Looking for a good freeware GIF editing application for my situation
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My goal is to get GIF files that can be handed over to a printer to print. Anyone who knows something about commercial printing is very welcome to reply! Now I am presuming that a commercial printer would be able to work with a GIF file, but if there is some other standard, I'm all ears. I have a bunch of GIF files sized at about 10000 x 14000 that I used Paint.NET to produce from TIFF files (the GIFs are about 25M while the TIFFs are about 840M!) The original TIFF files were created by a scanner from thin, ink-printed plastic pieces, that had a few colors (i.e., like a cartoon). I haven't checked, but I presume that the although the original object was supposed to only have a few colors, that scanner picked up some slight variations of the few colors, and the GIF conversion process just fit whatever colors it detected into the 256-color map. So I mainly want to get all the colors that are very close (i.e., all the colors that are really for the same original color) to get the same color, and to be mapped to color #1, #2, #3, etc. There is also some parts of these plastic pieces that are clear, so I figure that should be mapped to a color as well (color #0 maybe?) Now I know that the 32-bit BMP has an 8-bit part that signifies the level of transparency, but I am not sure how that would be done with a GIF. I can't seem to figure out how to do this in Paint.NET, but if it can be done, that would be great. Thanks
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My goal is to get GIF files that can be handed over to a printer to print. Anyone who knows something about commercial printing is very welcome to reply! Now I am presuming that a commercial printer would be able to work with a GIF file, but if there is some other standard, I'm all ears. I have a bunch of GIF files sized at about 10000 x 14000 that I used Paint.NET to produce from TIFF files (the GIFs are about 25M while the TIFFs are about 840M!) The original TIFF files were created by a scanner from thin, ink-printed plastic pieces, that had a few colors (i.e., like a cartoon). I haven't checked, but I presume that the although the original object was supposed to only have a few colors, that scanner picked up some slight variations of the few colors, and the GIF conversion process just fit whatever colors it detected into the 256-color map. So I mainly want to get all the colors that are very close (i.e., all the colors that are really for the same original color) to get the same color, and to be mapped to color #1, #2, #3, etc. There is also some parts of these plastic pieces that are clear, so I figure that should be mapped to a color as well (color #0 maybe?) Now I know that the 32-bit BMP has an 8-bit part that signifies the level of transparency, but I am not sure how that would be done with a GIF. I can't seem to figure out how to do this in Paint.NET, but if it can be done, that would be great. Thanks
While GIF doesn't support per-pixel alpha values, You _can_ make palette entries entirely transparent or opaque, but it's only a 1bit flag - the pixel is there or it isn't. You should be able to make palette entries transparent with a menu option of some kind. Dunno, tried Paint.Net years ago and threw it out in preference of Gimp. Also, for what it's worth, you'll get better compression with PNG, which uses the deflate compression scheme rather than the LZW one. As an example, the CP icon is a 4,795 byte gif. Converted to a png, its just 3,966 bytes. Depending on the material to be printed, you may also benefit from an image format that allows for colour-profiles to be embedded - important for accurate colour representation during print. As for mapping the colours back to their original (desired) values, you may be able to posterize the image to the number of colours actually present. The final colour will be determined by the avg of the relevant pixels, so you should expect the colour to drift a little from the desired one. You can simply edit the palette after posterization such that it reflects the desired colours.
"When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy'. They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life." - John Lennon
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My goal is to get GIF files that can be handed over to a printer to print. Anyone who knows something about commercial printing is very welcome to reply! Now I am presuming that a commercial printer would be able to work with a GIF file, but if there is some other standard, I'm all ears. I have a bunch of GIF files sized at about 10000 x 14000 that I used Paint.NET to produce from TIFF files (the GIFs are about 25M while the TIFFs are about 840M!) The original TIFF files were created by a scanner from thin, ink-printed plastic pieces, that had a few colors (i.e., like a cartoon). I haven't checked, but I presume that the although the original object was supposed to only have a few colors, that scanner picked up some slight variations of the few colors, and the GIF conversion process just fit whatever colors it detected into the 256-color map. So I mainly want to get all the colors that are very close (i.e., all the colors that are really for the same original color) to get the same color, and to be mapped to color #1, #2, #3, etc. There is also some parts of these plastic pieces that are clear, so I figure that should be mapped to a color as well (color #0 maybe?) Now I know that the 32-bit BMP has an 8-bit part that signifies the level of transparency, but I am not sure how that would be done with a GIF. I can't seem to figure out how to do this in Paint.NET, but if it can be done, that would be great. Thanks
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My goal is to get GIF files that can be handed over to a printer to print. Anyone who knows something about commercial printing is very welcome to reply! Now I am presuming that a commercial printer would be able to work with a GIF file, but if there is some other standard, I'm all ears. I have a bunch of GIF files sized at about 10000 x 14000 that I used Paint.NET to produce from TIFF files (the GIFs are about 25M while the TIFFs are about 840M!) The original TIFF files were created by a scanner from thin, ink-printed plastic pieces, that had a few colors (i.e., like a cartoon). I haven't checked, but I presume that the although the original object was supposed to only have a few colors, that scanner picked up some slight variations of the few colors, and the GIF conversion process just fit whatever colors it detected into the 256-color map. So I mainly want to get all the colors that are very close (i.e., all the colors that are really for the same original color) to get the same color, and to be mapped to color #1, #2, #3, etc. There is also some parts of these plastic pieces that are clear, so I figure that should be mapped to a color as well (color #0 maybe?) Now I know that the 32-bit BMP has an 8-bit part that signifies the level of transparency, but I am not sure how that would be done with a GIF. I can't seem to figure out how to do this in Paint.NET, but if it can be done, that would be great. Thanks
You could use IrfanView to convert the TIFFs. It's free, incredibly powerful, and has a batch mode. You should use PNG for your output files as has been stated. IrfanView has a 'Decrease Color Depth' command which will reduce the output size considerably. What to do about the transparent areas is another matter, you'd have to do that part manually. PNG supports transparency.
Regards Nelviticus
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My goal is to get GIF files that can be handed over to a printer to print. Anyone who knows something about commercial printing is very welcome to reply! Now I am presuming that a commercial printer would be able to work with a GIF file, but if there is some other standard, I'm all ears. I have a bunch of GIF files sized at about 10000 x 14000 that I used Paint.NET to produce from TIFF files (the GIFs are about 25M while the TIFFs are about 840M!) The original TIFF files were created by a scanner from thin, ink-printed plastic pieces, that had a few colors (i.e., like a cartoon). I haven't checked, but I presume that the although the original object was supposed to only have a few colors, that scanner picked up some slight variations of the few colors, and the GIF conversion process just fit whatever colors it detected into the 256-color map. So I mainly want to get all the colors that are very close (i.e., all the colors that are really for the same original color) to get the same color, and to be mapped to color #1, #2, #3, etc. There is also some parts of these plastic pieces that are clear, so I figure that should be mapped to a color as well (color #0 maybe?) Now I know that the 32-bit BMP has an 8-bit part that signifies the level of transparency, but I am not sure how that would be done with a GIF. I can't seem to figure out how to do this in Paint.NET, but if it can be done, that would be great. Thanks
I would strongly suggest using 8-bit PNGs rather than GIFs as PNGs have better compression. For converting TIFFs to 8-bit PNGs (or GIFs) you can use GIMP with the Save for Web plugin. This plugin allows you to customize how the 24-bit image is converted to 8-bit indexed color in many ways, such as choosing the type of dithering, number of colors, etc. while giving a realtime view of the resulting image and its filesize. GIMP also lets you posterize the image before exporting it, in which case you can set exactly which colors will be used.
