#background noise reduction | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

axxa-the-allikatt · 5 months ago

Text

(ᵕ—ᴗ—) I’m sorry for the ages long delay. Been having zero inspiration for anything in life. But I got this done :>

I didn’t know what to write about so I did a crack fic on bonten finding out about Sanzu’s relationship. Ignore the fact that the characters are a bit ooc TwT

***

Reactions of the Bonten members for you 🫴

1. Mikey.

No reaction. Duh. Shorty needs therapy, not tea about his pet dog’s hoe.

2. Kakucho.

He didn’t care either. As long as Mikey was satisfied, and nobody was getting into serious (haha) trouble, he wouldn’t push his nose into their business.

3. The Haitani brothers.

They had a sinking feeling something was going on but assumed that Sanzu was up to another one of his most definitely illegal shenanigans. So imagine their absolute horror and surprise when this ‘happy mood’ of the mad dog, Sanzu Haruchiyo, (who had the patience span of a two year old toddler that wanted its binky), lasted more than a month.

They decided to find what god was showering their blessing down.

4. Kokonoi.

Well, Kokonoi couldn’t care less what was up with the feral man, but the considerable reduction in cash spent on a shit ton of drugs caught his attention. This was news. Anything that saved so much money was worth looking into. So, in this case, what was it? He decided to find out.

5. Takeomi.

What was going on? Was the world ending? Where was the Sanzu he knew (not very well)? Who was this happy creep in their suite? Looks like he had some sleuthing to do.

- A temporary alliance was thus formed, consisting of the Haitani brothers, and Kokonoi. (They didn’t want that old geezer to join them-)

So there were a few possibilities.

1) He had kidnapped enough people to torture them for the next few months (possible but unlikely or it would have been viral on the news).

2) He had stocked up on a drug that sent him up to good heavens (also possible but unlikely since his drug sprees more often than not led to killing sprees which again would have been viral on the news).

3) He was genuinely happy about something or, OR, someone. Gasp.

This theory was decided to be the most unlikely but they had no proof going for either of these options. So they decided to find proof.

Attempt 1-

The best way to get Sanzu talking was to get him to do something fun. Like torturing traitors. The perfect opportunity came up when a few men were foolish enough to get caught selling out their secrets. The Haitanis were instructed to ‘take care’ of these traitors and they decided it would a good time to get Sanzu to join them.

On the fine sunny morning, the Haitanis found Sanzu in the kitchen, grabbing some drugs to start off the day fresh. Walking up to him Ran leaned against the counter, making sure he had Sanzu’s attention, before asking him whether he would like to join them for some ‘fun��. Sanzu was silent for a few moments before shaking his head. “I’ve got better people to deal with.“ Hmm, so theory number one was probably correct. Hm, simple enough, Sanzu was always unpredictable. Kidnapping several people didn’t even cover a fourth of it. Oh well, that was case solved th- “Besides- I don’t want to get my hands too dirty”….. He didn’t- he- the Sanzu Haruchiyo didn’t want to GET HIS HANDS TOO DIRTY?! WTF?!

*explosion noises in the background*

Sanzu- 1 / Alliance- 0

Attempt 2-

Well, attempt one was a no go, so the next option was to take him to a club. If theory number two was correct, and Sanzu did have a stock of good drugs, he mostly probably won’t be satisfied with the cheap drugs at the club and would therefore not accept it. Foolproof plan. Or so they thought.

It was a cloudy evening and anybody who enjoyed their existence would be found strolling in the park and enjoying the weather. Which is exactly why the Haitanis and Kokonoi, along with Sanzu, were found 15 feet underground in a crowded club filled with pretty ladies and petty men. Bonten obviously owned the club and were shown to their private area. Lounging themselves on the sofas that would cost the average man a kidney, the Haitanis happily bathed in the attention from the several skimpily dressed women. Kokonoi was sitting in the corner of the sofa, sipping on an expensive drink. All three of their eyes were trained on Sanzu, who was declining a woman who was offering him some of the white powder he usually loved. Hmmmmmmmmm. Perhaps-

“I told you, woman, I don’t need that! Fuck off!” Sanzu hissed, shooing away all the women who usually hung around him. “Oh? Sanzu not doing drugs? Is the world ending?” Rindou chuckled. “Shut the fuck up! I’m just trying to reduce on the substances-“…..REDUCE HIS DRUG INTAKE?!

