Transparency needed!

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RedMage
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25 Apr 2007, 6:29 am

Can someone make my new avatar have a transparent background?

BenJ
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25 Apr 2007, 7:38 am

see below

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Last edited by BenJ on 25 Apr 2007, 7:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

BenJ
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25 Apr 2007, 7:42 am

thats it fixed the white

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RedMage
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25 Apr 2007, 7:48 am

I never knew only gifs could be transparent. Now I know why I couldn't make png transparent when I was using The GIMP! Thanks BenJ, it looks much better now.

BenJ
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25 Apr 2007, 7:49 am

no problem. glad to help!

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TheMachine1
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25 Apr 2007, 3:26 pm

RedMage wrote:

I never knew only gifs could be transparent. Now I know why I couldn't make png transparent when I was using The GIMP! Thanks BenJ, it looks much better now.

I think PNG supports transparencey to?

neurodeviant
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25 Apr 2007, 5:51 pm

TheMachine1 wrote:

RedMage wrote:

I never knew only gifs could be transparent. Now I know why I couldn't make png transparent when I was using The GIMP! Thanks BenJ, it looks much better now.

I think PNG supports transparencey to?

Yep, it also supports alpha transparency, which I think has only just been fixed in IE7.

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lau
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25 Apr 2007, 5:58 pm

TheMachine1 wrote:

RedMage wrote:

I never knew only gifs could be transparent. Now I know why I couldn't make png transparent when I was using The GIMP! Thanks BenJ, it looks much better now.

I think PNG supports transparencey to?

Yep. It certainly does.

A problem I've been running into is that PNG files seem to take up more space (I kept getting stuck with my avatar wanting 16.1KBytes! I know it's mainly because going from JPEG to PNG is being unfair.

The thing that PNG doesn't do (yet?) is animation. I've chickened out and fallen back on GIF for that (a silly little program called "gifsicle" that will stuff a bunch of GIFS into one animation, auto-removing duplication of image data, so it's compact.)
There's a new MNG(?) format for animation, but it's not well supported.

Re The Gimp - I still haven't worked out how to do transparency properly in it. I know it does it via layers and alpha, etc, by I'm very much a novice Gimper (Gimpist?). My current avatar was constructed in The Gimp, but it was a struggle!

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DingoDv
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25 Apr 2007, 6:51 pm

I tend to use GIMP a bit backwards, and will usually cut what I want out of my original image and place onto an alpha background.
I have managed to do some animated gif stuff in it , don't know about duplicated layers though...

lau
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25 Apr 2007, 7:03 pm

DingoDv wrote:

I tend to use GIMP a bit backwards, and will usually cut what I want out of my original image and place onto an alpha background.
I have managed to do some animated gif stuff in it

, don't know about duplicated layers though...

I vaguely recall from a long time ago, how the GIF format works, internally. It has this idea of each frame involving the overwriting of one patch (or is it one or more patches?) of the image, defined as offset rectangles.
What gifsicle does it to accept a bunch of full sized GIF images and then work out what rectangles need changing from one image to the next.
I.e. to do a flashing "eye" in an image (as I had in my previous avatar), sort out the fist image, doctor the pixels for the eye and save as the full image again, then throw both through the program. It'll notice the tiny patch to change between images. The net result is a file hardly larger than a single image, not the sum of both.
(I had a shot at doing this from inside The Gimp, but didn't manage it. My mistake, I'm sure.)

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DingoDv
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25 Apr 2007, 7:12 pm

I wasn't trying fancy stuff when I did it, I wanted individual slides (avatar with a few photos of me and my aurabesh avatar attached - speaking of which, I'll go to that for a bit)

and Lau, your signature shocked me just then...

lau
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25 Apr 2007, 7:26 pm

DingoDv wrote:

...and Lau, your signature shocked me just then...

Erm. I wouldn't call myself "beautiful", but "shocking"?

Or were you referring to my previous avatar, ten frames with different delays... I built it with ...

Code:

gifsicle -O2 -l \
 -d 500 phoenix1.gif \
 -d  10 phoenix2.gif \
 -d 400 phoenix1.gif \
 -d  20 phoenix2.gif \
 -d 500 phoenix1.gif \
 -d  30 phoenix2.gif \
 -d 400 phoenix1.gif \
 -d  40 phoenix2.gif \
 -d 900 phoenix1.gif \
 -d  50 phoenix2.gif \
 > phoenixer.gif

-rw-r--r-- 1 lau lau 8967 2007-04-19 18:26 phoenix1.gif
-rw-r--r-- 1 lau lau 8992 2007-04-21 13:01 phoenix2.gif
-rw-r--r-- 1 lau lau 9317 2007-04-21 13:14 phoenixer.gif

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DingoDv
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25 Apr 2007, 7:32 pm

no, the request for use of my bathroom

lau
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25 Apr 2007, 7:40 pm

DingoDv wrote:

no, the request for use of my bathroom

Hehehe! I guess that means it's time for a change of Papa Lazarou quote from "Dave, my wife would like to use your toilet."

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TheMachine1
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25 Apr 2007, 11:12 pm

Lau wrote:

A problem I've been running into is that PNG files seem to take up more space (I kept getting stuck with my avatar wanting 16.1KBytes! I know it's mainly because going from JPEG to PNG is being unfair.

I think you can set different levels of compression optimization but png is a lossless format that simply does not compress as small as non-lossless gifs or jpegs.

lau
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26 Apr 2007, 7:04 am

TheMachine1 wrote:

Lau wrote:

I think you can set different levels of compression optimization but png is a lossless format that simply does not compress as small as non-lossless gifs or jpegs.

Yes and no.
Although PNG is lossless, it uses compression techniques that are good for image data.
If you take a pure, raw, photographic image, then store it as PNG, the file size will compare well with JPEG, assuming you don't make the JPEG image badly lossy.
What goes totally to pot is when you take the reconstituted JPEG image and store that as PNG. The artifacts introduced by the JPEG lossy compression have to be encoded losslessly by the poor old PNG algorithm, and they are not typical photographic image patterns.
I've just done a bit of a comparison, of a file stored as JPEG at various compression percentages, then reloaded and re-stored as PNG. It bears out what I've just been saying, i.e. the JPEGs get smaller (and rubbishier) as you up the compression. The PNGs are bigger, leveling out at what I guess is the pixel by pixel, lossless, no compression achieved, size.
Interestingly, I started with a 13.5Kbyte file (PNG), and the "100%" JPEG was only 12K. But re-storing that as PNG went up to 15KB, so the JPEG was lying. It must have been lossy, even though I asked it not to be!

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