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View Full Version : .gif vs. .jpg


Sophistemon
2006-09-28, 04:06 PM
I've started making avatars, and I was wondering whether or not I should save them as .gifs or .jpgs. Or neither. I'm very new at this...

Any suggestions?
The Prince of Cats
2006-09-28, 04:07 PM
Jpeg files don't support transparency.

Other than that, gif files never change after you reduce them to 256 colours. Jpegs get re-encoded every time you make even a small edit and so lose quality.
Sophistemon
2006-09-28, 04:16 PM
Oh, okay. So I should stick with .gifs, then.

Thank you!
Ego Slayer
2006-09-28, 04:28 PM
jpeg lose quality? I never heard that before..
Mr Croup
2006-09-28, 05:01 PM
jpeg lose quality? I never heard that before..

Yeah, you can lose some of the true color tone, as well as getting more pixilation.
Beleriphon
2006-09-28, 08:19 PM
Yeah, you can lose some of the true color tone, as well as getting more pixilation.


And it depends a great deal on the intial size and quality of the original file.

Ultimately if you want the best format for editing it would be PNG because it supports multiple alpha points (that is transparency on a scale of 0% to 100%) as opposed to a GIFs, which either have some transparent or don't. Of course PNGs are absurdly large files, so they may not be what you want.
Rawhide
2006-09-29, 03:52 AM
For stick figure art done on your computer, the only solution is GIF. JPEG does not support transparency and uses a lossy compression algorithm, it looks decent and barely noticeable on photos (when the compression isn't set too high), but will create horrible artifacts on line art.

PNG is a better file format and if set correctly will not generate larger files than GIF (comparing the size of a 24 million colour PNG to a 256 colour GIF is a mistake). However, (there's always a however,) Internet Explorer does not support transparent PNGs, so the majority of viewers will not see it correctly.

You only need look at any of these comics done in JPEG to see why you should not be using JPEG for line art.
Life for Death (http://www.angelfire.com/comics2/life-for-death/20051214.html)
Life for Death (Guest Strip by Gorby) (http://www.angelfire.com/comics2/life-for-death/20050926.html)
The Town: The Comic (http://www.town-comic.com/comic0002.html)

A good explanaition of the two filetypes' strong and weak areas can be found here (http://www.siriusweb.com/tutorials/gifvsjpg/).
ElfLad
2006-10-02, 02:33 AM
jpgs in a straight up fight, but Gifs if they're given sufficient time to prepare.