*explosion noises in the background*

Sanzu- 2 / Alliance- 0

Attempt 3-

No way in hell theory number three was right. No fucking way. How could they even get him to tell them if he was seeing someone?-

There they all were, in their weekly meeting.“Ran, Rindou. Mikey wants you two to collect the goods at the dock. We’re expecting some trouble so be prepared. Sanzu, you’ve got permission to join them.” Kakucho instructed. The Haitanis nodded, then looked at Sanzu.

“Nah. I’ve got a date.”

“…..”

*explosion noises in the background*

Sanzu- 3 / Alliance- 0

Hence your relationship was exposed. And he would definitely skin anyone who pestered you too much. Although, he never mentioned your name or any personal information. But they knew. And it still haunts them in their dreams.

*****

The fic’s not too Sanzu X You centric but I hope you liked it TwT

@germanpansexual @raythebestboiever

87 notes · View notes

pnwander · 4 months ago

Text

quick & easy lightroom walkthrough or: shooting through dirty double-paned glass, and other hardships.

I'll tell you! (Original post here.)

✱ KIT Panasonic GH5 + LEICA DG 100-400 with rubber hood for shooting through windows.* ✱ SHUTTER 1/125 sec ✱ APERTURE f/6.3 ✱ ISO 1600

*I use this one. It works for me, but it's a little tricky. It was a gift, and I think if choosing for myself I'd find something easier to get on and off.

WHAT'S ALL THIS, THEN? It was cold outside, obviously. And the flickers bolt if I try to open the back door, so sometimes I'll post up in front of my dining room window and just get the best shot I can. I do this less and less these days, now that my arthritic hands and I have heated gloves. The 'after' photo is a brand new re-edit using better tools than were available when this was shot. I was never happy with how it looked, before now.

under the cut: EDITS

✱ Detail: Sharpness & Noise Reduction My main problem here is sharpness. The photo is in focus, but because I'm shooting through a thick storm window, I've lost that tack-sharpness I really want, and I have a whole bunch of noise to contend with. This would always be the case, but worse depending on the camera you're using, and in my case this was two generations ago - the GH5. I have tested window shots with the GH7, and they're a lot cleaner.

That being said, the trick is to always, always, always use masking along with sharpening. Like, a lot of masking, just so much masking, so that you avoid sharpening an already-noisy background. In Lightroom, you can hold down down the ALT key while using the masking slider to visualize exactly what is being sharpened.

I'm choosing to leave the background noisier than I prefer, because even if I mask out the background, as I increase noise reduction, I lose detail in the edges. Leaving some noise in the feathers also preserves that sense of sharpness, generally.

This is a matter of personal preference and priority in your edits. I've had students absolutely hammer their photos with denoise and like it that way, and that is totally their call. I like it sharp.

Note: you could also do the sharpening/noise reduction at the end, after all your other edits, so that you have a better sense of how much you still need after toning. That's often my preference. I probably went backwards here only because I've edited this image before and had it pre-loaded in my brain.

✱ Tone Dehaze is the real MVP here. You could go even harder than I have on -blacks/+clarity/+dehaze, for a dramatic, crushed look. I decided to strike a balance between the soft darks I prefer but the clarity absolutely needed to make this look less smooshy. And my curve is pretty gentle.

Before toning and after:

(You can see that I've also done some color grading. But because that part is entirely personal preference, I'm skipping it here.)

✱ Selective Adjustments With a photo as flattened as this one, I always want to add some depth to it with masking. I have just three masks in this case:

1. The tree was blown out, detracting from my subject and looking, frankly, unrealistic. So I've darkened this on its own, so that my subject will stand out.

2. Contrast, texture, and clarity to bring out the detail in the feathers; a touch of saturation because the global color grading I wanted took away slightly from the bird's natural coloring. I want this on a mask, and not globally, because I do not want to exacerbate the noise in the background, or the texture of the leaves and snow.

