To the mapmakers and graphics creators - use PNG/GIF!

[marol]

Guys, I noticed recently that you don't know how good is GIF format.

I won't write long dissertation about it, instead I'll go straight to the point.
If you make maps, graphics, drawings, sketches, outlines or any other images other than photo then DO USE GIF!

- - - - - - - - - - - - JPG - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -GIF - - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - - 33,1 kB - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 3,5 kB - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I think no comment needed here - GIF image is lossless - you keep all the details and it's size is 10 times smaller than JPG! Some people makes maps so big so they need to split them into smaller pieces due to upload size limit. Using GIF you can avoid that. Another advantage is that you can use transparency with GIF images.


Where GIF won't work is photos and complicated pictures like that:

And last GIF limitation is that there could be only 256 colors in it.

[SekoETC]

Usually the problem with gifs is that they try to repeat the colours by a mix of two palette colours which makes the area grainy. Also drawing programs (unless they're like MsPaint) tend to mix the colours between areas so when it's saved as or turned into a gif, it will add to the palette a tone or a few to the border areas between colours and might replace some major colour with a dotty mixture.

But anyway, what ever you do, do not save as JPG in the middle of drawing because that makes the quality go poorer each time. Save as png or bmp and only save a copy as a jpg when you're ready to upload.

[marol]

SekoETC, when you have less than 256 colors on the image, there will be no difference unless you use dumb program. The pallete isn't set to some predefined values, it is adapted to the image.

Here's the photo I took last week - that's why you shouldn't use GIF for colour rich photos:

GIF:


JPG:

[Sicofonte]

.


I prefer PNG


.

[BarbaricAvatar]

Er, i can't see any difference, except for the girl on the left's leg.

[marol]

Sicofonte, PNG is nice, but if you don't need fancy features GIF is enough and it's still smaller.

[KVZ]

Marol, the same picture from first example is 34 bytes smaller in PNG Anyway it is not big difference, but some picures in PNG are much more smaller then in GIF.

[marol]

Weird, my Photoshop gave me PNG with size 6,6 kB... which is 2 times bigger than GIF.

Anyway choose GIF or PNG for maps and drawings - but not JPG.

[KVZ]

Maybe it is like that because I converted GIF to PNG, and maybe you tried to save PNG as 24 bit picture... PNG is flexible. It can save pictures with 256 colors palette (like GIF) as well as 24 bit pictures.

[N-Aldwitch]

Weird, my Photoshop gave me PNG with size 6,6 kB... which is 2 times bigger than GIF.

Anyway choose GIF or PNG for maps and drawings - but not JPG.

Actually, yeh, what KeVes said... that's the case for me with MS Paint at least.

[formerly known as hf]

PNG

It's non-proprietary

[Doug R.]

I tried uploading a png map today, and neither of my web browsers could see it. I had to convert it to a gif instead.

[formerly known as hf]

That's very strange. Almost any standard browser ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... at_support ) can read and display .png

Heck, ong was designed for transferring images over the internet...

[JK-Royale]

Oohw, thanks.
I used to make JPG's
but i'll keep this in my mind..

[Doug R.]

I'm on a mac, and tried both safari and Firefox. I even loaded the png directly into the browser just to make sure I didn't mess up the html, and no dice. The gif came out to be smaller anyway, so it was the better option regardless.

The -only- thing I can think is that the file was converted into a png from a power point file (in power point), cropped, and shrunk several times in graphic converter. Maybe there was some bad residual PP voodoo funking the image?

_Edit_

It must have been PP voodoo. Converting the gif back to png displayed fine.