Lisa, the Simpson!

TIP: Always save Grabpics as .GIF, and keep .SWF's for backup purposes. Never upload the SWF's. :P

AwwLilMaggie
Come on, you can't be serious. ;) SWF format is perfect for making grabpics.
Besides, if you love raster formats so much, you should use PNG24 instead, since grabs saved in GIF often have awful colors and/or moire defects.

SWF is definitely not for backup purposes, but the original FLA file (if you make them in Flash). ;) Using SWF for showing the pic is a good idea, but for saving them to a collection, I prefer one of the common bitmap formats, such as GIF, JPG or PNG. GIF files can look pretty nice, but you need a decent program like Fireworks for a good outcome. JPG is still superior if you want to keep the filesize low, but of course, you have to be careful with the compression level.

an interesting theme :o….
all format has its advantages… ;)

if we want to really work grabpics… the option it is format GIF :). nevertheless before beginning it would have to fit the parameters to 256 colors… :eek: if it creates an image that uses more colors than the supported ones by GIF… it will obtain a terrible result :(… nevertheless if the image is created in photoshop and wishes to conserve the colors… the program uses a series of techniques to maintain the colors exact…  :)  (not much) :p it interlaces the 256 colors available to create a convincing effect to the eye :confused:… nevertheless its quality is worse than JPG  :)hmmm. on sfw… he is interesting… since he is light… and it is supported by most of the navigators :)… nevertheless single is recommendable for images based on vectors… (as it is this case) :p… and on png… in images of a reduced size she is perfect… (even for photographies)… but he is not very recommendable :lisa:… …. my option is GIF. whenever it has selected   the trowel of 256 colors.. and no use much colors...  :lisa:

PS: sorry.. my english is very bad... (now in a monkey nivel) :homer:

You're talking about Lisa, right?  ;)

My two cents. :)

Neither GIF nor PNG, and of course not JPEG are good for keeping grabpics. What is a typical grab? It's a traced sequence of lines and filled shapes, usually without gradients and with limited number of colors. It's a vector image originally, and should be saved in vector format. Of course if you make grabpics in Photoshop (I tried it once, then gave up), you have no choice since it's a raster editor. But if you make grabs in Flash, it makes sense to keep the original vector format, because in this case your images will be extremely small in filesize and will have perfect quality.

Why not JPEG? Because it will worsen the quality a lot; JPEG was designed for keeping photos or other images with smooth colors, not precise drawings. When JPEG meets the sharp color edges, it leaves noticeable compression defects there, called "artifacts" (or you have to increase filesize to keep the quality decent, thus making almost no sense to use this format at all).

Why not GIF or PNG? This is more tricky, but the answer is: these formats were created not for grabpics. They were created for pixel-quality images like pixelart or icons; they lose their advantages when they have to deal with anti-aliasing effect which is almost always needed for grabpics. GIF also restricts the image to 256 colors; and most of the finished grabs have more than that due to the anti-aliasing. PNG24 works better, but still, you have to convert a vector image to raster format to save it as PNG. You won't be able to convert it back, only retrace once again :p

So I'm for keeping grabs in SWF. They turn out very small, load quick, have great quality, they resize automatically, adjusting to your screen resolution. They also can be animated and interactive. Of course SWF has its own disadvantages (for example, it's not easy to create thumbnails from SWF, and not all browsers support Flash fully yet), but for keeping grabpics it's perfect imo.

SWF is easily the best format for showing grabpics. It's vectorbased, so it looks good on every resolution, the colors look the same as when you saved the SWF in Flash and the filesizes are very small. There's no other format that has these properties.

PNG is also a very good choice. It's lossless, doesn't have distortions and the colors look good. The only downside is, is that the filesizes can become pretty big when you're working with lot's of colors and high resolution pics.

JPG and GIF are both worthless for saving grabpics. If you can get a grabpic in JPG to look good and without distortions, it's filesize will be huge. GIF will mess up the colors 9 out of 10 times and it only supports up to 256 colors. Interlaced GIFs have even worse quality. GIF will also produce pretty big files on high resolutions with 256 colors.

Go SWF!  :gigi:

It's very easy to create thumbnails from SWF. Load a grabpic, press 'PrtScn' on your keyboard and paste it into your favorite image editor :lisa:

I always save all my pictures as PNG... and use JPEG thumbnails... but thats artwork, not GrabPics.

The only problem with SWF is I couldnt see the pictures through my AOL browser. But then... I cant even see SR through AOL now. (Yey for Internet Explorer!)
As long as I can see the pictures, and am reasonably satisfied with the quality and loading time... suppose it doesnt really matter to me :D

...since I mentioned JPG earlier around: Of course, simple grab-pics with flat colors shouldn't be saved as JPG at all. It's only worthy for scenes where you used gradients and the like, since they will blow up PNG files a lot, and they look ugly as GIF, because of the limited color range. For example, I had to save some of my wallpapers as JPG, for keeping down the filesize (on my website, that is).

The main disadvantage with SWF is that you either need a standalone Flash player or a browser plugin to display them. Looking at them one by one works fine, but it's very hard to use a slideshow program, for instance, or flip through a large amount of pictures. This is the main reason why I like to keep them in a bitmap format.

HECK NO! PNG is terrible for Grabpics.

I use FLASH now, NOT Paint Shop Pro, so I use VECTOR graphics.

 
Would you like a 2kb SWF backup or a 5MB FLA backup? Answer that! :P

BUZZ! It makes them usless to people to use in designs and stuff.

For Photographs, Framegrabs etc... yes, but NOT Grabpics.

No, Grabpics are rasters. But Vector Editors do a better job than rasters. Grabpics are stracings, they're anti-aliased, they have pixels.