And 3., to make the flicker really pop, I've got a 'spotlight' mask

...which is working together with a light vignette to draw the eye to the subject. You could also create an asymmetrical vignette with an inverted -exposure mask, if you needed to.

All together now...

And that's it!

As always, please feel absolutely free to send any questions to my ask box. I try to watch for comments and questions in the tags, but sometimes they get missed. And if there are any other edits you'd like to see, let me know!

Find my other walkthrough here.

#on photography #photography #pnwander edits #lightroom classic #editing tips #photography tips #pacific northwest #pnw #nature photography #wildlife photography #photographers on tumblr #lensblr #how to #lightroom #original photographers #naturecore #photoshop #mine: photos

50 notes · View notes

jbird-the-manwich · 2 months ago

Text

my youtube is all witchy reccs cuz gearing up for spring has meant spring cleaning which means background noise and now my homepage is hippies "exposing" lab grown crystals. stephaneigh. you're wiccan. You're vegan. You never shut up about harm reduction. but crystals produced in a lab without child labor and slavery are fake? it's the child slavery that makes the material useful to you? hate to break it to you but uh. Laboratories? on earth? Also from the earth, steph. you're lookin a little bit dumb af

34 notes · View notes

mysticstronomy · 11 months ago

Text

DID MARS EVER CONTAIN WATER??

Blog#428

Saturday, August 17th, 2024.

Welcome back,

While the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn contain water, Mars remains dry. Despite dozens of space missions, the Red Planet has yet to provide convincing proof that it conceals significant water reserves beneath its surface.

Yet Earth's little cousin hasn't always been so secretive. Various studies have shown that a little over 4 billion years ago, it experienced a "watery" era when lakes, rivers and perhaps even oceans could maintain themselves on its soil. Branching valleys and ancient terrains rich in hydrated clays are evidence of this blissful period of abundance.

Subsequently, the loss of part of the Martian atmosphere led to a reduction in the greenhouse effect followed by a gradual disappearance of water. The question is how long this process lasted and under what conditions. This is what the American Space Agency's (NASA) Curiosity and Perseverance spacecraft have been trying to establish since their arrival in 2012 and 2021 in the Gale and Jezero craters.

"Lakes occupied these depressions 3.5 or 3.6 billion years ago," explained Nicolas Mangold, a director of research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) Laboratory of Planetology and Geosciences in Nantes.

By studying the sedimentary and clay deposits left by the former and exploring the ancient river delta that fed the latter, the aim is to determine whether the climate at the time was wet and cold, or dry and hot. The Perseverance rover is also collecting samples, to be brought back to Earth as part of the MSR mission [Mars Sample Return, NASA-European Space Agency (ESA)]. They should provide precise information."

For the moment, things are hazy. If water has flowed on Mars, where has it gone? Was it sucked up into space with the Martian atmosphere or did some of it remain on site, buried underground? Many teams around the world are working to find answers by searching for clues to its presence other than those offered by polar ice caps and glaciers.

As water cannot remain in a liquid state for long on the surface of Mars, these investigations often consist of spotting recent traces of its passage using instruments placed in orbit. This opens the way to all kinds of controversy about how to interpret observations of this world, whose morphology is radically different from that of Earth. "Some of these controversies, such as those concerning gullies – ravines 1 or 2 kilometers long, discovered by the hundreds along certain landforms in the early 2000s – have finally been settled," said Susan Conway, a CNRS researcher at the Laboratory of Planetology and Geosciences in Nantes.

Her team recently demonstrated in the journal Nature Communications that seasonal deposits of dry ice explain the phenomenon, and not water flows.

Other clues continue to fuel debate and even controversy among scientists. The nature of "equatorial dark flows," the background noise of radar signals suggesting the existence of an underground sea beneath the North Cap, the presence of possible channels in the ejecta of impact craters and the hypothetical formation of "rides" in areas of glacial retreat. If water exists on Mars, it is well camouflaged.

