Forums General Discussion Image question

If you add a *.bmp or a *.jpg file as a "photo" in a channel, then you see the picture in the right upper corner, and my question is this, i want to know if mirc see any color as transparent in a *.bmp or *.jpg .. cos if you have a image you dont just get the picture you want, you also the the color that are in the background of that pic.. and you cant asume that every user of mirc have the same background color in the channels/querys and so on.. any way to work around this? cos i cant make a image that have every possible color settings for channels and so on.. it would be many images befor i was done..

Transparent colors only work in .gifs.

In additon to Hammer's response, .gif's don't currently work in mIRC, so you can't (yet) have what both you and I would love to see.

ok thnx.. i just have to wait for the next version of mirc to be relesed then.. and hope that it suport .gif

.png also supports transparency. I don't see why mIRC shouldn't (if it doesn't already) support .png (and .mng for that matter) seeing as how it is a 100% free format.

Oh and about .gif being supported in the next version, don't count on it, .gif is not a free format. It is covered by patents which makes it illegal for the users (not Khaled, the people who use mIRC) to run mIRC without paying a royalty to Unisys.

I don't think there would be any problem with mIRC reading gifs. AFAIK the royalties are only required for the algorithms to write gif files, not to read them. Quite frankly though the patents have been so damn annoying I wouldn't use GIF files again even if they were made free. PNG/MNG should definitely be supported.

You might be right about reading, I don't know. But in any case, .gif is no longer an internet standard, .png is the new image standard and .mng is the new animated image standard. Why use old technology like a .gif when .png offers so much more and it's free?

As the owner of a fairly big website (around 100 pages) I can answer that. Simple matter is that GIF is a much smaller format allowing pages to load quicker. The big downside to GIF is the quality of the image where more than 256 colours are present and at times even the ballsy Photoshop cannot dither enough to smooth out transitions between colours, which is where PNG comes in. We all know that PNG is a far better quality format and for photographs it craps all over GIF three times over but where possible most webmasters still use GIF where it is possible to get away with using them. Having said that I still use JPG alot for photos through force of habit though have been known to use PNG at times and will probably use it more often as time goes on. One thing is for sure though, if you are right when you say that PNG is now the standard, webmasters are being dragged kicking and screaming to use it. It is definitely a very good format though, better quality than GIF and better quality than JPG.

Another reason (beyond the bloat) PNG hasn't picked up popularity is that Internet Explorer doesn't support its alpha transparency... making the format pretty much useless as an alternative to GIF.

On another note, June 20, 2003 was "GIF Liberation Day" day here in the US... the LZW patent is set to expire elsewhere in 2004.

Currently it seems that mIRC is affected the same way. I once tried a PNG in mIRC and where the transparency was meant to be I got a black background..

Yes i know.. but i made it the "hard" way made a image for every color in the color list "the 16 default ones".. then i made the script look for:

if $color(bakground == %var) { load this image }

and if i change color it set the color mode and it set the image that match that color you can work around anything if u want to

That would work well but if you distribute the script then it would be a bit 'heavy'.

Yes it is, but with the mIRC.exe and everything its up in 1 meg.. so i cant say its that big, i will make it so they can only DL the script, and then it wont be more then 870 kb .. so cant say it is so heavy

i have around 30 images in it by the way.. but when mirc suport jpg/png, then i dont need to use bmp :tongue:

It would all depend on the script. I've seen scripts distributed with mIRC, as about 99.9% of them are even though it's against the licence and some are under 2MB while others are upto 10MB. The few scripts I have seen distributed without mIRC range from a few hundred KB upto about 6MB. It would depend on how 'pretty' things are and depend on the amount of third party contributions such as DLL files and DOS/Windows based games are included.

Well as the owner of a "fairly big website" you are grossly misinformed. The average .png image is SMALLER than the corresponding .gif image. Where you got your information from, I don't know, but when I convert png's to gif the filesize increases. When I convert gif to png the filesize decreases, similar results are reported by numerous online image groups.

