Zack's Graphic Design Blog: September 2014

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Tree / Dot Photo Compression Review

Dot / Tree Review

I think that out of all the photo file save options that PNG is the best. It has a very good picture quality and all three options for PNG look almost identical. Also for the quality of the picture it has a pretty decent file size. It is not as low as like JPEG but it does have the highest picture quality in my opinion. so if there was a way to get all the picture quality like PNG but to have the small file size like JPEG it would be the best option of all the file formats.

Trees

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

red blue circle

Graphic Design Notes

Graphic Design

Graphic File Formats

Understanding Format Choice and Image Compression

Gif = Worst Quality for Printing Art Work
Compression = Makes the work worse

File Formats

All Computer documents or files are packaged in different formats
The format is determined often by the origin of the file, such as a software program like photoshop or a device as a digital camera

Lossy vs Lossless

Graphic image formats fall under 2 catagories of compression, Lossy and Lossless
With Lossy, image data is “lost” or reduced for smaller file sizes and can cause poor image quality (pixelation)
Lossless retains image data for higher quality, but for larger file sizes

Graphic Formats

TIF, JPG and GIF are the 3 most common formats for common activities such as printing, scanning, and displaying images over the internet
PNG is a common web format, is high quality and can contain an alpha (transparency) channel
each format has its own advantages and disadvantages

File Format: TIF

Stands for Tagged Image Format
Common format for desktop publishing, print, photo, and Graphic design

File format: JPG

stands for Joint Photographers Expert Group
Created for digital Photography and works best for photo content
Has a Lossy format
can reduced a image file size by 10 : 1
level of compression is adjustable

File Format: GIF

stands for Graphics Interchange Format
Is best for graphics or images that have a flat color or even tone, such as a cartoon
Reduces image size by “indexing” color from 3 channels to 1
Is adjustable by changing color bit levels from 1 to 8
Contains no DPI (Dots Per Inch) data for printing. Not a proper format for print

KNOW YOUR PIXELS

TIF and JPG are best for images with pixels that blend in color, these are called “Contigous Pixels”
GIF is the best for images with flat even tone, or “non-contigous pixels”