New servers and file optimisation request!

[Cyberbeing]

The recommendation to use Save for Web (PNG8) is generally bad, since it will produce an Indexed PNG which is only 99.6% lossless, not to mention some viewer software scales it horribly. Reducing colors below 256 with Indexed PNG also has a tendency to murder screentones and create horrible aliasing on edges. Unless you have a raw which which is already very low bitdepth without any edge smoothing, saving a few extra KB usually isn't worthwhile for the quality loss. To each their own though.

Most of the time, you should aim for a proper Grayscale workspace with Grayscale PNG8 output. A few more steps, but really what I'd personally recommend if aiming for maximum compatibility and quality.

[ul]
Ensure your Grayscale Workspace is set to sGray (Grayscale equivalent of sRGB, web default), Edit -> Color Settings -> Working Spaces -> Gray -> sGray
Open your Image
Image -> Mode -> Grayscale -> Discard Color (Workspace is now Grayscale sGray)
Always ensure your layers are Flattened before saving, Right click your layer -> Flatten (Removes Alpha, Workspace is now 8bit Grayscale)
Save as PNG and uncheck the color profile (Photoshop will output a Grayscale PNG8 automatically)
If you intend to re-compress with pinga/pingo afterwords, you can output uncompressed PNGs from Photoshop to save some time[/ul]

 

[CatWEax]

@Ksetrar said:

Any nice software for jpg files ?

If you have to use JPEG and want to lossless further compression, try jpegrescan or MozJPEG. Nice on a *nix system, but I don’t know if/how they work on Windows.
For grayscale pages, make sure to save/export your JPEGs as grayscale or use the optimizer’s grayscale option to get rid of the useless color channels.

There’s also some lossy tool (that I forgot the name of) used by Twitter, which botchers the color channels. It’s okay for photos but looks really horrible on anything with strong color contrasts, such as most colored manga pages.

 

[Violu]

Is this is a response to the mass of people coming in from that recently dead aggregator + quarantine people?
If so, whats going to happen once areas start opening up and people stop spamming the site?
Will you be keeping the upgraded servers (which I imagine cost more to upkeep?) or going back to what it was before?

 

[AB2000]

@Holo I've tested PNG gauntlet and Pingo.
They work well, but they're painfully slow. Although you will save space and bandwidth, you will need a lot of computational power for compression.

In the long run, it might be interesting to create a home-made low-level PNG optimizer.

 

[Holo]

@Violu I suspect this traffic won't be going down, so the upgrades will likely to be permanent.

 

[YumeriaYumi]

Slow loading still. Whatever you changed about two weeks ago change back. Because I am getting pissed off at waiting so long for loading.

 

[Stoner]

@YumeriaYumi I only get that on old chapters, usually new chapters are fine. Dunno if it'll get better.

 

[tomselick]

Is there a distributed worker like F@H that will make the conversions en masse if uploaded to a queue. Could look into adding that to the H@H client thing as well.