Why not deep underground, frozen in the cryosphere? Or preserved in liquid form in aquifers, or inside the thin film of perchlorate brine that supposedly exists at the base of the permafrost that covers Mars at high latitudes? The Marsis and Sharad radars of the Mars Express (ESA) and MRO (NASA) probes have pinpointed promising regions. And when NASA's Phoenix lander dug a few centimeters into the frozen ground just after it arrived in 2008, it immediately uncovered blocks of water ice – a further reason for hypothesis and speculation.

Originally published on https://www.lemonde.fr

COMING UP!!

(Wednesday, August 21st, 2024)

"DID LIFE EXIST ON VENUS??"

#astronomy #outer space #alternate universe #astrophysics #universe #spacecraft #white universe #space #parallel universe #astrophotography

81 notes · View notes

heartbeat-eras · 9 months ago

Text

I really missed coffee until....

Well you can judge by the results my heart’s thoughts on that decision. Do you think she agreed with my choice? I admit that the weight of steth on my chest was comforting to get through this small recording.

I’d already exported it unedited to send to some buddies so I thought I would give the edited and unedited version so you can hear the difference. When I use the steth and record, she sounds almost like the edited version. Very loud and thumpy. I only really amplify and noise reduction then export these days. Her beats are pretty perfect otherwise.. but do you like the OG or edited better?

Steth - Cardio IV

Location - pulm

#cardiophile #cardiophilia #female heartbeat #heartbeat #beating heart #self stething #pounding heart #stethoscope #fast heartbeat #heartbeats #female cardiophile

56 notes · View notes

possiblyunhinged · 6 months ago

Text

The mere mention of identity politics makes everyone’s spine stiffen—left, right, middle, whatever. Both sides argue that the other’s gripes are unfounded. Very helpful. Very progressive. Very… Twitter.

Much like the word "woke," identity politics has been kidnapped, beaten up by the right, dressed in clown shoes, and paraded around as a cautionary tale. The left, naturally, responds by shrieking louder, flailing its arms, and punching itself in the face. But here’s the kicker: you can’t understand systemic prejudice without looking through the lens of identity. Equally, looking at it without understanding how capitalism sustains that oppression is just as nonsensical.

Take Luigi Mangione. Some left-leaning commentators have decided he’s only being fawned over because he’s a handsome white guy. Sure, fair. Privilege is a hell of a drug. And let’s be honest—if he looked like Boris Johnson, would my friends and I be sharing pictures of him in that cunty orange jumpsuit? Absolutely not.

But let’s not skip over the fact that this might also be the first time in decades that people have collectively agreed the U.S. healthcare system is more criminal than your average cartel. Mangione’s case has sparked wider conversations about how shamelessly the media and politicians protect their billionaire donors—while the rest of us have to grin and bear the cost-of-living crisis and the slow-motion collapse of our quality of life. Elon Musk, for example, isn’t worried about solving world hunger—unless it’s the million children he’s fathered out of wedlock. Very traditional. Much man.

This is one of those rare moments when class consciousness kicked down the door, barged into the conversation, and shouted: “Where have you been, dickheads?” And we should be listening. Classism is the vessel of systemic prejudice. It’s the golden goose that keeps laying eggs for the rich while the rest of us scramble over the shells.

Mangione’s privilege? Sure, it’s skewing the narrative—no denying that. But suggesting it’s the only reason people empathise with him is reductive at best and utterly clueless at worst. Maybe folks are just sick of billionaires treating us like extras in their dystopian fanfiction. Just a thought.

In the UK, the top 20% owns 63% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 20% owns a paltry 0.5%. That’s not even enough to fill a trolley at Lidl. And yet, middle-class progressives sip their oat lattes and wax lyrical about privilege as if they aren’t sitting on a cushy safety net. I was born into a working-class family that fell into poverty when I was ten. Watching white, middle-class folks treat identity politics like gospel while ignoring class is like watching someone lecture you on drowning while standing in a lifeboat.

Classism is why kids from disadvantaged backgrounds are 19 months behind their peers by the time they finish school. It’s why 3.6 million children lived in absolute poverty last year. And it’s why those problems remain immovable—because fixing them would mean looking in the mirror. And let’s face it, blaming the "other" is much easier than self-reflection.

