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Image Optimization

J

Jay_NOLA

Well-known member
Didn't see anyone mention about optimizing images. Reduce size if needed and run images with an image optimizer. I've found that I can get my Realm down by several megs by doing this and it is good to do if you want to export your Realm for others.

On the Fantasy Grounds forum they have tutorial on doing this along with a link to a free image optimizer.

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/foru...ges-in-your-ruleset-tokens-battlemap-and-such!
 
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I found irfan view to be helpful. Reducing the number of colours and choosing the right image format with the qulaity setting and compression does wonders. It also has batch processing. Might not be as easy as the tool above, as it has a learning curve on it's own, but it's a nice tool with many plugins and supports a lot of formats.
 
You should be able to reduce the size of jpeg's without reducing the number of colors.

You can often reduce the size of a jpeg with no noticeable loss of quality.
 
Thanks for the link, I also downloaded their gui and it works a treat, I'm getting an average of over 55% size reduction and I can't see a difference on a 1080p monitor.

This will save a ton of space.
 
@kbs666
I know I use the colour reduction sometimes when I want to create a certain effect, not mainly due to the file size. Images from the SR3 world are often just 2 colours. A scan keeping more colours would be just wasted. :)

JPG would also not be my first choice for coloured images as it is a lossy format.
 
Acenoid said:
@kbs666
I know I use the colour reduction sometimes when I want to create a certain effect, not mainly due to the file size. Images from the SR3 world are often just 2 colours. A scan keeping more colours would be just wasted. :)

JPG would also not be my first choice for coloured images as it is a lossy format.
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Of course you can safely convert a black and white image to 2 color. That isn't was under discussion I thought.

As to jpeg's being a lossy format unless you are choosing to greatly compress the file that simply shouldn't be a concern. It is almost always possible to take a jpeg and optimize it to be of a smaller file size without any visual difference than a png or gif.

On the web today, despite years and years of various entities trying to get people to switch over to png, the vast majority of images are still jpegs because of the superior image handling characteristics of jpegs over png.
 
The tool in the tread does optimize pngs. I use pngs and jpeg. Png optimization doesn't give as great as reduction as Jpeg one but a a small reduction of 5 or 10% does add up.

If you look on the 2nd page of the fantasy grounds thread that has the tutorial you can see an png dragon that was optimize and one that wasn't to compare the difference in one of the posts.

Image dimensions aren't changed by the optimization program if that wasn't clear.
 
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png optimization, since it is a lossless format, cannot achieve large file size reductions.

What happens is the png compression process takes a lot of clock cycles so most software that produces png files limits the process to a predetermined amount of time. This gets close to an optimum file size but there are almost always savings to be had if you're willing to invest the time.
 
I don't know if this has been suggested, but I would like to see a date installed column on the latest updates screen. So we can easily tell if we've already installed an update or not...?
 
Voromir said:
I don't know if this has been suggested, but I would like to see a date installed column on the latest updates screen. So we can easily tell if we've already installed an update or not...?
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You're in a Realm Works forum, not the general Hero Lab one. You're also in a thread about reducing the number of bytes an image takes up on disk.

In Realm Works the installed version is shown on the splash screen (visible at startup, while loading a realm, and from Tools/About in the Launcher or Help/Product Info in a realm). If you go to Tools in the Launcher you can Check For Updates to see if you're on the latest version.

In Hero Lab's Latest Updates list an exclamation point indicates that you have the item installed and there's a newer version of it available. Unfortunately, there's no visible difference between something that's up to date and something that isn't installed at all. While I'd like to see those shown differently (perhaps using another icon to show "not installed"), I doubt they'd put much effort into it due to the move towards Hero Lab Online. Ah, well.
 
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