Do you see a difference?

[Oualawouzou]

Hello everybody,

After some more tinkering, I got a .png version of my comic to be about the same size as the .gif version. I *think* the .png is slightly sharper, but I'm really not good at spotting subtle differences. Plus, the sharpness seem to change slightly weither I look at the pic on my hard drive or the one I uploaded to photobucket.

So... which one? Or would you say they are too similar to bother?

GIF version.
PNG version.

[Joel Fagin]

Even zoomed in Photoshop, I can see no difference.

What you need to do is see if PNG will get it smaller for the same quality.

- Joel Fagin

[Sorcery101]

Personally the only thing gifs aren't suited for is stuff with gradiants, So since you're using flat colors I say still with the gif becuase it's a smaller file and some older browsers won't show a PNG.

[Cope]

I switched to png a while ago just for the smaller filesizes (about 4-10kb in my quick experiments, depending on the size; really small images, like under 10kb, tend to larger as pngs).

I did consider the incompatibility with older browsers, but decided that webcomic readers who use Internet Explorer 4 or older are extremely few and far between anyway. You may want to look here, in any case.

....as for the sharpness issue...I can't tell the slightest difference!

[Warofwinds]

Can't tell a difference on my end.

[Garneta]

Can't tell a difference on my end.

Me either.

[Thetwat]

I can't tell any difference. which is good because there shouldn't be one. Both .GIF and .PNG are lossless compression, so they don't actually change the image. (The only change to your comic should be when it gets indexed, but that's the same process with both .GIF and .PNG-8)

I've noticed on my computer that .PNG is usually fractionally smaller than .GIF, but is sometimes fractionally larger, so it doesn't really make much of a difference which format you choose.

(But then again, I've been known to be wrong before.)

[C.w.]

GIF is only sort of lossless. It can only index 256 colors, after that it tries to approximate extra colors with dithering and the likes, but it generally doesn't work out too well. That's why stuff with gradients tends to look poopy in GIF. PNG will index however many colors you want. But yeah, with that few colors, there's most likely no difference whatsoever.

Anyway, without doing anything drastic i was able to get it down another 20kb. 32 colors seems to be the sweet spot.

[Jackhass]

Looking at them side to side I see no difference.

[Deaths Head II]

Too similar to bother.

[Oualawouzou]

Ok, so it was all placebo effect. Thanks everybody!

Anyway, without doing anything drastic i was able to get it down another 20kb. 32 colors seems to be the sweet spot.

Thanks for the tip c.w., I'll try that.

[Nervous Spy]

I can't see any difference, as well. And, as c.w. already said, even at 32 kb there is hardly any perceptibel quality loss.

In general, PNG is the better algorithm, if your graphic suite supports all its functions. GIF's only real advantage is animation. I think you should go with whatever gives you the smaller filesize. PNG support in browsers is no longer much of a problem, especially if you do not employ the alpha channel transparency feature.

[Uncaringmachine]

Looks the same yo.

[Nervous Spy]

The .PNG version has darker colours than the .GIF version.

Dang, you're right - but only for IE. I've just tried it out - the colours are identical in Photoshop, and display identical in Firefox. In IE, however, the PNG displays darker, because obviously IE still does not support gamma correction for PNG.

[McDuffies]

I like the script of .gif version better.