Userbars

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Fatalcrash · #46 Post by **Fatalcrash** » Sat Dec 22, 2007 3:53 pm

*in pain*

Just came back from work... Really, REALLY tired. Whole... Body... Throbbing!

Anyways, it only takes me about fifteen minutes to prepare a bar, more if I'm being a perfectionist idiot at the same time. Finding a suitable colour for the background is the real problem. Everything else is all hunky-dory.

This is a userbar thread, not a 'Ye Olde Fatalcrash's (c) TwoKinds userbars' thread. As such, you guys are perfectly free to post up your own userbars and such. PM me with the URL of the bar, and I'll put it up on the first post.

I will do my own version of Karen when Tom releases the next comic. Or maybe I'll do it tomorrow. Hmm. I can't imagine how I'm going to have to work for the rest of my life. *collapses*

Shade · #47 Post by **Shade** » Sat Dec 22, 2007 6:59 pm

Fatalcrash wrote: 1) Just came back from work... Really, REALLY tired. Whole... Body... Throbbing!

2) Finding a suitable colour for the background is the real problem. Everything else is all hunky-dory.

3) PM me with the URL of the bar, and I'll put it up on the first post.

1) just get some rest.. as i said, nobody Really has time to post.
2) I can come up with the entire colour chart if you want.
3) Your work is really the best. I dont think anybody can do what you do.

Sage · #48 Post by **Sage** » Sat Dec 22, 2007 7:16 pm

Shade wrote:
Fatalcrash wrote: 1) Just came back from work... Really, REALLY tired. Whole... Body... Throbbing!

2) Finding a suitable colour for the background is the real problem. Everything else is all hunky-dory.

3) PM me with the URL of the bar, and I'll put it up on the first post.
1) just get some rest.. as i said, nobody Really has time to post.
2) I can come up with the entire colour chart if you want.
3) Your work is really the best. I dont think anybody can do what you do.

1) It's almost always good advice to rest, but some people have boring jobs that totally gives them time to post...
2) Do you normally offer people Rainbows?
3) Then how do you explain there being many many many other User bars out there and even sites that can generate User bars for people that look just as good, the same, or better? I would make my own however i would then make it bigger so i could fit the breasts into it and before ya know it - its not a user bar at all...

Shade · #49 Post by **Shade** » Sat Dec 22, 2007 7:19 pm

halarious. I don't often offer people rainbows because their so far away from where i'm standing (of course, this is a joke)

I'm just trying to say, He's good at it.

INH the Arctic Tigerboy · Sun Dec 23, 2007 5:56 pm

I would make my own however i would then make it bigger so i could fit the breasts into it and before ya know it - its not a user bar at all...

I found that highly funny, before I realised that that was exactly what I did. Hence:
http://i273.photobucket.com/albums/jj20 ... 1197831826
Hmmm, that's Odd. It didn't work.

Shade · #51 Post by **Shade** » Sun Dec 23, 2007 7:27 pm

I don't think i've ever saw that sig before

Now i see why sage said that

pocketlint82 · #52 Post by **pocketlint82** » Sun Dec 23, 2007 8:03 pm

Insert Name Here, I love you! Kat is the greatest!

INH the Arctic Tigerboy · Sun Dec 23, 2007 8:16 pm

Yes. Kat ftw.

Salem · #54 Post by **Salem** » Sun Dec 23, 2007 8:30 pm

I want an Ephemural userbar and Stalker Lady Basitin userbar. Heh, those two are awesome... and sexy. Yes, Ephemural is sexy too...

Shade · #55 Post by **Shade** » Sun Dec 23, 2007 9:14 pm

ehehe. I wonder if flora would look good on that. Oh yes, flora and kathrin fighting over trace. Very interesting indeed.

#56 Post by **avwolf** » Mon Dec 24, 2007 6:57 am

Alright, here it goes. The small resolution works in the favor of indexed colors -- there isn't much space for the gradient to expand into a large color range (it's small enough that I didn't realize the background was a gradient until I was doing this, actually, and if you were to do solid colors, indexed formats would completely carry the day). Oh, and the filesizes are negligible enough, hotlinking to my server's fine. The links are under the image. (Sorry for not following protocol, Fatalcrash. Uh...pick a favorite and we can put it down on the first post and pull the urls off the others.) The colors in the background gradient were picked from a couple of her articles of clothing, and I otherwise did my best to keep it in Fatalcrash's style, including the minor differences he had from the Userbars Tutorial (That one's for you, Kinuki).

If I were to make a recommendation, Sage, I'd highly recommend making it much taller. Karen really can't fit any of her definitive character features in twenty pixels. I didn't run any numbers for comparison, but I suspect that by fifty pixels in height, JPG starts to win out on the filesize/quality competition, due largely to the background gradient.