Agree.

GIF's are Compressed and limited to 256 colours, ideal for grabpics because you use probably no more than 20 even WITH anti-aliasing. So as long as you optimise the grabpic for GIF then it'll show perfectly.

PNG is ideal if you have more than 256 colours, but very FEW grabpics will do that, if you have a Gradient then PNG is probably the better format to go for.

For Animations and Interactivity your only option is SWF. But for grabpics SWF is not a good choice. For the Simple reason they become useless to designers to use in designs and wallpapers etc... And also as you said, not all browsers support SWF.

EVERY Single grabpic I've made is stored in GIF format, both in Paint Shop Pro and Flash. If you look at this grabpic

http://babysimpson.co.uk/staff/gary/lisa77.gif

You'll see its compressed, and has no loss in quality.

Simple: Can you edit SWF files later? The answer is no again. Only with the original source FLA file, you're able to edit the lines, colors, export it to other formats etc. Maybe you were thinking of something different when mentioning "backup", but for me, it's always the source file that should be backupped, not a copy/export of any kind. As I said, SWF is great to show grab-pics to other users, but like PDF, it's not meant for any editing/processing.

Why?

.FLA, because you will be able to edit it if you want to and you'll be able to save it into every filetype Flash supports.

Why?

It makes them great to use in designs, because you're not limited to the size it has been saved in by the person who made it. Ever heard of 'PrtScn'? Look at this: http://members.lycos.nl/stebje/screenshot_lisa_layout2.png It's a design made with grabpics that were saved as SWF ;)

Depends on which format you use to save it. A grabpic made in flash and saved as SWF will always be a vector.

Again, no, they aren't. Their very useful for designs and wallpapers. Try making a decent 2048x1536 resolution wallpaper with a 400x300 raster grabpic. (In case you're going to say no one uses that resolution: my 21" monitor supports it)

But the majority does. Over 85% of the world uses Internet Explorer, which has that plugin. Than there's a fair share of Firefox users and Firefox also has a Flash plugin. The browsers that do not support Flash take up less than 1% of the entire market. I don't think there's anyone here who uses Konqueror, Lynx, Epiphany, etc anyway.

Unlike GIF, PNG is not limited to a maximum of 256 colors. ;)

Caution, long post ahead :D

AwwLilMaggie
I can't see how so... for the simple reason: PNG isn't any worse than GIF. Animation ability aside, PNG is a superset over GIF; it can do everything GIF can, so any GIF image can be converted to PNG without any loss in quality. Moreover, PNG can do things GIF cannot: for example, PNG allows more than 256 color and supports alpha-transparency, which is really useful sometimes.

I never had grabpics with the 5MB source and 2KB final result... so i cannot answer. :p Of course this is possible, but backups are backups. Like Andreas said, they should be kept in the original format, regardless the filesize. Burn them to DVD if they are so huge. ;)

Nope, that's not true. Grabpics can be represented in any format; I'm posting them in vector format, you're posting them in raster. But originally, all of them are vectors, because they are being made using the same vector technology (i.e. drawing straight and smooth lines). The proof that grabpics are naturally vector images, is simple: vector formats manage to represent them better. Like I said above, grabs in SWF have much smaller filesize (up to 100 times comparing to raster formats), and the visual quality is perfect.

About anti-aliasing... first of all, AA is a workaround. It wasn't developed along with raster formats, but appeared much later in the computer world, when monitors became better, and the computers became more powerful. AA is just a way to imitate a vector image on a raster medium, nothing more. Of course, you have to pay for this imitation: raster images with AA use more colors and more bits than raster images without it, and algorithms used in editing programs to make the lines "smoother" on the raster images, are all quite complex. I remember studying some of them in university - it's not easy to represent an inclined line on a pixel matrix so individual pixels aren't too noticeable!

That's not really correct... GIFs can be used for designing if the destination size of the image matches the original. But what if you need the same image, but 15% bigger or 15% smaller? (Or even worse, 3 times bigger...) You have to resize it. All raster images lose in quality when you resize them, no matter if you shrink or enlarge them. Vector images can be resized to any size without any loss in quality, and all professional designers prefer using vector images in their work instead of raster ones.

First of all, the grabpic looks nice, great job! :) But the same image could be saved in the vector format with the same effect. To be fair, I should mention one thing: the anti-aliasing quality (i.e. the smoothness of the lines) is damn good on your picture, it's even better than Flash produces. But it's not the format advantage, more editing program one. Flash Player could produce the same quality with SWF easily, but it doesn't... so yeah, raster formats have their advantages in the end. But if Adobe/Macromedia will decide to fix that in their player someday, all existing SWF images will be displayed with even better quality, without any modifications to them. Dunno why they didn't do that yet... most probably, just because nobody notices the difference.

P.S. Again, the moment is very cute. :) I should rewatch that episode someday. :lisa:
P.P.S. Oops, when I was writing this, there was no Suusje's post yet...

Actually, the answer is YES. You import the SWF into Flash and then Right Click it and Break apart and boom, your SWF is editable again. :P

I have that grabpic in SWF Format too, like I said, I store all grabpics in both GIF and SWF formats, where the SWF format is for backup purposes where I can edit it as much as I wish.

Duh, its a bluring effect I added to the grab that was 2500 px high in PSP then shurnkn down.

hmmm..... :homer:

I am learning much :D…
status brain: overload… :p

 :)very interesting data :)

Really? Never tried that before. Does it also restore layers and such? But it only works for your own SWF files, I suppose - if the author protects them, you can't open them anymore.

I think it restores layers, I dont know. There's really only one way to find out. :P

EDIT: It does, it restores each layer as a new symbol.