AuthorTopic: Avoiding twitter compression?  (Read 4545 times)

Offline floydshayvious

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Avoiding twitter compression?

on: March 08, 2016, 11:35:40 pm
Hi!

Couldn't think of a better place to ask this as a noob...

I've been uploading pixel art to twitter for a little over a week, and compression issues are rather vexing - turning my hard work into blurry messes.  Since I follow pixel dailies in an attempt to exercise my skills I'm around tons of gorgeous pixel art now on a daily basis - and I see lots of it that avoid this problem entirely.

Some of my things look better than others - but it's a general problem with everything I post.  I see people talking about "transparency" and/or "fixed widths" but I'm not quite understanding.

Could anyone please enlighten me to how people are avoiding twitter compression both with static pixel art PNGs and animated GIFs?

Thanks in advance.

Offline tsej

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Re: Avoiding twitter compression?

Reply #1 on: March 09, 2016, 12:17:28 am
Hi.
https://twitter.com/Pixel_Dailies/status/705200381505048576?lang=en 

Having a pixel at even 1% transparency prevents the jpg compression.
I hope it helped. Have a good day!
Correct me if I'm wrong

Offline alkaline

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Re: Avoiding twitter compression?

Reply #2 on: March 09, 2016, 12:35:04 am
on the same topic, how do you stop your twitter profile pic from getting compressed? I could have sworn it didn't do this before.

Offline floydshayvious

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Re: Avoiding twitter compression?

Reply #3 on: March 09, 2016, 12:40:47 am
Thanks tsej - How exactly do you set a single pixel at 1% transparency?  I'm just not sure what they mean - are they talking about the save options or in an actual layer (like - in photoshop?).

Also - whenever I post a GIF that's more than 2 frames twitter omits some frames (like the pixel Haggar on my twitter page - it cuts out the arm blur and shake frames entirely).  Is there a way to avoid that too?

God I feel dumb...

lol - sry but thanks for the help.

alkaline - I'm not sure about that either :\  Still getting used to twitter in general. (That's a wonderful little robot :) )

« Last Edit: March 09, 2016, 12:43:04 am by floydshayvious »

Offline Atnas

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Re: Avoiding twitter compression?

Reply #4 on: March 09, 2016, 12:44:04 am
I believe Tsej meant 99% transparency.

The file just needs an alpha channel and to be set to 24 or 32 bit. This advice gets passed around on twitter by a lot of people since they changed this.

So if you're in photoshop, just set the eraser to 1% opacity, touch a corner or something of the image with it, and save as png with alpha transparency.

Offline tsej

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Re: Avoiding twitter compression?

Reply #5 on: March 09, 2016, 12:46:28 am
@alkaline Also pretty sure if your picture is a PNG - aka has transparency, it won't get compressed. Don't quote me on it though, do test it. Also, making it 400x400 might help. 

@atnas Thanks. Derp on my part.
« Last Edit: March 09, 2016, 12:50:01 am by tsej »
Correct me if I'm wrong

Offline alkaline

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Re: Avoiding twitter compression?

Reply #6 on: March 09, 2016, 12:55:18 am
No, I tried everything, including that, but twitter still jpg's it :/

but it's not really that big of a deal I guess. only noticeable if you click on it to enlarge.

Offline floydshayvious

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Re: Avoiding twitter compression?

Reply #7 on: March 09, 2016, 01:00:56 am
Atnas: That's more clear - I'll try that and report back when I can.  Thanks everyone for the input. :)

Offline floydshayvious

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Re: Avoiding twitter compression?

Reply #8 on: March 09, 2016, 06:43:35 pm
Atnas - That seems to have worked today for my pixel dailies post.  Also seems to have worked for facebook as well.  Thanks so much!

I figured out that my Chrome browser was out of date - an update fixed the problem with my GIFs being messed up - ha!

Offline ptoing

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Re: Avoiding twitter compression?

Reply #9 on: March 09, 2016, 10:25:07 pm
Actually, the image does not even need any transparency at all. In ProMotion you can give a pic a fully solid alpha channel that does not get optimised out when saving as 24/32 bit. I think in PS this does not work though. Not sure.
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