The Inline GIFs

Almost all of the inline images on these pages are interlaced GIF87a images which have been gamma corrected for the average CRT (~2.25). They all use up to 256 colors and were not dithered during the color quantization. Hopefully your browser can do a better job of choosing a compatible set of colors and dithering than I could do in advance. These will look awful in ancient browsers like the original NCSA Mosaic, but look pretty sharp in a modern broswer like Netscape, especially if you have a high-color display.

About 85% of the inline images are smaller than 8k; the average size is about 5.5k. Some have been cropped to show only part of the full size image they represent.

The Full Size JPEGs

The full size images are all JFIF format JPEG images at gamma 2.25 (which violates the standard specified by the JFIF format, but it seems that everything does nowdays). Most have a quality setting between 85 and 93%.

About 70% of the full size JPEG images are smaller than 55k; the average size is about 51k. Most are either 800x600 or 1024x768, and all were generated directly from the raw TGA output from POV-Ray.

Additional Reference

Poynton's Color Technology Page gathers the extremely useful gamma and colorspace FAQs written by Charles A. Poynton into one handy location.

The ABOUTGAMMA file included with xloadimage and its descendants (notably xli) by Graeme W. Gill contains more useful information about gamma correction, including the following quote:

At least two file formats do the right thing. The Utah Raster Toolkit .rle format has a semi-standard way of recording the gamma of an image. The JFIF file standard (that uses JPEG compression) specifies that the image to be encoded must have a gamma of 1.0 (ie. a linear image - but not everyone obeys the rules).

Also, Tom Fine's USENET FAQ Archive provides a sort of hypertext version of the JPEG image compression: Frequently Asked Questions document.