I just came up with a clever way to show hundreds, or even thousands of
colours in a single GIF image! It's little tricky, but it can be done!
Why would you want to do this in a GIF image when you already have JPEGs
to show 24-bit images? Well, JPEGs are good, and they're small. But
they're lossy, and you can't do transparency with them. If JPEGs had an
alpha-channel for the Internet, then I'd be in love with them. But they
don't. So, I came up with this method whereby you can make a GIF animation
that has an individual palette for each frame. Each frame is a separate
part of a complete picture. When viewed in Netscape or IBrowse, the entire
image is shown and so you can have a GIF with thousands of colours if you
want, and A TRANSPARENT BACKGROUND!
To make it work, you first have to take your original image, and cut it up
into several different pieces as you like. Then, load each piece into a
bitmap paint program, like DPaint or PPaint, etc. Re-map the 24-bit pieces
one-by-one into 256 colours. Place a piece in the position where it was
originally in the entire image, and make sure you have a background colour
for transparency. But be sure to only have one piece on the screen at one
time. Save the image for the very first frame (usually the top leftmost
one) AS LARGE AS THE ORIGINAL PICTURE WAS. Make sure the blank portions
of the screen are the background (transparent) colour. All subsequent
pieces of the image can be picked up as brushes from the top leftmost
corner of the image to the lower extremities of the piece that you've just
laid down. But always make sure that the background is transparent! After
picking up a brush, save it as a GIF (or convert it to a GIF later. Make
sure that the colour that is transparent is the same colour across all
images. (I make it colour 0 just for simplicity's sake.)
Next, use WhirlGIF (available on AmiNet) to make the GIF animation. You
need to specify the disposal method as "not" or "none"; the transparency,
as colour 0 (or whatever colour is transparent in your frames); and don't
make the GIF animation loop; it must stop at the last frame. Here is an
example of the command line:
Whirlgif -v -o Ram:My.GIF -time 0 -disp not -trans 0 frame1.gif frame2.gif..
After it correctly makes the GIF, you should load it up only in IBrowse or
Netscape. Browsers such as AWeb, Voyager, or Internet Explorer don't show
the images properly. I also haven't found any image viewers which show
them properly either. But my main purpose for these special GIFs is for
use on the Web, anyway. It just goes to show how correctly IBrowse and
Netscape display pages on the WWW, eh?
Included in this archive are some example images for you to check out.
Load up the TryMe.HTML page into IBrowse or Netscape. It will show you the
differences between a JPG, a 256-colour GIF, and my special hacked GIF of
the same image. I've also included a hacked GIF of my logo, which shows
off the ability to have thousands of colours and a transparent background!
Other things of mine which you should check out are:
pix/anim/AmiBanner.lha ;An animating GIF banner that supports Amiga.
pix/boot/Win95BURN.lha ;My Windows'95 trasher. Burn, baby burn!!!
pix/boot/Win95BURN.jpg ;A JPEG version of that pic.
pix/boot/WinBURN24.lha ;A 24-bit IFF version of that pic.
pix/wb/BeBoxWBs.lha ;Some pics of my WB using the BeIcons.
pix/wb/JapanWB.lha ;A Japanese Workbench. ;-)
pix/wb/HAMBrowse.lha ;A Pic showing how to browse the WWW in HAM!
pix/icon/BeIcons_2.lha ;A set of NewIcons in the BeOS style! (and more!)
gfx/aga/HUGEBench.lha ;Some monitor settings for a HUGE Workbench!
misc/emu/Snd2Mid.lha ;Converts iNES SNDs to MIDI.
And of course, my webpage at http://www.sfu.ca/~ccovell/
It has lots of stuff that you might enjoy exploring.
See ya!
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