GIF89A and PIL

Harishankar v.harishankar at gmail.com
Sat Mar 27 23:32:16 EDT 2010


On Sat, 27 Mar 2010 19:44:54 -0700, Stephen Hansen wrote:

> On 2010-03-27 08:17:46 -0700, Alain Ketterlin said:
> 
>> Stephen Hansen <apt.shansen at gmail.invalid> writes:
> 
>>> If not, are there any decent other image libraries out there that
>>> anyone's familiar with? The only one I could find was PythonMagick,
>>> which seems completely undocumented. Or I'm blind.
>> 
>> I don't know PythonMagick, but it is based on ImageMagick, which is
>> kind of a swiss-knife in image manipulation and conversion. You could
>> try the standalone tools first, to see if you get what you want/need.
> 
> Well, I know it -can- do what I need, except the subprocess business
> isn't something I want to deal with. And the library seems utterly
> undocumented. :(
> 
>> Hmm, a 16x16 image. Don't expect much from the most sophisticated
>> formats (e.g, PNG), because their overhead (headers etc.) may well be
>> above the size of the data. Compression isn't usually targeted at small
>> files.
> 
> Yeah, I don't expect much from PNG. The images are very small but I
> might be sending a LOT of them over a pipe which is fairly tight, so
> 50-60 bytes matters. That's why I selected GIF.
> 
>> (BTW: "slight tweaking" may have an effect on file-size if it
>> introduces new colors, because GIF uses a color-table. I guess you know
>> all this.)
> 
> Yeah, I know this is possible, which is why the tweaking was to be very
> careful: these images all have only a couple indexed colors each, and I
> should be able to do the tweaks and not increase the size excessively.
> 
> However, the problem is: I left out all the tweaks and it still exploded
> in size.
> 
> Just opening, and then saving the same file with no changes at all,
> resulted in a 72 byte file growing to 920.
> 
> I thought it was GIF87a vs GIF89a... but have since come to determine it
> doesn't appear to be. I decided to give PNG a try again, since those
> extra 50 bytes *matter*, but if I can't get GIF to work, 50 is better
> then 900. Unfortunately, I hit the same wall there.
> 
> If I convert these itty-bitty images into PNG, they're about 120 bytes
> or so. Opening one in PNG, making no changes, and saving, results in the
> new file being 900 bytes too :(
> 
> So I wonder if there's just some hyper-optimization Photoshop does that
> PIL can't round-trip.
> 
>> GIF uses the LZW algorithm, and so does zip and gzip (the latter with
>> an additional layer of Huffmann coding). If your images are of fixed
>> size, you _may_ be better off compressing the raw data with a general
>> purpose compressor (i.e., gzip). Check the packages gzip and zlib.
> 
> Hm. I hadn't thought of compressing the saved version. I could do that,
> I suppose: it just seems there is so much extra stuff which shouldn't be
> needed that's being saved out.

This might not be of much use to you, but I've found by experience that 
PNGs are almost always bigger or equal to GIFs of the same resolution, 
colour depth and so on. I've never yet seen a PNG file that is smaller 
than a GIF for the same set of pixels.

As mentioned above, compressing raw data stream might be more beneficial 
in this situation.

Also try the pngcrush utility and see what size it gives you.
http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/

-- 
Harishankar (http://harishankar.org http://literaryforums.org)



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