Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Netscape or "safe" palette use in banner ads

Greg Bulmash (greg_at_bulmash.com)
Thu, 29 Jan 1998 01:16:27 -0800

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On 28 Jan 98 at 21:46, Lauren Guzak <guzak_at_slip.net> wrote:

> This is not true. Exact palettes do not help decrease the size of your
> .gifs, nor will they make your images sharper in a browser. They will,
> in fact, make them dither (read: make them look less-sharp, more
> noisy). And, depending on the number of colors in your exact palette,
> you're more likely to fatten that image up in terms of K, rather than
> slim it down for web optimization.
>
> For a great resource on this subject, I recommend Lynda Weinman's
> book, Coloring Web Graphics (http://www.mcp.com/newriders).

I'm going to have to disagree with you here. If you dither to the
Netscape pallette first, then use an exact pallette, you *will* reduce
file size.

For example, anti-aliased text, once dithered, is maybe 6-12 colors.
Using an exact pallette means not having to store color info for
204-210 colors you're not using.

I'm not wealthy enough to have all the top of the line tools I want, so
often I'll dither in one graphics program and then re-open the graphic
in Photoshop LE (which came with PageMaker) to do an exact indexed
pallette. I'll see 1-2k drop out of the file size in almost every
instance.

In some cases, the dithering itself can decrease sharpness depending on
the colors used in the original image, but once the image has been
dithered to the Netscape pallette, reducing the pallette size to
include only the colors used in the image will not diminish the image
quality.

OTOH, remember that the 216 color pallette was conceived when most
people were running screen pallettes of 256 colors. As more and more
people upgrade to a minimum of 1 meg of VRAM and often higher with
larger monitors, they're running more often at higher resolutions and
better color depths.

Half of the battle is education. Both of my parents, in their 50's,
moved up to 15-17 inch monitors, Pentium 166 or even 266 systems, and
hearty graphics cards within the last 6 months or so. When I visited
and popped them up to 800x600 with a minimum of 16 bit color, they were
amazed at how much their browsing and overall user experience improved.

Many people could comfortably run at higher resolutions and color
depths, which would allow designers more freedom, but they just don't
know any better.

-Greg

--

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|NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION #8:                                   |
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|Greg Bulmash               Author/Editor - The WASHED-UPdate|
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|            THE ANSWER TO "WHERE ARE THEY NOW?"             |
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