Reduce size of an IFF image?

[BarryB]

Have Dpaint V but can't see an option to either optimise an image or reduce it's colour palette?

Is it possible to reduce/compress an IFF image to save space yet still be viewable? Have a 640x200x16 image that I want to reduce in size by either optimising it somehow in a program (Amiga or PC) or reducing/optimising the palette so it's smaller?

Any ideas!

[zipper]

IrfanView on PC.

[BarryB]

Can't save as IFF though!

[s2325]

You can paste from Irfan View to XnView.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by BarryB

Have Dpaint V but can't see an option to either optimise an image or reduce it's colour palette?

Is it possible to reduce/compress an IFF image to save space yet still be viewable? Have a 640x200x16 image that I want to reduce in size by either optimising it somehow in a program (Amiga or PC) or reducing/optimising the palette so it's smaller?

Any ideas!

Nope and yes - depend what is your goal...
Use different format than IFF (GIF or PNG for example).
If color requantization is not a problem go for decent software like Ximagic plugin http://www.ximagic.com/q_index.html - it can be used on XNView.
I would suggest SColorQ method as probably it will produce best perceived quality. However as dithering will be used - size can be not significantly smaller (dithering is signal like noise and it will not compress especially with simple RLL).

[jPV]

PPaint is pretty ok on the Amiga for these kinds of operations.

[DrBong]

Originally Posted by jPV

PPaint is pretty ok on the Amiga for these kinds of operations.

Yep, PPaint or you could try small utils like IFFConvert or Packman on Aminet.

[kolla]

In DPaint, just change screenmode to one with fewer bitplanes, duh.

[BarryB]

PPaint 7.1 did what I wanted, allows you to choose how many colours, dithering if needed and let's you see the effect as you reduce the number of colours. While DPaint allows an 8 colour palette it's not as flexible as PPaint in setting the number of colours in an image, at least I couldn't see any way to do it, I'm no Bob Ross!!

[Daedalus]

Yep, PPaint is excellent for this, and has some good resizing algorithms for scaling an image within a limited palette.

[BarryB]

Yes, PPaint is perfect for what I wanted! Thanks for all your suggestions people, appreciate the help

[kolla]

For some reason, Youtube is full of DPaint tutorials, some of them hour long. No tutorial videos for PPaint. Yes, I am aware that PPaint comes with a few turorial animations, but it doesn't beat narrated demonstrations.

[DrBong]

Originally Posted by kolla

For some reason, Youtube is full of DPaint tutorials, some of them hour long. No tutorial videos for PPaint. Yes, I am aware that PPaint comes with a few turorial animations, but it doesn't beat narrated demonstrations.

Sure, there aren't nearly as many YouTube tutorials on YouTube.....but there are a few (hint: use "Personal Paint" rather than "PPaint" in searches).

[ Show youtube player ] (Amiga Format video)

[ Show youtube player ]


Here are a few more traditional PPaint tutorials too:

http://www.amiworld.it/corsi/ppaintind.html (in Italian)

http://www.amigaforever.com/classic/ppaint/ (Cloanto support page)

http://www.intuitionbase.com/static....n_PPaint-Setup (AmigaOS4 set-up)


I'm sure there must've been more tutorials for PPaint in the Amiga mags, especially if Amiga Format went to the trouble of making a dedicated video tutorial.

[beezle]

If memory serves me correctly DPaint will create an "optimized" (using the term quite loosely) palette when you change the screenmode to one with fewer colors. I'm pretty sure there's an option for dithering somewhere, but it's a separate menu item/requestor to the screen mode one. Bare in mind however that dithering minimizes impact of compression.
Take this with a grain of salt though as I'm going by memory.

[BarryB]

Kolla already mentioned the screenmode method. Wonder if you get a nice manual and in depth tutorials with PPaint 7.3a?

[jPV]

Aren't these programs quite self-explaining? You'll find out the options pretty quickly just by browsing the menus on the program itself and trying it out... and use of RMB etc tend to be same on both, and that can be found out too by trying

[BarryB]

But if you're not an artist, don't have any art background or very rarely use art programs you need 'something' to explain what the tools do. Having some form of built in help or a manual to explain terms and techniques should be available, trial and error only gets you so far before you need to refer to a proper manual.

I'm sure anyone who has used Photoshop just learned it by clicking on things

[Leandro Jardim]

Well, there is "Art Department Pro" and "Image Studio". The first is a commercial program, now "abandonware", and its a classic; and the latter is a shareware program, abandonware too, that produces excellent pictures. Both programs requires a big amount of memory, but the latter can use the hard-disk as virtual memory (unique to its kind).

http://grandis.nu:81/eabsearch/searc...de=&limit=1000

http://aminet.net/search?query=image+studio

http://home.exetel.com.au/amiga/ImageStudio.keyfile

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?...t=image+studio

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?...t=IMAGE+STUDIO

[Workbench13]

A 640x200@16 raw image (and without header) would take up to:

. 375KB's if stored as truecolor (24-bit)
. 125KB's if stored as paletted (8-bit)
. 62,5KB's if stored as bitplanar (4-bit)

What you want is option number 3 plus RLE compression (which's as good as it gets for LBM), but somewhat limits it's compatibility with third party applications and doesn't generally mean much of a size reduction for photographic quality images unless they happen to have very large, same-coloured areas.

XnView 2.13 (Windows) will handle and output plain as well as RLE-compressed IFF's, and if your image's already looking good at 16 colors, you'll not need quantization (use scolorq as suggested above if you do) but format conversion alone (be sure to hit the "convert to colors" feature for this), which will simply do away with the extra unused palette entries (or bitplanes upon exporting) to save space.