Crew of Red Corsair

Now that I know more tech people here than before I want to share (or better improve) my knowledge about posting images to CRC forum.

I want to find a way (and commonly acceptable) to post more pictures while finding a suitable balance between size and quality.
While searching different opinions I'm still having doubts if I'm doing it correctly.

I've find those problems:

• Limited forum space
• Size
• Formats
• Quality

Last picture posted (Late Summer Event 2018) is processed like that:
Original: 799,2KB, 1024x600, 8bpp, RGB, PNG
Posted: 122,7KB, 1024x600, 8bpp, Web palette, PNG, max compression

Colors quality was affected. But I'm not taking colors so seriously because I thought that pictures like that must represent a moment lived during that event.
Because of that resolution can't be reduced.

About formats I thought that JPEG is unacceptable for raster graphics and GIF gets bigger than PNG. PNG is the default format for screenshot.

On my LineageOS phone that picture looks even more horrible maybe because of antialiasing.

Hi Livio,

To be honest, you are the only crew member in recent years who has shown such an avid interest in posting photos, so grazie mille! I am certainly no expert at perfecting photos, and never really considered (nor do I fully understand) all the issues you have addressed. I only learned what I know from trial and error. But for what it's worth, here are the steps I take:

1. Use the Print Screen key to take photo.
2. Photo automatically goes to my Dropbox in PNG format.
3. Open photo with Windows Photo Viewer.
4. Open Microsoft Office Picture Manager.
5. Crop photo to a size that I think looks good, and save it.
6. Follow the CRC Image Gallery upload instructions to post.

Hope this helps and good luck!

Well, captain... I'm doing it in a more complex way without involving any proprietary software or SaaS. Everything I've done so far was entirely "handmade" with GIMP.
Manaplus saves photos in PNG as I push the PS button on my PS3 controller.
Cropping the photo only reduces its size in term of resolution. Indexing colors or using a known palette reduce the amount of information to save from the picture. I've tried using Mirage and other softwares too but I'm not happy with the results.

Anyway I hope that more people like to post more photos in a way that makes this forum more "colorful" without wasting memory.

Once I've found a good way to do it I'll try to repost everything I've done.

Hey there! I've got some quite good results with the GIMP!

Shivtr's free space is about 60% at the time: the more we save, the more we can post.

I've reduced the size of a screenshot lessening the quality to quite acceptable levels from about 900kB to 80+kB.

That's how I've made it:

- Format: PNG
- Palette reduced around 32 : 256 colours, web palette is the better but affects quality a lot
- PNG compression maxed out
- Positioned dithering or Floyd-Steinberg (I don't know which is better yet)

Keep in mind that the real value behind the picture is not the picture itself but what it represent for us!