I'll take your answers off the air.

4/1/2007 5:43:54 PM

Are you asking about the technical aspects of the compression, or just what they're best for?

Use jpeg for photographs or things with lots of colors. Use gif for text, things with a limited color pallette, or big blocks of the same color.

4/1/2007 5:53:11 PM

Quote :

"Are you asking about the technical aspects of the compression, or just what they're best for? "

yes.

4/1/2007 5:54:32 PM

Little known fact. All gifs are actually female. The reproduce asexually.

4/1/2007 6:09:26 PM

i find gifs to be useful for making stupid animated pictures for thewolfweb

4/1/2007 6:11:28 PM

gifs are fun because they support animation
yay

4/1/2007 6:11:41 PM

^ that's the ONLY thing GIFs are useful for...if using few colors, PNGs are far superior...otherwise, JPGs are the logical choice

4/1/2007 6:28:13 PM

THANK YOU.

someone else who uses PNGs.

4/1/2007 8:21:15 PM

PNGs also support animation, transparency, and true color. Sadly, most applications that support PNGs do not support the animations and many web browsers do not support the alpha channels properly. GIFs are based on LZW compression and 256-color palettes. LZW lossless compression is only good for data that is very repetitive (i.e. animations that change only a little from frame to frame), documents that have the same formatting tags over and over (PDFs) and the like.

PNGs use another lossless compression method that is more suited for photographs.

JPEGs use a lossy compression method that truncates data from the frequency spectrum of the image. Data is lost, but this can be acceptable in images where very high frequencies (corresponding to abrupt changes in color between adjacent pixels) is minimal. JPEG compression will end up smearing such regions of photos.

[Edited on April 1, 2007 at 9:08 PM. Reason : ]

4/1/2007 9:07:41 PM

^^ quality answer

4/1/2007 11:44:57 PM

fix your ^'s noob.

the correct response is,

^^ quality answer

4/2/2007 1:14:58 AM

GG limpynuts. I <3 PNG. Too bad jpg is just so much damn more efficient for web-use on photos.

But PNG for non-photo stuff is amazing. Nothing like having images that are like 69 bytes.

4/2/2007 1:32:33 AM

Every time I make a transparent PNG8 its GIF equivalent is smaller.

4/2/2007 8:20:51 AM

PNG are great. pitty that IE6 doesn't support transparency with them.

4/2/2007 8:22:31 AM

It does. It just has to be a PNG8, which means you're using Fireworks to make it.

Though it is still just index transparency, not alpha transparency.

[Edited on April 2, 2007 at 10:21 AM. Reason : .]

4/2/2007 10:20:27 AM

^I use photoshop for my PNG8's and they come out retardo smaller than GIF's.

If you have access to photoshop, make your image, then do Save for Web (ctrl-alt-shift-s) and set the color table.

I think both the normal Photoshop save and Fireworks save tend to just default to a 256 color pallette with PNG for some reason, and give much inflated file sizes.

4/2/2007 10:47:00 AM

I'll have to look into that then, since I was unable to do it the last time I tried in Photoshop (which was probably back in the pre-CS days) so I've just used Fireworks ever since.

Not having to use Fireworks ever would be just peachy though.

4/2/2007 11:27:15 AM