Challenge

I'm sick of how overrated PNG has become - it's cramming signatures around PC needlessly with 200-300 KB signatures, when they could be saved as JPGs with barely (if at all) visible quality loss. So I present to you a challenge.

One of these banners is a 54 KB JPG. The other is an 86 KB PNG. Can you tell me which is which without cheating?

um, is the first one png and the second one jpg? AND I PROMISE I DIDN'T CHEAT!

I say that the 1 one is JPG. the 2 is png.

Aha, Lizzie was right. The first is the PNG and the second is the JPG.

But with Blaze's reply, I think I've made my point clear - you could cut your banners down to even half the filesize with un-noticable quality loss.

First is png, the second is jpg. See, with a sig like that, you can't tell much of a difference in them. However, when you get a sig that has crucial color quality with far more contrast than this one, it really does matter.

EDIT: Let's try a challenge of mine where you actually can tell the difference, shall we?





Now, let's take a look at the first one. It is a jpeg. On the dragon's wing, do you notice tiny little bits that aren't there in the png? They weren't there in Photoshop, either. There is a difference, my friend.

Oh, well excuse me for being able to tell the difference ;-; I am a member at a whole bunch of art sites; they will be critical of those tiny little things, so I'm just speaking with the knowledge I have. Sorry. I'm just saying that I will continue to use .PNG for my own reasons, I can't be forced to listen to you, Ty.
EDIT: btw, I've been using .PNG since the first request thread I made; it hasn't seemed to be a problem until now.

Yeah, I suppose, but I don't like going to all the trouble of making a .png for those sites, and then saving it as a jpeg for here, re-uploading, and putting in my sig. It's inconvenient, and it's not that huge of a file-size difference.

A gif is far worse than a .png. You wanna see that sample sig as a gif? It loses almost all of its color quality, it gets those little dots, the resolution gets really crappy, it just sucks. Besides, it's not like PC could really use the extra bandwidth >_>

Sawyer said:

Oh, well excuse me for being able to tell the difference ;-; I am a member at a whole bunch of art sites; they will be critical of those tiny little things, so I'm just speaking with the knowledge I have. Sorry. I'm just saying that I will continue to use .PNG for my own reasons, I can't be forced to listen to you, Ty.

Click to expand...

I'm not trying to force anybody. A small 340x100 banner is fine; a full-sized 500x300 banner is another story. And I'm seeing a lot of banners like that come around lately, it's horridly annoying waiting for that stuff to load.

But I was trying to make another point here too - you can only notice the difference if you look really carefully. People who criticise you for something that isn't even worth noticing have way too much time on their hands. =\

Sawyer said:

EDIT: btw, I've been using .PNG since the first request thread I made; it hasn't seemed to be a problem until now.

Click to expand...

I looked at your request thread once. Haven't gone in there since. It took far too long to load. Again, your banner is fine, but the size of banners that people request in there in PNG format is just overkill.

You people just need broadband. =/

Of course... 500x300 banners are way oversized for a banner, especially a .png banner. Besides, the people making those 500x300 sized banners don't have enough detail in their banners that you could hardly tell the difference anyway. I'm saying, most actual graphic designers don't go much over 400x100, that's just pushing it. In my first banner thread, 400x100 was the default size, in my new thread, 380x85 was the default size, now I don't have a request thread, but I almost always make my banners 340x100. I mean, for a banner with so little detail in it, why have such a huge size? It's a waste of space. If someone who has a banner sized 450x150, for example, that has only an anime image, not a render, no, it's just the image with its actual background... how big does that sig need to be to see those details?

MystiKal said:

You people just need broadband. =/

Click to expand...

I want broadband. My mother keeps saying she'll get it, and never does. When I mention it to her, she ignores me.

My banners are 400x150, that's about the biggest and the smallest I'm willing to make them. But I agree with the rest of what you said; I hate how big people make their banners. x_x Still, it could be an edgy impulse - they think their signatures will be just perfect if they're right on the limit.

Really what needs to happen is PC needs a sig size limit.

YES!

But they just refuse to implement one, and instead tell us to disable signatures. x__x I've had them disabled for months now. The problem is that amongst all the minute-loading crap, I've missed some beautiful signatures because of it.

Yeah, I know what you mean. But like 90% of forums out there have a sig limit I mean come on.

It's fairly obvious which is which... the one that's already preloaded into the cache from a previous thread in which you posted (in your sig) is the JPG. :P I completely agree with you, though; I'm very much against huge filesizes. Many people don't know how to compress a PNG image properly, either. For a sig you don't need the best quality in the world.

... Is it even possible to compress PNGs?

And if the staff brought in a filesize limit, I'd happily make a compression shop.