[Tutorial]Making a dynamic signature for twilight

[Judobreaker]

Yeah I know, that would fix the size, but it would also cause quality loss. ^^
The reason I mentioned filesize difference isn't really cause I like the smaller sizes (I don't really care about 100kb) but cause it is proof there is image quality loss.

[Quest]

It seems I assumed wrong that you know about PNG & its compression The compression that PNG uses is LOSSless, meaning NO LOSS of quality. JPEG uses a lossy compression. If you don't believe do the quality comparison between two PNGs one 0 and one 9. Here's some wiki quotes for the non believers:

Originally Posted by WIKIPEDIA

PNG uses a non-patented lossless data compression method known as DEFLATE, which is the same algorithm used in the zlib compression library. This method is combined with prediction, where for each image line, a filter method is chosen that predicts the color of each pixel based on the colors of previous pixels and subtracts the predicted color of the pixel from the actual color. An image line filtered in this way is often more compressible than the raw image line would be, especially if it is similar to the line above (since DEFLATE has no understanding that an image is a 2D entity, and instead just sees the image data as a stream of bytes). Compression is further improved by choosing filter methods adaptively on a line-by-line basis. This improvement, and a heuristic method of implementing it commonly used by PNG-writing software, were created by Lee Daniel Crocker, who tested the methods on many images during the creation of the format.

Originally Posted by WIKIPEDIA

Lossless data compression is a class of data compression algorithms that allows the exact original data to be reconstructed from the compressed data. The term lossless is in contrast to lossy data compression, which only allows an approximation of the original data to be reconstructed, in exchange for better compression rates.

[Quest]

OK , time for demonstrating a bit of PNG powah.

My latest sig link : http://signature.elementfx.com/sig_exellentmg/sig.png/
Looks like crap , I know , don't rush.

My latest sig in use : http://forum.twilightmuonline.com/member.php?u=3856 ("About me" tab, ofc)

For the knowledgeable, they don't need any explanations but for the others it's a nice demonstration of transparency use as PNG. Besides the character that gets "out of the sig" and is transparent (a case demonstrated by vladko in a previous post) the signature itself is transparent and lets the background it is put on to get through (glass effect). It looks crap on white because it was not designed for white background, but as you see, on forum it looks decent.

Here's another example of the same signature on another background color.

The drop-shadow effect also looks as intended. As for filesize I used compression level 9 and the image "weights" just 55.79 kB.

Convinced you yet? What are you waiting for, go out there and do loads of signatures!

[Judobreaker]

Oh I've been convinced of the advantages of png for ages. :P

[albsky]

me too, but I can't get it working myself, wtf :P