On Dec 29, 2003, at 10:11 AM, Jacob Rose wrote:
It occurs to me that the background for a 640x480 desktop may not be 640x480
at all, because of the Apple menu at the top of the screen. That is likely
to be the case if your 'banding' is in the form of horizontal stripes,
rather than banding in areas that should have been color gradients. Does
anyone know whether the Apple menu is displayed 'atop' the background or if
the background is instead scaled so that there's room for the Apple menu?
On Wed, 24 Dec 2003, Greg Koelpien wrote:
Yes, I thought using a GIF, which can only have a maximum of 256 colors, would bypass the problem of dithering, but the same banding occurs. I suppose I can try saving it as a web-safe GIF, and not a regular GIF, but that would seriously deteriorate the quality as well...
greg
On Dec 24, 2003, at 12:30 AM, Roger Johnstone wrote:
On Wednesday, December 24, 2003, at 06:21 PM, Greg Koelpien wrote:
I am perplexed by an issue with Mac OS 8.1's "Desktop Picture"
control panel on my modded Color Classic. The problem is that I can
have a perfectly smooth image scaled at 640x480 that looks great in
Photoshop. However, when I set it as the background image, it looks a
lot worse, and there's this weird banding effect. I've tried high
quality JPG, 256-color GIF, PICT files, and it still looks bad. The
screen resolution of 640x480 with thousands of colors should render
these perfectly. These same images look fine when opened in Photoshop
4 on the same machine. Any explanation as to why these images don't
look their best as background images but fine in PS?
Greg Koelpien
I used to have the exact same problem with an iMac running 8.1! It too
was running in 16-bit colour mode. I came to the conclusion that the
Destop Picture control panel just reduced the colours in the picture
from 24-bit to 16-bit with no attempt at dithering, which caused the
banding. When viewing the picture in other programs, they did a decent
job of reducing the colours and the pictures looked fine.
It's been a few years, so I can't remember exactly how I solved the problem. Later I got the video RAM upgrade which let me use 24-bit colour, so maybe I didn't solve it! Something to try (if you haven't already), is to open the picture in Photoshop and reduce the colours to 16-bits. Then save the picture as a TIFF or PICT. If you save in JPEG format it will convert it back to 24-bit colour since JPEG only supports 8-bit grey and 24-bit colour, although it shouldn't "undo" the dithering.
-- Roger Johnstone, Invercargill, New Zealand
PS/2 Mouse Adapter for vintage Apple II or Mac order at http://vintageware.orcon.net.nz
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