Let's break it down (these numbers are from my filesystem):

http://www.deviantparadigm.com/2k/Karen-Userbar-128.gif
GIF with 128 color palette: 3.59K.

http://www.deviantparadigm.com/2k/Karen-Userbar-256.gif
Even with a 256 color palette, the GIF weighs in at 4.5K. Not bad. The two are pretty similar.

Let's see how JPG stacks up.

http://www.deviantparadigm.com/2k/Karen-Userbar.jpg
JPG, run at 80 quality (which is default for "maximum"): 5.72K. Pretty similar from a quality standpoint. The indexed colors win out from a filesize standpoint, but the quality is certainly good enough that if you were stuck in a situation where you could only use JPGs (say, a version of Flash that's as old as my copy of Photoshop) or you simply preferred their use for your own perverse reasons, you would be just fine.

http://www.deviantparadigm.com/2k/Karen-Userbar-60.jpg
JPG, run at 60 quality (default for "high"): 3.3K. That sticks us with both reasonably quality and a filesize that's comparable to the images generated by the indexed colors. However, you can see how the JPG is producing some blurring effects. We should probably keep the quality higher than this for a decent product, we just don't have the color range to support this quality setting.

Taking the JPG down to "medium" (30) quality starts to produce some nasty blurring and artifacts, so that's right out. Bringing the JPG up to 100 quality (which isn't a default setting) doesn't give you much boost to the image quality, but it doubles the filesize from the "maximal" one up to ~10K.

Personally, I'm a PNG fan (this dates back to when the format was created because Compuserve was trying to enforce their copyright on the GIF format). So I was pleased to see it performing the best from a filesize perspective. I'm going to run a few extra color sets for PNG to demonstrate the differences in palette sizes.

http://www.deviantparadigm.com/2k/Karen-Userbar-32.png
You can see at a 32 color palette that the gradient looks a little worse for the wear and Karen's hair lacks some of its depth. 1.90K, though. Can't beat that for bandwidth usage.

http://www.deviantparadigm.com/2k/Karen-Userbar-64.png
The 64 color palette's pretty good, and it's 2.19K. We're reaching a reasonable compromise, but none of us here are that hit up by bandwidth expenses to scrimp this much.

http://www.deviantparadigm.com/2k/Karen-Userbar-128.png
At 128 colors, we can see some very minor improvements to Karen's hair (look near her left eyebrow) and the gradient is smoother. 2.91K, smaller than the 128-color GIF.

http://www.deviantparadigm.com/2k/Karen-Userbar-256.png
256 colors is almost imperceptibly different from 128 colors, so 128 is probably good enough if you want to stick to powers of two and not do some weird value for your palette size. 3.66K, barely larger than the 128 color GIF.

Fatalcrash, I'm at a loss as to how you're generating 33K userbars. I have to go 100 JPG quality or PNG-24 in order to break 10K.

I must admit, I'm impressed by the JPG performance here, I'd expected it to be slightly worse (on the order of another couple K). The loss in sharpness to the letters or the characters are neglible for a first run save.

Just for giggles, I decided to illustrate how JPG loses quality progressively. What I didn't expect was that the filesize would also balloon. This is why we don't save working files as JPGs:

That's 16.5K, and it's been saved roughly 53 times (which is pretty ridiculous), each time at "maximum" quality. So not only is it three times the size of our single save JPG, it also looks terrible.

Sage · #57 Post by **Sage** » Mon Dec 24, 2007 9:35 am

See how much time you wasted doing that? The JPG versions work out fine and are very easy to work with and as long as you work with default or higher you easily avoid the single reason we dont like using Gifs and PNGs (Though I like PNGs too they always seem to fail when its a large image- but are great for small images) - And that is why we use JPG for our comic formats- larger pictures- lower size - good quality - none of that wave effect you get when the GIF runs out of colors for the normally smooth grad. But yeah- of course you never save as a JPG till the image is done - nor should you save as a GIF or PNG- you save as a file format that preserves layers- usually the programs native file type like PSD for Photoshop!

But onto more important matters- that user bar doesn't do Karen justice-- no - no - its gotta show more of her awesome and superiorness...

Shade · #58 Post by **Shade** » Mon Dec 24, 2007 1:19 pm

whoa, i never even knew you used that program! i'm missing out big time!

GIMP 2.2 has a quality editor. 0% (Very crappy for old computers) to 100% (Soft as a blanket).
Then it comes with a smoothening editor. 0 - 1. That's how I do my art, In JPGs!

Elo · #59 Post by **Elo** » Mon Dec 24, 2007 3:25 pm

*GASP* Karen bars! Avwolf...you are my hero!

Shade · #60 Post by **Shade** » Mon Dec 24, 2007 4:21 pm

is there some sort of Special Program Specific for that? An extension maybe? I need it badly. Take a look at my userbar, not as good as yours.