallet
    104K snapshot1.jpeg // this is a jpeg with 85% quality
    97K snapshot1_no_dither.gif // this is a non-dithered gif with optimum pallet
    92K snapshot1.png // this is a png
    381K snapshot1_web_dither.gif // this is a dithered gif using the 216 colour 'web-safe' pallet
    81K snapshot1_web_no_dither.gif // this is a non-dithered gif using the 216 colour 'web-safe' pallet

    The file sizes should speak for themselves. It may be worth noting that my title-bar uses a vertical gradient.



  • @m0ffx said:

    I took a screenshot of my system, PCLinuxOS 2007 running firefox, almost everything as default, and tested some different file formats. These were made with The Gimp. Conversion to indexing is done by Image > Mode > Indexed

    318K snapshot1_dither.gif // this is a dithered gif allowing The Gimp to choose an 'optimum' pallet
    104K snapshot1.jpeg // this is a jpeg with 85% quality
    97K snapshot1_no_dither.gif // this is a non-dithered gif with optimum pallet
    92K snapshot1.png // this is a png
    381K snapshot1_web_dither.gif // this is a dithered gif using the 216 colour 'web-safe' pallet
    81K snapshot1_web_no_dither.gif // this is a non-dithered gif using the 216 colour 'web-safe' pallet

    The file sizes should speak for themselves.



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  • @Mal1024 said:

     



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    @ThisIsFunAndNowWeCAnChangeQuotesLOL said:



  • @FuckingWingdings said:







  • @dhromed said:




  • @Random832 said:

    @dhromed said:



  • @dhromed said:

    @Random832 said:
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  • @bstorer said:

    @dhromed said:
    @Random832 said:
    @dhromed said:



  • @Random832 said:

    @dhromed said:






  • @Random832 said:

    @Random832 said:
    @dhromed said:



  • @Mal1024 said:

    @Mal1024 said:

    @ThisIsFunAndNowWeCAnChangeQuotesLOL said:

    Gotta try this thing... 

    How do I put wingdings in the tag? They aren't showing up!



  • @joemck said:

    @Mal1024 said:

    @Mal1024 said:

    @ThisIsFunAndNowWeCAnChangeQuotesLOL said:

    Gotta try this thing... 

    How do I put wingdings in the tag? They aren't showing up!

    (tags were "those characters are not wingdings; you see; the thing is; they're in unicode")

    WTF!? My tags aren't showing up at all!


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