File size for quest images

[lujate 578]

I am working on my first quest with pics. I went to upload my pics, and it gave me a warning that the files are recommended to be 150KB or smaller. My camera views are running about 300KB.

 

Do I need to resize or drop the resolution to meet the recommended 150KB size?

[Schot 407]

It would be great if you could lujate.

 

That said I do know how difficult it would be to get a screenshot down to 150KB. Our wiki software suggests 150KB in order to maintain optimal performance. As close as possible to 150 KB is certainly recommened though I would say a realistic number to hit would be 200-300KB.

 

First thing I would suggest is to resize your screenshots to 1280. Or better yet change your game resolution to 1280 when making quest screenshots. A good 40% of people online have 1280 resolution or less. Anything above that would not be visible on their screens. Then in your image editor adjust the quality setting to about 60-75%. That should do the trick.

 

Here's a sample of one of my screenshots. Originally it was at 1920 resolution in TGA format with a file size of 6.59MB. I resized it to 1280 and set to 60% quality which resulted in a file size of 194kb.

 

[Silver_fox 397]

No, lujate, you don't need to resize them or reduce the quality. Full screenshots won't fit into 150kb anyway - I'm playing with 1280x1024 and have 600-900kb camera views. The file size depends on a number of colours and small details that are on the picture. Since maps and cameras have to be informative - they have to preserve details - so they would be bigger than 150kb no matter what you do. If you make such a picture fit into 150kb, it'd become blurry, with a lot of artifacts - and therefore won't look good on the page and won't be informative for users. So just click the 'Upload anyway' button - or mark 'Ignore any warnings' checkbox before uploading. by the way, what quest are you working with?

[lujate 578]

I believe I am running 1440x900 resolution, and I think the largest JPG was 312kb. I will resize them down to 1280 and see what happens. I exported them with Gimp using the default quality setting, but I do not know what that is.

 

I am doing A Long Journey. I have the text started but stopped briefly when I hit the warning on uploading the pics. Once I finish that, I am ready to start the second Light HE class quest.

[Silver_fox 397]

I'm pretty sure that I have bigger sizes because of the increased quality settings. But anyway - on the page the pics are sized down by automatic resizing. That makes the pics on the page quite lightweight. And if somebody clicked on the pic to see it not resized, than this person wants to see all the details - so we can let this person do so. By the way, even though my Internet speed sometimes drops to dial-up-like during the last days, I don't have troubles with loading any of the quest descriptions on wiki - which means that the pics on the page aren't too big and 'heavy' to load.

[lujate 578]

Tonight, I will resize down to 1280, upload the pics and see what everybody thinks.

[Schot 407]

This is actually something I've been wanting to talk about for quite some time so I'm glad you brought it up lujate. The thing is that where we get hit the most with large images is during the imagemagik function that runs each time an image is uploaded. The larger the image the harder the function needs to work. It was the reason why we had so many lockups/freezes here at darkmatters and the wiki about a month ago. We were maxing out the CPU power each time a pic went up. Also the reason why we got a finger shaking from our host, haha. Our host has since resolved this by restricting how much CPU we can use so that if we start using too much then the next process in line will be forced to wait rather than halting all other processes like the entire forum and wiki.

 

I guess I'm just concerned about maximizing effeciency on our sites. It can spin out of control quite quickly. ^^ We're ok for now but with present practices we'd be in a bind if a sudden burst of activity were to occur. I could simply implement a file size restriction but I don't want to do that in the event we want to try out other kinds of uploading in the future.

 

All's I is say'in is pleeeeaase try to make your images compact.

[gogoblender 3,072]

Here's a sample of one of my screenshots. Originally it was at 1920 resolution in TGA format with a file size of 6.59MB. I resized it to 1280 and set to 60% quality which resulted in a file size of 194kb.

 

 

 

I see why you're asking for smaller file sizes.

 

The drain on resources for our sites is hit hard with the large images.

 

This image you've just put up is pure artistry.

 

An amazing balance tween file size and integrity of a very high quality pic.

 

Beautiful work Schot

 

 

gogo

[Silver_fox 397]

I'm trying to make images smaller. I always fit into 150kb with NPC portraits and m-maps and into 300kb with dialogs and tab-maps and a bit bigger logs(they require 75-80% quality to make the text neat). I'll try to reduce the camera views in the future (you're right, 60-75% is quite good, I just usually forget to change it from 80%). But really, 150kb is too little. If you're going to restrict a file size, than please make it at least 450kb. It's frequently just impossible to fit a png into 150kb, because some dialogs are really long.

