| Recently, my
friend and I were having a 'discussion' :P He's also into
websites and has done some freelancing on the web. So anyway,
he was telling me of how some sites like their graphics only
in gif format. So little ol' me thought: "What? What's
the diff between the gifs and jpegs?" Well, to me, there wasn't any.
I mean... as long as a picture loads fast and looks good...
does the format really matter?
So, I went home and dug through
my dusty shelf of books-bought-never-read and pulled out one
on internet graphics. Hmmm... *readreadread* And now I'm a
little wiser ^.^v (yay)
Let me share a little of what I
learnt. Hmm... how do I start? Okay. First let me introduce
the gif. The gif (or Graphic Interchangeable Format) was
designed for graphics and really turns those mega files into
itty-bitty... files. (Okay, so I can't think of any other
word. Bite me. *OW!!*). Gifs offer two things that Jpegs (or
Joint Photographic Expert Group) don't:: transparency and
animation. Transparent gifs are used to create the illusion of
irregularly shaped images, images with masked areas (normally
the background) that appear transparent. These are the pics
that look great on any web background. Meanwhile animated
gifs are like little movies. You know, those Henshin gifs of
the Sailor Senshi all over the net? Yeah. Those are an example
of animated gifs. Now gifs can be saved from 8-bit down to
1-bit. And itsy-bitsy bits equals itsy-bitsy file size.
But (yes there's always a
'but') if you were to take a photo... that's another story.
Gif is a lossless compression method, i.e. you don't loose any
information from your images. However, because you save on an
8-bit/lower (meaning 256 colors/lower), your images dither and
become... well... generally awful. And the file compression
isn't too good either. So in comes the jpeg! The jpeg is a
24-bit compression method so the compressed file size is 1/2
that of a compressed gif file. The jpeg does deteriorate the
quality of the photo, but the difference is less
visible.
So it might seem that the jpeg
rules. Well, in a sense it does. But (another one...) if given
files, one gif and one jpeg, don't be surprised that, even if
the jpeg is smaller, it takes a longer time to download. This
is because jpeg involves both compression and decompression
while gifs just load as it is. So jpegs in the end get viewed
in better quality than the gif at the expense of download
time.
Last point before I end:
Different compression levels can be applied to the jpeg. The
file size difference is substantial and the quality penalties
are not too steep.
To sum it all up, the gif is
for graphics and the jpeg is for photos. Though there may be
times when you might want to save a photo as a gif, that's
fine. But don't save graphics as a jpeg (no no no...) unless
they're combined with photographs. The download time of
the page on which your graphics are on will be lengthened and
visitors HATE that. (Which is why I took down the long- loading
bg of my old site ^^)
Well, that's the end of my
'short' er... blab-cum-advice-...whatever passage. Hope that
this helps you in some way!
|
Gif photo:: 36KB and
completely ugly
Jpeg photo:: 21KB, fantastic
quality
|