Dreaming of abolishing capitalism in the UK feels delusional. Especially when billionaires like Elon Musk are playing the world’s loudest violin, painting progressivism as socialism to protect their wallets. Musk isn’t doing this because he’s a genius. He’s doing it because he’s a hollow man with a God complex and unresolved daddy issues. But I digress.

Capitalism thrives on division. Nothing oils the machine faster than convincing us to turn on each other. And look, I get it—understanding identity-based oppression is vital. But when it devolves into a pissy shouting match? It’s just white noise. No learning. No change. Just people screaming into the void.

Surviving as a working-class person in a capitalist economy is engineered to break you. Now add some self-important pundit on telly wagging their finger at you for not being progressive enough. What do you get? Rage. Exhaustion. Division. If I hadn’t been so socially disconnected from the kids I grew up with—thanks, undiagnosed autism—I might’ve followed the same far-right pipeline they did. Why? Because they had fuck-all, and society kept telling them they were the problem.

My single mum didn’t have time to be an activist. She was too busy working three jobs, clutching her mental health by the throat, and keeping a roof over our heads. That exhaustion is the whole point. The system is designed to keep you too knackered to fight back.

You can’t separate identity struggles from class struggles. But ignoring class entirely? That’s how we end up here, with riots in the streets and Farage clones stoking the flames. Those riots weren’t populated by middle-class Foxes or Robinsons. They were predominantly white, working-class people. Why? Because class disparities breed discontent, and that discontent gets weaponised by the rich to keep us fighting each other instead of them. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

If we addressed class disparities—if we dragged billionaires kicking and screaming out of politics—it’d become painfully clear how class has been the boot on everyone’s neck. Instead, we squabble and point fingers while the top 1% buys up everything, including your grandma’s bungalow. This is no accident.

Politicians haven’t failed us. They’ve done exactly what they were built to do: oppress the majority, enrich the ruling class, and keep the boot shiny. By cutting class consciousness out of discussions on racism, sexism, and transphobia, we’re missing the plot.

#its me again moaning on the internet about classism #identity politics #classism #capitalism #economic inequality #class consciousness #wealth disparity #elon musk #luigi mangione #late stage capitalism #politics #i am once again asking for white middle class journalists to stop writing articles for a month so the world can heal

28 notes · View notes

neturbizenterprises · 10 months ago

Text

youtube

Revolutionize Your Podcast with Podcastle AI

Explore the transformative impact of generative AI in podcast creation with us! This video delves into how AI technologies are revolutionizing the industry by automating content creation, enhancing audio quality, and personalizing listener experiences. We’ll discuss tools like Podcastle's clip generator and revoice feature that streamline workflows for podcasters and content creators.

Discover advanced methods for improving production processes, from AI-driven transcription services to programmatic podcast advertising. These innovations not only enhance accessibility but also help monetize content effectively. Join us as we uncover these exciting developments in media production!

#GenerativeAI #PodcastCreation

0 notes

techdriveplay · 1 year ago

Text

How to Use a Blue Yeti Microphone

Using a Blue Yeti microphone can significantly enhance your audio recording quality, whether you're podcasting or streaming.

Using a Blue Yeti microphone can significantly enhance your audio recording quality, whether you’re podcasting, streaming, or creating content. Known for its versatility and superior sound quality, the Blue Yeti microphone stands out as a top choice for creators. In this guide, we’ll delve into the initial setup, optimal placement, and advanced features to ensure you make the most out of your…

View On WordPress

0 notes

mspaesthetic · 2 years ago

Text

Tidbit: The “Posterization” Effect of Panels Due to the Consequences of GIF Color Quantization (and Increased Contrast (And Also The Tangential Matter of Dithering))

There’s this misconception that the color banding and patterned dithering found in panels is an entirely deliberate, calculated effect Hussie manipulated the image into looking with some specific filter, but this isn’t the case, exactly. It wasn’t so much a conscious decision he took but rather an unavoidable consequence of the medium he partook in: digital art in an age where bandwidth and storage was at a premium.

