In message , Mayayana
writes:
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a format for storing photos. Similarly with GIF: It's
handy for creating small files and it's cross-platform,
but it's lossy insofar as it reduces an image to 8-bit
color.
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Not quite: it reduces it to 8-bit _storage_, but it does that by using a
palette. I think the palette entries are at least 16-bit. Basically, it
reduce an image to 256 _colours_, but they're not the _same_ 256 for any
given image: a picture of a sunset, for example, will have a lot of
oranges and reds. And once the reduction has been done, there's no
_further_ compression (though some image editors - like, unfortunately,
IrfanView, which I think is great in most respects - tend to operate in
maximum-colours mode, so edit actions in them _do_ cause degradation
when resaved in GIF. But that's not the format's "fault"; if the editors
could be constrained to work in 256-colour mode, there'd be no loss).
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they
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