gif compression (sorry heavy load time)

[robotsneloppen]

i'm a huge fan of the gif format. mainly because it's a great media and the compression looks amazing if done creatively. i don't know much about it though, so here's some questions, and maybe it could be general gif tips and tricks thread

what kind of compression is used to quantize the pixels to these tiny patterns?



i guess it has something to do with the setting/whateveritis that saves space by not "refreshing" the pixels if nothing has happened. like the background here:


this compression is just really cool, how do you get that?



a lot of questions :b answer some if you know anything about it. tell me something interesting about gifs. stop and think about how great gifs are. post some nice gifs. gif stands for graphics interchange format and is your friend!

when talking about settings i would really appreciate if we referred to the photoshop interface



ps. i tried to link to all the gifs instead of creating load time and rubbish formatting, but i'm not allowed to yet :b

 

[Burned Ice]

The 'compression' you're talking about is easily achieved by this: filter -> filter gallery... -> Distort -> Grain. Play with the values for the desired effect. I think most of the .gif's combine this with other effects but I can't think of anything else I once made this .gif from blackadder

 

[SCTRWD]

robotsneloppen, the "compression" you see has nothing to do with compression. It's just the Dither pattern to squeeze your image colors to a pretty scarce master pallete. And quite poorly at that, just using the simple "pattern" algorithm. Lets face it: it looks ugly and remindes of eighties. I really don't know what made you so high about it...

There are and have long been other Dither methods like Error diffusion, Noise and stochastic dither.

As for "compression": GIF format uses LZW compression, which is just one of the universal compression algorithms for files of all sorts. The compression algorithm as itself has nothing to do with GIF format: it just compresses the raw GIF data to some file on the disc. It's good, but there have long been much better(and free) compression algorithms since then.

One thing that I liked about GIF89 is that some encoders did all the dirty things for you. As a result, some Capture Screen applications made beautiful, clean and small presentations in the GIF format. Where when you move cursor over the screen GIF only recorded the cursor previous position and the cursor new position.

Which was good but only because some applications were lazy enough to "think" and make MUCH more better results exporting in other formats(like Flash format).

Camtasia Studio is the example: when you moved cursor over the screen it recorded the whole screen as a new frame in Flash format. Allthough the Flash format lets you make the cusor image once and then move it anywhere just with a couple of bytes command. But then it takes "thinking", it takes "working" and "programming"

I don't know how the things are nowadays. Hope they are not what they used to be. But GIF format is aged now, lets move on...

 

[robotsneloppen]

interesting story about gifs sctrwd, i googled the stuff you were talking about and i see your point!

here is some dither examples i found for anyone interested: caca.zoy.org/study/part3.html

i however disagree with your philosophy. do you think an old les paul record is rubbish because it was recorded with old equipment and processed with outdated gear? many new records sound like they were made in 60's, but it all comes down to preferences and taste. when people consider something to be ugly it may be because it has some hidden layers that are way more interesting than what always is considered beautiful. i think you learn to appreciate "ugliness" after you've learned to appreciate "beauty"

i just made these gifs, and i think they're pretty sweet:





edit: look at different parts of the gif for some time. if you have mac, ctrl+scroll to zoom in and out and always remember to press cmd+alt+ctrl+8 to have a look at the colours inverted