[Schot 407]

Oh of course. I agree with you Silver. That 150kb warning message came with the mediawiki software. For our purposes I'm suggesting as close to 200-300kb as possible. Granted sometimes it's possible to get lower but it all comes down to trial and error. We certainly want the pics to look good so that's the first thing to consider then the file size.

 

The most important is to try and get it down.

 

 

Here's a comparison of two quality settings. The lower quality saves on quite a bit of file size while maintaining readability:

 

When the pic below opens you can click between the two images while the image window is open. Move your cursor to the upper left or right of image to see the "Prev" and "Next" buttons.

 

Saved as a jpg at 80% quality; 343kb

 

 

 

Saved as a jpg at 60% quality; 201kb

 

 

 

 

So from those results I think it's safe to say since all logbooks are mostly using the same colours and layout that 60-65% quality should be used.

[Silver_fox 397]

Well, I agree about the logs. Though it depends on your software. Photoshop gives nice relults with 60%, but I'm not all that sure about other programs. I know that old Gimp gave a lot of jpeg artifact when saving with less than 75%. But maybe the new versions are better.

 

And what about the dialogs? For some quests they are really big. For example this one: The Tortured Soul Starting dialog is 467kb (saving it with other settings gave even bigger results). When I resize it to 430px I get 325kb anyway. Dialogs that long are quite rare, but they do exist. On the other hand this case is more of exception, so it won't hurt the poor little server too much. But it makes me happy that wiki doesn't have any size restriction now.

[Schot 407]

Well this is a surprise. I just tried in Gimp and it actually seems to compress better than my Photoshop.

 

This is the same image as I made an example of above. Saved as a jpg at 80% quality resulting in a file size of 174KB. That's excellent compression. The only extra steps I did was I unchecked the extra data. When you do "save as" you need to click the advanced options and unckeck "Save Thumbnail". If you use the "Save for Web..." then checkmark "Strip EXIF". That will reduce it by 10kb.

 

 

 

I'm glad you brought up the dialogue boxes Silver. What do you think about making future dialogues as gif or jpg and using the wiki background colour to make it blend in? I saw a very long dialogue that was over 600kb.

[Silver_fox 397]

Well, the size compression is better, but the jpeg artifact already appeared. So the thing about Gimp adding it is still true. In Photoshop you'd get the same appearance only with 45% quality. The 60% Photoshop one is a bit bigger, but it's clean. After all, wiki IS a quality standart for all the Sacred fan sites (it really is), so we should try to keep our images neat if the cost is only 30kb. I know that not all of us have Photoshop installed, but I think that a bit better quality in Gimp would do the trick too.

 

As for the dialogs - are you completely sure that the wiki background would never change? What if when Sacred 3 will come you'd decide to re-skin it? And one more thing - the 600kb dialogs are very rare. At the same time we have a Places section, where each photo is 600+ kb. You aren't going to force Knuckles to redo it all again, are you? As for the gif - I'll try it and report my opinion.

[Silver_fox 397]

I tried the gif file - and it won't work for dialogs. Gif isn't exactly readable after resizing to 430px that we use on pages. Some letters aren't even easely recognizable. It's possible to decipher it - but decipher, not read. Here are gif and png together - compare them yourself.

 

[Dragon Brother 619]

 

 

 

 

Well, the size compression is better, but the jpeg artifact already appeared. So the thing about Gimp adding it is still true. In Photoshop you'd get the same appearance only with 45% quality. The 60% Photoshop one is a bit bigger, but it's clean. After all, wiki IS a quality standart for all the Sacred fan sites (it really is), so we should try to keep our images neat if the cost is only 30kb. I know that not all of us have Photoshop installed, but I think that a bit better quality in Gimp would do the trick too.

 

As for the dialogs - are you completely sure that the wiki background would never change? What if when Sacred 3 will come you'd decide to re-skin it? And one more thing - the 600kb dialogs are very rare. At the same time we have a Places section, where each photo is 600+ kb. You aren't going to force Knuckles to redo it all again, are you? As for the gif - I'll try it and report my opinion.

 

Whats wrong with the picture above silver? I don't see anything jumping out at me as substandard.

[Silver_fox 397]

Well, maybe it's just me - several years of dealing with digital photography made me sensitive to color noise, and I can notice it as soon as it appears. On this screen the color noise caused by jpeg commpression started to appear around the quest title on the right page and some chain titles on the left one. This kind of noise always appears in the most contrast areas. At this settings the noise is minor, but I already see it.

 

But actually, I just always tend to make everything perfect (it's like a bad habit to me)... and sometimes I may go too far with it. I'm sorry if sometimes it becomes annoying.

 

And maybe the monitor and its settings matter too. Some screens hide a lot of minor mistakes that are on the images, while other screens show them.

