Skip to main content

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: New Avatar policy (Read 27072 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

New Avatar policy

Reply #25
I just have to say that 6kb seems way to small as well. My avatar is ~8kb PNG, I can make it around 6kb with JPG, but it looks like complete crap. I think a more reasonable size (15-20kb) should be enforced. Obnoxious avatars are a totally different story and should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

New Avatar policy

Reply #26
Quote
If part of the reason for the new rule has to do with reducing costs of hosting, I understand completely and I will remove my avatar altogether.
  
   If this is a courtesy to modem users, I concur with rjamorim - the option to disable avatars is there.

totally agree ... 6kb is way too small  ... and if it is to reduce bandwith cost, why don't enforce to use esternal linking? i mean pointing to external srcs, so no bandwith is consumed from ha ... well ... mine is 3.02 kb, so i'm not telling cause me being afected

New Avatar policy

Reply #27
Quote
Hmmm, saving my particular .gif (13kb in disc space) avatar to a .png (presumably uncompressed) in photoshop7 nets no reduction in size on the disc, but perhaps this is idiosyncratic to photoshop.

I'm pretty sure it's idiosyncratic to Photoshop, although I could be wrong. Some versions of Photoshop have been known to produce sub-optimal PNGs.

There are many cases, though, where GIF and PNG compression are approximately equivalent. It's lossless, not lossy, so there ya go.

New Avatar policy

Reply #28
The jpeg format is meant for pictures, like photos or things with lots of gradients. It is blurry and quick to lose detail, since, well, it is a lossy format.

The gif format is lossless (uses lzw compression) but its restricted to 256 colors (from Compuserve BBS days...) one of the colors can be used for "transparency"...

The Portable Network Graphics is "A Turbo-Studly Image Format with Lossless Compression". Not only is lossless, it also accepts a full alpha channel which is great for blending against any type of background (of course Internet Explorer fails to do this blending...). Unlike gif, there is no "animation" in png. For that, the Multiple-image Network Graphics format was born, but its still not so widely supported, yet...

Consider that png accepts indexed (anything less than 24 bit with supplied palette), grayscale, grayscale with alpha, 24bit, 24 bit with alpha and 48 bit with alpha. If you are careless, your program may be saving the image in 48 bits! (16 bit per channel, whoa!)

PNG uses a Deflate compression, an LZ77 derivative used in zip, gzip, pkzip, and related programs. It is more efficient with patterns of the same colors repeating, so a cartoon will compress much better than a photo with gradients, etc. So you can imagine that reducing the number of colors can help compression.

PNG is also a w3c recommendation.
She is waiting in the air

New Avatar policy

Reply #29
My avatar is only around 2 kb 

New Avatar policy

Reply #30
I'm conforming now...

bye bye to alpha channel... hello little blocks and blurry shades.



The biggest irony is that it looks better in IE now... bloody microsoft.
"You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted, then used against you."

New Avatar policy

Reply #31
Quote
My avatar is ~8kb PNG, I can make it around 6kb with JPG

Not a big change, but you can losslessy reduce the size of yours with pngcrush.

New Avatar policy

Reply #32
how about 'no animated avatars' ? (roberto is exception of course) 

(they are annoying - distractive (is that a word?))
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
NOTICE - cpu 0 didn't dump TLB, may be hung

New Avatar policy

Reply #33
Has anyone actually complained about the size of avatars?  If they have I would say to them that their time on this planet is very short, and there is much they have yet to achieve.  Not only that, but in the time it took to complain, many avatars would have loaded. 

Other than that, I vote no change in policy, other than a clean out of offensive avatar's (of which I dont recall seeing any).

New Avatar policy

Reply #34
Quote
other than a clean out of offensive avatar's

...and legally questionable ones?

New Avatar policy

Reply #35
I also think that 6kb is too small for the avatars (mine's 12kb, even after optimization! ).
I'm on a 56k dial-up modem also, and have no slow page loadings etc. But maybe it's just because I'm used to wait a while before pages load up..
I'd vote for ~15kb limit

New Avatar policy

Reply #36
Damn makes me think I was to blame for this action... since I was having a few issues with my avatars.

My stance is nothing on this site offends me or is slow to load up on my 56k modem. I would of though offsite linking would be encouraged to stop avatars chewing up server bandwidth. So I my position is to leave the avatar policy unchanged.

Regards

AgentMil
-=MusePack... Living Audio Compression=-

Honda - The Power of Dreams

New Avatar policy

Reply #37
Quote
I also think that 6kb is too small for the avatars (mine's 12kb, even after optimization! ).
I'm on a 56k dial-up modem also, and have no slow page loadings etc. But maybe it's just because I'm used to wait a while before pages load up..
I'd vote for ~15kb limit

Your avatar was 24bit which is way too much.
Attached modification is 256 colors and optimized.
Only 4,65KB.

New Avatar policy

Reply #38
Reduced mine from 18.1 KB to 5.6 KB (still png, but 32 colors now). External hosting.