Not to delve too deeply into the history and technicalities of it, but the long and the short of it is back in the early nineties to late aughts (and even a bit further into the 10s), transferring and storing data over the web was not as fast, plentiful, and affordable as it is now. Filesize was a much more important consideration than the fidelity of an image when displaying it on the web. Especially so when you’re a hobbyist on a budget and paying for your own webhosting, or using a free service with a modest upload limit (even per file!). Besides, what good would it be to post your images online if it takes ages to load them over people's dial-up Internet? Don't even get me STARTED on the meager memory and power the average iGPU had to work with, too.

The original comic strip's resolution was a little more than halved and saved as a GIF rather than a large PNG. That's about an 82.13% reduction in filesize!

So in the early days it was very common for people to take their scans, photographs, and digital drawings and scale them down and publish them as smaller lossily compressed JPEGs or lossless GIFs, the latter of which came at the cost of color range. But it had a wider range of browser support and the feature to be used for animations compared to its successor format, PNG ("PNG's not GIF").

You'd've been hard-pressed to find Hussie use any PNGs himself then. In fact, I think literally the only times he's ever personally employed them and not delegate the artwork to a member of the art team were some of the tiny shrunken down text of a character talking far in the distance and a few select little icons.

PNGs support semi-transparency unlike GIFs, which is why Hussie used them to preserve the anti-aliasing on the text without having to add an opaque background color.

While PNGs can utilize over 16 million colors in a single image, GIFs have a hard limit of 256 colors per frame. For reference, this small image alone has 604 colors:

For those who can't do the math, 256 is a pretty damn small number.

Smaller still were the palettes in a great deal of MSPA's panels early on in its run. Amazingly, a GIF such as this only uses 7 colors (8 if you count the alpha (which it is)).

Not that they were always strictly so low; occasionally some in the later acts of Homestuck had pretty high counts. This panel uses all 256 spots available, in fact.

If he had lowered the number any smaller, the quality would have been god-awful.

To the untrained eye, these bands of color below may seem to be the result of a posterization filter (an effect that reduces smooth areas of color into fewer harsh solid regions), but it's really because the image was exported as a GIF with no dithering applied.

Dithering, to the uninitiated, is how these colors are arranged together to compensate for the paltry palette, producing illusory additional colors. There are three algorithms in Photoshop for this: Diffusion, Pattern, and Noise.

Above is the original image and below is the image reduced to a completely binary 1-bit black and white color palette, to make the effect of each dithering algorithm more obvious.

Diffusion seemingly displaces the pixels around randomly, but it uses error diffusion to calculate what color each pixel should be. In other words, math bullshit. The Floyd-Steinberg algorithm is one such implementation of it, and is usually what this type of error diffusion dithering is called in other software, or some misnomer-ed variation thereof.

The usage of Pattern may hearken back to retro video game graphics for you, as older consoles also suffered from color palette limitations. Sometimes called Ordered dithering because of the orderly patterns it produces. At least, I assumed so. Its etymological roots probably stem from more math bullshit again.

True to its name, Noise is noisy. It’s visually similar to Diffusion dithering, except much more random looking. At least, when binarized like this. Truth be told, I can’t tell the difference between the two at all when using a fuller color table on an image with a lot of detail. It was mainly intended to be used when exporting individual slices of an image that was to be “stitched” back together on a webpage, to mitigate visible seams in the dithering around the edges.

To sate your curiosity, here's how the image looks with no dithering at all:

People easily confuse an undithered gif as being the result of posterization, and you couldn't fault them for thinking so. They look almost entirely the same!

Although I was already aware of this fact when I was much younger, I'm guilty of posterizing myself while editing images back then. Figured I may as well reduce the color count beforehand to help keep the exported GIF looking as intended. I view this as a complete waste of time now, though, and amateurish. Takes away a bit of the authenticity of MSPA art, how the colors and details are so variable between panels. As for WHY they were so variable to begin with, choosing the settings to save the image as requires a judicious examination on a case-by-case basis. In other words, just playing around with the settings until it looks decent.

It's the process of striking a fine balance between an acceptable file size and a "meh, good enough" visual quality that I mentioned earlier. How many colors can you take away until it starts to look shit? Which dithering algorithm helps make it look not as shit while not totally ruining the compression efficacy?

Take, for example, this panel from Problem Sleuth. It has 16 colors, an average amount for the comic, and uses Diffusion dithering. Filesize: 34.5 KB.

