XnView Software

In Export, GIF-tab, dither should perhapps be a check-box instead of so many options in the pulldown-menu.

V 1.90 B5

Agreed. It would definitely be better as a checkbox for dither/no dither.


(..Although personally, I find dithering to be worthless 99.9% of the time. It almost always looks much worse than adaptive.)

Drahken wrote:(..Although personally, I find dithering to be worthless 99.9% of the time. It almost always looks much worse than adaptive.)

Yes, you're totally right. It must be different algorithms behind dithering in different software, it works very good in ie. Photoshop.

Troken wrote:

Drahken wrote:(..Although personally, I find dithering to be worthless 99.9% of the time. It almost always looks much worse than adaptive.)

Yes, you're totally right. It must be different algorithms behind dithering in different software, it works very good in ie. Photoshop.

But you have not only 1 dithering method for some of them, for example B&W

xnview wrote:But you have not only 1 dithering method for some of them, for example B&W

That makes it hard to create a checkbox, no?

(In btw: to be honest, I've never used B&W Gifs)

1) Different dithering methods do look very different, but none look good (at least none that I've seen).
2) What about making the stienberg one available for the other color settings too, and using a dropdown box or radio buttons for: adaptive, pattern dither, stienberg dither?
3) All this stuff is rather redundant since you can do it all within xnview before saving/exporting.

Drahken wrote:3) All this stuff is rather redundant since you can do it all within xnview before saving/exporting.

How and why? Sounds like a detour if you have to do the dithering yourself.

Image->convert to colors. There are both adaptive and dithered options for each color setting. This has been there since long before the whole export function. Simply decrease the image to whatever colors adaptive or dithered, then save in any format you wish.

I guess Troken's question was a rethoric one. Why prepare images for saving/export when you have an export assistant? The assistant must be complete - and for completeness you need the dithering options. Later even more flexible colour reductions with arbitrary colours might be useful and needed in the Export dialog.

Drahken and Helmut

Well, my question was actually both. First of all a rethoric question because I don't think it should be needed to decrease colours before exporting (see Helmuts comment), but I'm also curious how to do this, maybe it can be helpful when exporting.

Decreasing colors within xnview has been there since long before the export function, and way before the export function included color reduction. In fact, prior to the export function, reducing colors before saving was the only way to get an indexed (256 color) PNG. The options for color reduction within xnview are the same as the current ones in the export dialog, so there's no real advantage there. However, if you reduce colors before saving/exporting and find that you don't like how it looks, you can easily make some adjustments to the image before saving to try to make it look better. Also, if you reduce colors first, then you'll be able to edit the palette and change some of the colors manually.

Cheers mate for explaining the background story. With a good export feature I can't really see a need for the manual reduction of colours. But thats only a personal reflection, I suspect that there are lots of folks using this for different reasons.

Troken wrote:With a good export feature I can't really see a need for the manual reduction of colours. But thats only a personal reflection, I suspect that there are lots of folks using this for different reasons.

I use dithered color conversion on regular basis and I need to see what the picture ends up looking like before saving it. Also, if I couldn't do it manually, I would be wasting time saving the image in order to load a new color palette.