Independant evidence:
scantips.com:
"[PNG is] perhaps about 25% smaller than TIF LZW for 24 bit files, and perhaps about 10% to 30% smaller than GIF files for indexed data. "

burnallgifs.org references a letter written by Christopher Wright (an online-cartoonist) who states:
"Switching over to the PNG format has given me about a 4K reduction in size per panel. "

Additionally, burnallgifs.org references a post by Drake Emko (another web cartoonist) that states:
"PNG images compress more efficiently than GIFs. The smaller file size you can achieve with PNG may be the most important reason to switch to this format."

Want some hard evidence rather than opinions?
http://www.algonet.se/~otsu/pngcomparison.html

Note the size of the compared checkerboard image. .gif was at 0.99kb, where as .png was at 197bytes. Thats a signifigant difference.

Ok, now you might be saying "Well these tests were conducted by just random people! That doesn't mean anything!"
So lets look at some test results from Yale University (http://www.library.yale.edu/wsg/docs/image_pro_con/imgprocon.htm):
"[PNG] typically compresses images 5-25% better than GIF."

http://www.oit.umass.edu/publications/at_oit/Archive/spring00/jv_compress.html also contains a very in-depth and accurate description of jpeg, gif and png, and it also states that png compresses files smaller.

So if you want to say .gif is smaller than .png, thats fine, but all the evidence suggests otherwise.

Oh and to rogue, who mentioned about IE's lack of alpha transparency support. Yes you are right, IE does not support this, however neither does gif. So why does that make png useless? It's not like if you use gif you can use alpha transparency, so your argument doesn't make any sense to me at all. It's like saying you have a choice between A and B, B has signifigant advantages over A. However, both A and B lack a feature. Therefore you should use A. Well A doesn't have the feature either, so all you're doing is losing out on all the added benefits that B would provide. That makes no sense at all...

I changed the icons in the bar on mirc, and thats why i send it with the script, it have a matching theme to the rest of it.. but its a chame when you find script that ppl want to get paid for if you using them..

Where you got your information from, I don't know, but when I convert png's to gif the filesize increases.

I get it from the programmes I use. Photoshop and Photo Editor.

At the same time I just made a PNG with Photoshop and saved it at 6.82KB and then coverted to GIF which saved at 2.97KB. I then saved the GIF back as a PNG and it saved at 5.32KB. There's every chance it would depend on what settings you use in whatever image editing programme you use whether it be Photoshop or something else.

I'm not saying you are completely wrong here, what I am saying is that it will be many years before webmasters shake off GIF images. If you go to any corporate website the chances of finding JPG and GIF there are very good. For the record I didn't follow the links provided because it's obvious that you wouldn't provide anything contrary to what you mentioned but what Yale University (where-ever that is) finds as a result of some experiment is clearly not being used in practice.

In light of this, I visited my own sites plus the two you own and there are GIF files a-plenty and 0% PNGs that I happened to have seen. Our choice of format simply happens to be reflected on a massive scale all around the world. PNG will one day takeover but it will probably take as much time as DVD did to claim Numero Uno spot from tape.

gif owns png when it comes to animation. a statistic all of those sites failed to mention.

With network and storage bottlenecks decreasing and cpu bottlenecks increasing, what might seem like savings today may become a hinderence in a few years, as png undoubtedly uses more cpu to render than gif.

Also, a GOOD gif compressor (such as GifConstructionSet, a licensed LZW application) usually produces smaller gif files than photoshop indexed png files, in my experience.

I believe every image format has it's place, and yes png has a growing nitch among internet users and photographers. I enjoy png for its 24bit lossless compression, the best of both gif and jpg, and personally hope to see digital cameras switch over to it. If you want to be revolutionary, please support open formats like png and mpg... but do remember to boycott mshit formats like wmv and wma, too.

For compatibility, I'll stick with .gif for web graphics for the next couple years.

- Raccoon

Probably because PNG isn't an animation format? MNG is however. I can't say how it compares to GIF because I've never used it. AFAIK it isn't supported in many programs - yet. That will almost certainly change in the space of a year or so.

Why on Earth would higher CPU demand from PNGs be an issue in a few years (if that's even true)? It's not an issue now, in a few years processors will be even faster, why will it be an issue then? Bandwidth is a much scarcer resource than processing power.

MNG is supported by Netscape 7 and above, and there is a plugin for IE to add support. According to most statistics I've read, MNG has features that animated gif's can't. For example, you can use alpha transparency in the animated image, a feature gif lacks.