hmmm... okay I think I figured out part of the problem.... I just switched my video card to 32 bit mode and now all the tiles that had blocky colors before, look fine now. But that still doesn't explain why most of the tiles in the quilt looked perfectly okay when I viewed them in 16 bit mode, except for mine and a few others. Weird.

hmm your tile looks very dark on my screen. I can hardly see anything unless I turn up my monitor brightness. I don't have that problem with other tiles. This site still has a few bugs. But I'm sure Slothy is doing his best getting rid of the bugs =]. nice tree anywho.

PNG is a non-lossy format that does everything from 8-bit paletted to 32-bit (with full 8-bit alpha transparency). We're using the 24-bit format to send the tiles out. It doesn't matter what they come back as. If they appear blocky in 16-bit mode, it's probably the image viewer doing a very poor 32->16bit conversion.

The cause of the dark PNG versions (the on the left, not the one in context, which uses the Jpeg version) seems to be gamma. Saving the gamma value of the image lets it display at the correct brightness on any computer that has configured their gamma, or it uses a default one otherwise. However, it appears as though some programs are saving an invalid gamma value, so when the gamma correction is done, it's much darker than it should be. Maybe I can strip the gamma from the image completely (ahh.. once again, a few people ruining it for everyone ;). I'm looking into this, but I just don't know what I can do for now.

Drorak must actually have his brightness much higher than the 'standard' brightness value. If his program had saved his gamma value, it would look just fine on ours. If I strip the gamma, we'll get this sort of thing often, I fear.

Jon/Slothy

Yes you're absolutely right, my brightness or rather my gamma was set too high. I have no choice but to set it high, because my monitor has trouble distinguishing between darker shades of color. So I usually set it to 1.5 in my Geforce's video properties. This time though I had it set even higher to 2.5, because of some game with dark colors I played with a few weeks ago, I got used to the brighter colors and forgot to bring down the gamma afterwards. I just reduced it back to 1.5 and that tile I made with the tree looks almost all black on my monitor, and yet I'm sure that most of you can see it okay with your gamma still set to zero. I don't know if my KDS monitor is just a cheap model or whether I damaged it, because I had my refresh rate set too high on it for quite a long time.

And I didn't know that the gamma setting gets saved along with the picture, that's good to know (jpegs too?). I'm assuming that I probably would need to run the color calibration test in Photoshop though for this to work properly.

Thanks for the info Slothy.

No, Jpeg and other formats don't save the Gamma. That's one feature of PNG's. So since your gamma was really high, it adjusted to ours by darkening the picture. Neat. I could try manually setting the gamma value for this image to fix it.

Jon/Slothy

Thanks, the .PNG tile (Top left) looks a lot better now. :)

I think I can answer your question as to why your photos look brighter in Photoshop, it's because you did the color calibration test when you first installed Photoshop. If you want your images to have the same level of brightness in the rest of your windows programs like ACDSEE for instance, then you need to go into your graphic card's properties and select the COLOR MANAGEMENT tab (for an Nvidia card) and then if my memory serves me right, you should see a Photoshop color profile in the list, select this profile and your problem should be solved.

Now I think I'm going to go ahead and do that Color Calibration test myself. :)

Amen to that, Leo =)

/em casts slow on this mob
/em casts slow on that mob
/em slows everything in sight
/em is out of mana
/em looks exasperated when someone asks her for a heal