FIT3084: Images

In the previous lecture:

• Colour is not something to be added lightly to a website or multimedia work.
  
• Things to consider include:
  colour effects, colour meanings, colour relationships, practical issues relating to colour and the web.

In this lecture:

• Image file formats & compression schemes
  
• Uses for images
  
• Improving download times
  
• Improving the user's experience of your image content

...and the Web has never been the same since!

Images used as...

• Inline decoration
• Backgrounds
• Buttons & icons
• Space dividers
• Navigation tools (image maps)

Special considerations...

• (File) Size does matter (and smaller is better!)
  
  

  	Image WIDTH and HEIGHT specification accelerates browser page layout and can be used to scale an image up or down uniformly,
  	or non-uniformly!
  Note that scaling an image down in this way does not make it any faster to download! The file size remains the same as for an unscaled image. Only the screen space the image occupies is altered. The same is true when an image is scaled up. Ie. No extra information is available, the image download time is constant. The image may look pixellated if scaled up too large for this same reason.

• Specify ALT="Text for browsers not displaying images"
  
  
• Lecture 3 for HTML of images & image maps
  
  
• Remember! Images cannot be interpretted by text-to-speech/Braille software. They cannot be interpretted by people with visual difficulties including elderly or blind web-surfers. People who are colour-blind may have difficulties interpretting some images, especially coloured graphs and charts.
  Use images wisely and carefully so that where possible, their functionality is duplicated using other means. There are increasing numbers of examples of web designers being taken to court for failing to consider such issues. E.g. airline companies, Sydney Olympics organizers.
  
  

• Bitmap images*
  (Historical Web standard)

  Grid of coloured points (Picture elements / pixels) Grid dimensions are the image's width & height A bitmap image file is a means of storing information to retrieve the value of every pixel of the image Large file sizes	Enlarged, pixellated bitmap
  	* Sometimes black and white images laid out in a grid of pixels are referred to as "bitmaps" since they require one bit per pixel to specify.

• Object-based / Vector images
  (Future addition to the WWW/displayed using plugin)

  Collection of geometric shapes: lines; ellipses; rectangles; polygons. These are edited by moving control points, usually line mid / end points. Redraw image at any resolution Small file sizes

  Bitmap of vector image (control points marked)

Lossy and Lossless Bitmap Image Compression

• An R, G, B triple
  
  Each component specified by a floating point value from 0 to 1.0 inclusive
  0.0, 0.0, 0.0 = Black
  1.0, 0.0, 0.0 = Red
  1.0, 1.0, 1.0 = White
  
  Or as an integer from 0 to 255 inclusive
  000, 000, 000 = Black
  255, 000, 000 = Red
  255, 255, 255 = White
  
  
• Or a colour index

  Each value is an index into a colour table or palette holding the colours used in the image.

  For this palette, 255 = Black 044 = Red 000 = White

Compression schemes

Lossy schemes

• Discard pixel information
  (Very high compression rates)
  
  
• Reconstruction by approximation
  
  
• Range of quality / compression trade offs
  (The better the compression, the worse the quality. Compression usually specified within JPEG images as a percentage from 0% (low quality) to 100% (high quality))
  
  
• Often suitable for images captured from conventional camera / video
  (Compresses well, artefacts invisible)
  
  
• Often unsuitable for digitally synthesized images
  (Artefacts / degradation visible)
  
  

Lossless schemes

• Do not discard pixel information
  
  
• Reconstruction by calculation (exact)
  
  
• Often unsuitable for images captured from conventional camera / video
  (compresses poorly)
  
  
• Often suitable for digitally synthesized images
  (compresses well)
  
  

Skull image - captured using a camera.
GIF 38 kBytes (lossless*)	50% JPEG 4 kBytes (lossy)	25% JPEG 2.5 kBytes (lossy)
Spider image - synthesized digitally.
GIF 15 kBytes (lossless*)	50% JPEG 3 kBytes (lossy)	25% JPEG 2 kBytes (lossy)
Text image - synthesized digitally.
GIF (lossless)	JPEG (lossy) Under very high compression to accentuate the edge artefacts

• GIF
  Graphics Interchange Format
  
  
• JPEG
  Joint Photographic Experts Group
  
  
• PNG (recently supported Navigator / Explorer)
  Portable Network Graphics
  
  

Image Format Attributes

Transparent Image Backgrounds

User-selected colour rendered transparently Browser background shows through Hides rectangular image border

The image left (which has a transparent background) can easily be displayed in two different table cells, each with its own background colour showing through.

Image Interlacing

• Browser downloads & displays image progressively in bands
  (Reduces wait time for image preview)

GIF Animation

Sequence of image frames stored within GIF89a file Frames displayed in sequence by browser

Thumbnail Images

* Footnote: GIF is lossless only if the source image has 256 colours or less!

Image maps

• May be used to fill an entire screen
  (Beware of download time!)
  
  
• May be used as a button bar
  
  
• Easy way to develop a custom interface
  
  
• Consist of:
  • Image
  • Map regions
  • Software returning appropriate URL
    (client or server side)
    
    
• Example: Alan's homepage and see lecture on basic HTML.

Backgrounds

• Uniform background colours and appropriate text & link colours may be specified as attributes of the BODY tag:
  
  
  • bgcolor="#RRGGBB" link="RRGGBB" vlink="RRGGBB" alink="RRGGBB"
  
  
• Or a background image specified: BACKGROUND="imageName.GIForJPEG"
  
  

  Use background images with uniform and subdued colours

  
  
  

  and contrasting text!

  
  
  
• Use small, seemlessly tiled images to save background download time.
  (Instead of single huge background images)

• Keep images as small as possible by using an appropriate compression scheme.
  
  
• Use tricks like interlacing, thumbnails, inserting ALT, WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes to improve the user experience of your image content.

Courseware | Lecture notes

©Copyright Alan Dorin 2008