[Dragon Brother 619]

Quite possibly the screen...Im sitting at tiny ~15" laptop screen so that could hide stuff.

[lujate 578]

I would like to get some feedback before I continue. I took a camera view screen shot. The original TGA file was 1280x1024 and 5 MB. I used Gimp to export this TGA file out as JPG files, at 85 (default), 75 and 65 quality. The resulting images were 366, 272 and 223 KB.

 

Take a look and let me know what you guys think of the pics.

[Dragon Brother 619]

I have no issues with any of them, mind you none of them fit on my screen to see the whole picture so I may not be the best judge here...

[Schot 407]

cameraTest03.jpg is just fine for the average reader lujate. I would bring it up just a notch and make it 275kb. In fact if all your screenshots are more or less like that then you can safely expect to set all your screenshots to 275kb.

 

Oh believe me I get what you are saying Silver. I often make gogo crazy with my constant pixel pushing, haha. I've learned over the years to let go a little bit though. Working on the sites has really helped me in that respect. A designers perspective is vastly different from an observer's perspective. Honestly, I often find myself leaning forward so that I'm maybe 5 inches away from my screen to check on some rogue pixels and push them into their proper places. We love to do this but no one is going to really notice. It's more for ourselves. As a matter of creative art I completely agree with you Silver but I've learned in regards to web dynamics that a tiiiiny bit of distortion is ok. My phylosophy is to stop compressing at the first sign of distortion but let that little bit of distortion through. Trust me. Nooooo one will ever know. Except you and you'll just have to live with the guilt but only for the rest of your life.

 

Here's some samples I made using Photoshop and GIMP. These are from a PNG dialogue on the wiki which I converted to gif. I did not resize it. I'm letting the wiki do that and in which case you'll have to look on the wiki pages s=to see the results:

 

PS tortured soul test.gif

 

GIMP tortured soul test.gif

 

They actually turned out very well. In fact your pixel obsession Silver has resulted in such quality that the gif versions even look fine against black. Go figure! Try it out yourself Silver. Change the background colour to black using your browser settings and see how well the gif versions look. You make nice cut outs. ^^ Oh and as for your question about the possibility of sacredwiki's background colour changing... That defintely won't happen. Too many of us have added too much content based on that background colour. I will make a new skin for sacred 3 wiki but it won't affect the Sacred 2 namespace.

 

 

Cheers for the feedback DB. It really helps to have as many opinions as possible.

 

 

Since we've uncovered so much in this topic we'll probably set up limits based on specific types of screenshots in the near future. Oh and only to be applied to future images for now. I wouldn't dream of asking anyone to go back on their hard work and change it.

[lujate 578]

The second pic came out at 272 KB with a Gimp quality setting of 75, so I will use that as my standard.

[Schot 407]

Sounds great lujate. Bet you weren't expecting the kind of answer you got huh, lol.

[Silver_fox 397]

@ lujate

I really think that they all are OK both size-wise and quality-wise, so I would probably go with the middle one. The thing is - there is no need to set a bigger quality in the graphics software than you have in game. If you play with default settings, which are a bit below average, the level of detail in game isn't extremely high, so no matter what you do in Gimp, it won't get higher. Saving with 80-85% may be reasonable only if the initial screen was made with all-options-on and maybe Elite Graphics Pack to boot (I keep forgetting to install it!) - so there is a lot of details to preserve.

 

@ Schot

The gifs aren't all that bad, while not resized. After resizing the background goes all pixel, but not to the extreme amount. I kind of like the PS one - the full one doesn't go pixel at all. What settings did you use? All the gif files I got yesterday were a bit smaller and a lot more pixel.

 

And one more thing I remembered here. Some time ago Knuckles told me that he always sizes the images for the bestiary up. That his standart is to get the portrait image at somewhat 350-400px size and then size it up to 640px. I never saw a point of it - with almost 2 times resizing the file size goes up and the quality goes down. After that it's resized to 160px for the page and quality goes down again. So, to tell you the truth, I always refuse to size up the bestiary portraits. Am I right here?

[Knuckles 904]

Since we've uncovered so much in this topic we'll probably set up limits based on specific types of screenshots in the near future. Oh and only to be applied to future images for now. I wouldn't dream of asking anyone to go back on their hard work and change it.

 

You have no idea how relieved I am to see this in print

 

I did see some of us are using Gimp and there's a plug-in that might help here. If it was already posted, sorry, I kinda power-read through the topic and it's morning so I might have missed it. But anyways here it is

Gimp Save for Web Plug-in

[lujate 578]

Sounds great lujate. Bet you weren't expecting the kind of answer you got huh, lol.

Looks like I opened a can of worms, but in a good way.

 

Knuckles, you link tells me page not available.