New Avatar policy

Reply #39
Quote
I just have to say that 6kb seems way to small as well. My avatar is ~8kb PNG, I can make it around 6kb with JPG, but it looks like complete crap.

agree big area of same colors are a no go for jpeg, but its loved by .PNG

BTW reducing to 256 colors and using PNGout, your avatars fill 3.73 with NO noticable difference.

the reasong you avats is "big" compared to the simplexity is because of anti aliasing.

few colors in big areas = .PNG wil do MUCH better then jpeg
lots of single colors in small pixels and lots of shades = jpeg rules


--- EDIT ---

"Benchmarks" of .PNG compression show that PHotshop are doing af SHITTY job at compressing. tru using PaintShop Pro/irfanview/ACDSee instead and consider using PNGout for extra compression


does anybody now if IE supports MNG and wher to find an animated gif to MGN conveter


---- EDIT---
Quote
Hmmm, saving my particular .gif (13kb in disc space) avatar to a .png (presumably uncompressed) in photoshop7 nets no reduction in size on the disc, but perhaps this is idiosyncratic to photoshop.


Just to show how bad Photshop is for compression.
PaintSgop Pro did the fiel in only 11.4 Kbytes.
PNG out made it further shrink to 11.2.

hehe maybe i should make a Avatars Compression Service for people... :-)
Sven Bent - Denmark

New Avatar policy

Reply #40
Quote
Reduced mine from 18.1 KB to 5.6 KB (still png, but 32 colors now). External hosting.

It's not to bug you but if you run advpng on that file you can get the size down to 3,88KB.

New Avatar policy

Reply #41
You're not bugging me
Thanks for the tool.

New Avatar policy

Reply #42
Quote
Quote
Reduced mine from 18.1 KB to 5.6 KB (still png, but 32 colors now). External hosting.

It's not to bug you but if you run advpng on that file you can get the size down to 3,88KB.

hehe i got it down to 3.86 with PNGout 
Also testet with audiable avatar... PNGout give better compressiong the advcomp.


Benchmarks around PNGout vs PNG crush show that PNGout gives best compression in most cases
Sven Bent - Denmark

New Avatar policy

Reply #43
Quote
Quote
I also think that 6kb is too small for the avatars (mine's 12kb, even after optimization! ).
I'm on a 56k dial-up modem also, and have no slow page loadings etc. But maybe it's just because I'm used to wait a while before pages load up..
I'd vote for ~15kb limit

Your avatar was 24bit which is way too much.
Attached modification is 256 colors and optimized.
Only 4,65KB.

hoh did you reduce coloers and keep transparancy seem liek PSP dump transparacy when doing color reduction.

But i got it down to 3.66kb at 256 colors no transparacy.

-- edit--
i now se that you didnt keep the tranpracy and i must say that my conversion keepes the fadeout much better then yours...

how do i attach files ?
Sven Bent - Denmark

New Avatar policy

Reply #44
Use the save for web function in PSP and remember to check the transparancy box.

New Avatar policy

Reply #45
Quote
Use the save for web function in PSP and remember to check the transparancy box.

Your version does not have transparancy/alpha channels
when i open in PSP the checkerboard (transparancy) background is gone...

Anyway i did a rehash of the avatars WITH comple alpha channels but made the milde in only 256 colors. the size was then 7.24kbyts i can get i down more but it requires manually work

And besdies... If the avatars is only going to be on this site (alway same bacground color) tranparacy is not needed  in the final output, so my prev 3.78kbytes version should be considered the better choice in compresion & quality
Sven Bent - Denmark

New Avatar policy

Reply #46
Quote
how do i attach files ?

You become a moderator or use the upload forum.


Hmm... I only checked with PSP if it was tranparent and saw the tranparency grid... but yes. something is very wrong with my version of anza's avatar.

New Avatar policy

Reply #47
Damn.... I had to take my color depth down to 128-bits, and then png-out the result in order to get it to fit.

But you'll be unlikely to see the difference from the previous ones, so I guess it's good overall.  I should be HA-compliant now.

New Avatar policy

Reply #48
I use a 56k modem (which connect at a lot less) sometimes. There is no problem with HA for me.

If this is the only reason for the low limit, then it's probably not needed (IME). Of course, if there are other reasons, that's OK - and it's always good to make people think about reducing the file size of things flying around the internet.

Cheers,
David.

New Avatar policy

Reply #49
Quote
Damn.... I had to take my color depth down to 128-bits, and then png-out the result in order to get it to fit.

But you'll be unlikely to see the difference from the previous ones, so I guess it's good overall.   I should be HA-compliant now.

i got it down to 2.84kbytes by only using 16 colors

There is a noticable difference when flipping betwens 128 colors and the 16 colors version
However i think its not noticable if you dont have the "reference" avatar...

the reasong you need to reduce coleros is because of the antialiasing on this avatarts
its really destroys redundancy and bit patterns
Sven Bent - Denmark