Compression puzzle

[Grafixman]

I was just playing around with PI, trying to do some gif animation, and I had a few pixel screentone objects applied to the canvas. I zoomed in on one part, then decided to do a screengrab of it, pasted that as a new image. Pretty funky abstract-looking piece. What puzzles me is that when I tried to save the image for posting, either as a jpg, gif or png, the png compression gave me the lowest file size. I'm talking about png full color, the two other options, jpg and gif gave over 100K file sizes, while the png saved at about 40+K only. That has never been the case for me before. Any ideas why?

[sallybode]

It must be right, I have never found the optimization tools to say one file size when they weren't in PI.

It must be the type of image was best suited to PNG I guess.

Yes, it is very cool.

[Grafixman]

"It must be the type of image best suited to PNG I guess."
My thoughts are the same as yours, but what exactly makes it optimal for png? Maybe if we could pinpoint that, we could tweak our photos and drawings so that they give similar results. PNGs are really much cleaner than jpgs. Maybe sometime in the future they could come up with animated pngs... now that would be cool...

[Terry]

Grafixman,

They came up with animated PNGs in back in 1996. The file type is MNG (Multiple-image Network Graphics), but it just hasn't caught on.

Check it out here: http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/

[jamesmc]

I can use Paint Shop Pro Format (version 7 or before only) to use with animated GIFs. This allows layers and anything else that Paint Shop Pro can do in animated GIF's. It also allows superb transparency and reduced file size.

Great for making overlays or underlay(ers) for movie shorts, titles or transitions.

Since the Jasc's GIF animator is dynamically tied to PSP, it's easy to import/export the frame back and forth between the two programs.

You can also have on the ready in PSP, your fills, masks, imports ready to go to modify a frame. Really very handy. No need to do artwork acrobatics when making a GIF animation. Or an AVI.

[Grafixman]

Terry, yes, I also found out about this one after I posted my reply and googled png, trying to understand more about it. Pretty cool. I guess it's on the same boat as svg. Great ideas having a hard time catching on.
James, sounds like PSP and it's animator program are better integrated than PI and Gif Animator . I'm still miffed by not being able to copy and paste transparent objects between PI and Gif Animator. Yep, maybe they should just merge the two into a single program instead. In Gif Animator's native .uga file format, the full color and 8-bit transparencies are supported, so yes, I suppose it is also possible to produce movie transitions in it, and I think it also outputs .avi files. I haven't really explored those options. I mainly use it for making pixel animations .
I've been exploring the picture above, and trying out things with a normal photo, posterizing it to lower the color count, tweaking curves and levels, etc, but nothing seems to tip the balance towards making the png option smaller than the jpg or gif. So my new theory is that in the image above, the situation is that because of it's peculiar nature, (lots of sharp transitions in the square blocks, and large color variation in the gradients) it is defeating jpg and gif's compression algorithms, making it hard for both formats to achieve a good compression. PNG, on the other hand, handles it well. So it is a case of poor compression for jpg and gif, not unusually good compression of png. I don't understand the mathematics of these things, but that is how I feel it...

[Kiwi]

GM
Can't say I understand much about the png issue as it's a format I never use.
Gif animator however is capable of quite a lot.
2 years ago when I got my first graphics program it was UGA which I fumbled my way through learning to use by myself and with the help of Em's site at animationbeginnersclasses (MSN)
Everything (Creating/Drawing/Animating)to do with graphics was done using uga alone and it wasn't untill a year later when I found PIRC that I was to realise that Photo Impact 8 was also quite capable...lol
Copying and pasting between PI and UGA, preserving transparency, isn't possible but saving as ufo and opening that in uga allows you to turn off whatever you wish. ie. background!
Yep you can make movie files no sweat file-save as-video file-.avi

One of gary's worms has drained my brain of inspiration at the moment (Heck! I was playing with making siggies this morning, and glitter!! boooorrrring!)
Perhaps tonight? .... or tomorrow??