Then there's this panel right afterwards. It has 8 colors (again, technically 7 + alpha channel since it's an animated gif), and uses Noise dithering this time. Filesize: 34.0 KB.

The more colors and animation frames there are, and the more complicated dithering there is, the bigger the file size is going to be. Despite the second panel having half the color count of the first, the heavily noisy dithering alone was enough to inflate the file size back up. On top of that, there's extra image information layered in for the animation, leaving only a mere 0.5 kilobyte difference between the two panels.

So why would Hussie pick the algorithm that compresses worse than the other? The answer: diffusion causes the dithering to jitter around between frames of animation. Recall its description from before, how it functions on nerd shit like math calculations. The way it calculates what each pixel's color will be is decided by the pixels' colors surrounding it, to put it simply. Any difference in the placement of pixels will cause these cascading changes in the dithering like the butterfly effect.

Diffusion dithering, 16 colors. Filesize: 25.2 KB

This isn't the case with Noise or Pattern dithering, since their algorithms use either a texture or a definite array of numbers (more boring nerd shit).

Noise dithering, 16 colors. Filesize: 31.9 KB

Pattern dithering, 16 colors. Filesize: 23.1 KB

There's a lot more I'd like to talk about, like the different color reduction algorithms, which dither algorithms generally compress better in what cases, and the upward and downward trends of each one’s use over the course of a comic, but since this isn’t a deep dive on GIF optimization, I might save that for another time. This post is already reaching further past the original scope it was meant to cover, and less than 10 images can be uploaded before hitting the limit, which is NOWHERE near enough for me. I should really reevaluate my definition of the word “tidbit”… Anyway, just know that this post suffers from sample selection bias, so while the panels above came from an early section of Problem Sleuth that generally had static panels with diffusion dithering and animated panels with noise dithering, there certainly were animated panels with diffusion later on despite the dither-jittering.

Alright, time to shotgun through the rest of this post, screw segueing. Increasing the contrast almost entirely with “Use Legacy” enabled spreads the tones of the image out evenly, causing the shadows and highlights to clip into pure black and white. The midtones become purely saturated colors. Using the Levels adjustment filter instead, moving both shadow and highlight input level sliders towards the middle also accomplishes the same thing, because, you know, linear readjustment. I'm really resisting the urge to go off on another tangent about color channels and the RGB additive color model.

Anyway, there aren't any examples in MSPA that are quite this extreme (at least in color, but I'll save that for a later post), but an image sufficiently high in contrast can be mistaken for being posterized at a glance. Hence the Guy Fieri banner. In preparation for this post, I was attempting to make a pixel-perfect recreation of that panel but hit a wall trying to figure out which and how many filters were used and what each one's settings were, so I sought the wisdom of those in the official Photoshop Discord server. The very first suggestion I got was a posterization filter, by someone who was a supposed senior professional and server moderator, no less. Fucking dipshit, there's too much detail preserved for it to be posterization. Dude totally dissed me and my efforts too, so fuck that moron. I spit on his name and curse his children, and his children's children. The philistines I have to put up with...

In the end, the bloody Guy Fieri recreation proved to be too much for me to get right. I got sort of close at times, but no cigar. These were some of the closest I could manage:

You might be left befuddled after all this, struggling to remember what the point of the blogpost even was. I had meant for it to be a clarification of GIFs and an argument against using the posterization filter, thinking it was never used in MSPA, but while gathering reference images, I found a panel from the Felt intermission that actually WAS posterized! So I’ll eat crow on this one... Whatever, it’s literally the ONE TIME ever.

I can tell it's posterization and not gif color quantization because of the pattern dithering and decently preserved details on the bomb and bull penis cane. There would have had to have been no dithering and way fewer colors than the 32, most of which were allotted to the bomb and cane. You can't really selectively choose what gets dithered or more colors like this otherwise.

Thank you for reading if you've gotten this far. That all might have been a lot to take in at once, so if you're still unclear about something, please don't hesitate to leave a question! And as always, here are the PSDs used in this post that are free to peruse.

#tidbit #homestuck #problem sleuth #gif #dithering #posterization

371 notes · View notes