Saving to PNG

[bkh]

Cool actions
When thinking about it it comes to my mind that Lab is the better color space for this job, as it is based on perception and has equal distances between its colors.

That was my reason for using Lab instead of RGB. Unfortunately, MedianCut does not minimize distances between colours but between colour components, but it might be good enough for practical purposes.

Cheers,

Burkhard.

[RobS]

See the attached for some quick evaluation tests (apologies for the size)

webexportcompare.jpg.zip

Top two rows are standard RGB colour reduction with spot-noise indicated

The bottom two rows are colour reduced after applying the "Colour reduction in Lab mode" action, with just a couple of small areas showing some spurious spot-noise. Overall though a marked improvement compared with the out of the box colour reduction in RGB, and closer to the result obtained from photoshop (previous page).

In all cases 'error diffusion' was used as the dithering method and the target number was 256.

Cheers

Rob

[Hoogo]

I was now able to test a plugin for color reduction, Ximagic Quantize. It lacks some usability, but offers quite some methods and gives nice results.

[RobS]

Thanks Hoogo,

Very interesting set of plugins there... unfortunately I'm Mac-based and can't make use of them, at least not conveniently! Be nice if there were some Mac-compatible alternatives.

Rob

[greenmorpher]

Thanks Hoogo,

Very interesting set of plugins there... unfortunately I'm Mac-based and can't make use of them, at least not conveniently! Be nice if there were some Mac-compatible alternatives.

Thanks Hoogo,

Very interesting set of plugins there... unfortunately I'm Mac-based and can't make use of them, at least not conveniently! Be nice if there were some Mac-compatible alternatives.

Hiya Rob

I don't have much use for plug-ins -- as you might have deduced from some of my posts, I'm flat out just getting the most out of the standard feature set!!!

But to keep up with plug-ins, I suggest you keep an eye on Mike Bedford's Plugs'n'Pixels site: http://www.plugsandpixels.com.

Why not suggest to him that he look at Mac and PC plug-ins that work with programs apart from the big names? Obviously, Adobe changed its architecture to keep third parties like PhotoLine out of the plug-in party, and plug-in makers have to go along with that because P'shop is where the market is.

Hey, what about someone starting a list of plug-ins that work? With Mac, of course, you would have to look at two different modes, with Rosetta and without.

I have some old ones that work with Rosetta, but the latest developments in iPhoto and PhotoLine have rendered them pretty well redundant so I've stopped running PHotoLine with Rosetta.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard
Publisher, Editor, Business Writer
The Worsley Press

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