#image compression

I use GIMP for all image editing, besides occasional Lunapic.com usage. I did an FAQ on this on another gimmick blog a while back but I do different things here sometimes so I'll redo it anyways.

I got a higher quality version of your picture so the compression will be more noticable:

All the compression done on this blog favors aesthetics over functions, which is why there's extreme dithering on everything: dithering isn't really something that's used at all anymore but I like how it looks.

The main process is really just scaling the image down with linear interpolation to something between 64-256 pixels on the short side, and using Gimp's feature of letting you clamp an image to indexed colors, specifically with Floyd-Steinberg dithering on. If there isn't dithering, the picture will look like this:

Then I just check the sizes they export at and post the image and that's it.

If I want to make the image comically small and impossible to discern, I'll keep it as a jpeg and turn the quality way down at a tiny size:

Which will end up looking like this.

There are other techniques used sometimes, mainly on the #win98 pictures and #gba pictures.

With the win98 pictures, I scale them down to 320x240 or 160x120 every time and clamp the colors to the windows base palette, usually saturating the image before since the dithering doesn't look great otherwise. Look how this picture looks without vs with extra saturated colors:

I forgot to mention before so I'm just jamming it here, but I'll also replace text in the font 3x3 mono if it's too small to be readable to keep the image legible sometimes. You'll notice this being done with fine print and watermarks sometimes:

Here's the runthrough of that:

Lastly, with the GBA pictures, it's about the same process but I just clamp the colors down to a number that the dithering is noticeable while the image is at the gba resolution. I never noticed until making this tutorial, but there's a positioned option for dithering too which I'll probably start using for these gba posts.

That's about it. Here's the big version of the image you sent by the way: