Rant about BMP's

Posted by gamehawk on July 31, 2005, 11 p.m.

Errrr, Microsoft makes me angry!!!!!!! Why do they have to use BMP as defualt format. I used to think it was good but :P, a 4 kb sprite, is less than 1k in GIF!!!!! Microsoft should change the default format to save to in Paint!!!!! And it shouldn't distort it when you try to save as GIF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Errrrrrrrrrrr.

Comments

melee-master 19 years, 4 months ago

Some programs (Irfanview) allow you to choose the quality of saving .gif and .jpg images. I recomend you get it. Then copy the image into Irfanview, then Save As, and make sure you put the quality to the highest.

<a href="http://www.irfanview.com">Irfanview.com</a>

twisterghost 19 years, 4 months ago

…true, but whats the problem with just saving it as a gif? it takes 2 seconds. im gona time mself for writing '.gif' now. ready…gooooo!!!!

.gif

1.2 seconds. see?

flashback 19 years, 4 months ago

Twister, that just makes it a renamed BMP.

…and if you save as a .gif in paint, it goes to a standard system palette.

firestormx 19 years, 4 months ago

It has to distort the quality to make the file size smaller.

Most people who use microsoft products arn't smart enough to know that .gif files only support 256 colours, while the bitmap format supports more colours in your image than you're likely to have as a number of pixels, so the user will get confused when they save their file, if their image has a lack of colours.

You can select what format you wish to save the file as in the dropdown menu under the filename input box. (when you 'save as'.)

flashback 19 years, 4 months ago

*jumps up and down*

Did I get your attention? OK.

You don't have to use a system pallette for GIFs. Look at photoshop - you can have "adaptive" or "exact" pallettes (up to 256 colors) that use the colors from the sprite, not just the standard 8-bit set of colors.

orbofwisdom 19 years, 4 months ago

Oh, the angst! The edginess as shown by the multiple exclamation marks and the long onomatopoeia at the end!

Anyways…

Yeah, I guess it is a bit annoying that the default format in MSPaint is a BMP file. Because of that, I've wasted God-knows-how-much space with my random pixel doodlings. But it's not that much of a hassle to save as something like a PNG file, is it?