Michael Boardman

A member of the Philip Greenspun's Homepage community since January 27, 2000

If you were to log in, you'd be able to get more information on your fellow community member.

January 27, 2000, on IMG Format Comparison:
I think that the points here are very accurate. They apply to photos or photographic type images only. Graphics that only have a few colors (IE less than 256) should use GIF compression. Images that regularly fall into this category are logos, text as graphics, basically anything that has distinct "areas" that are one color. The way GIF compression works is taking a line-by-line scan and removing the redundant data. So an image with horizontal strips (American Flag) could be a very small file while the same image turned 90 degrees could occupy 10 or 20 times as much space. Working in the corporate world, it is frustrating encountering people who only know half the truth, resulting in 2 color images being saved as .JPG and then the so called artist trying to reduce the file size by increasing the compression. Resulting in a blurred and spotted image that is STILL larger than the same image saved as a 16color or 8color gif. Anyway, that's my two cents on the subject.