Thanks O!

@mahvin, Did you use Gap to animated that candle?

No. I duplicated two identical frames, one of which had brighter layers. I used I-warp to grow the candle flame on two frames.

O my, kewl thanks

Tried one of your animated candles mahvin. I used brightness & contrast and just moved the brightness slider a little to the right so there would be flickering on the wall.

I iWarped the flame on each of the brightened layers differently.

That's another good way to use lighting techniques. I did the same using curves and brightness/contrast, because in some places I wanted the light to have a "bending" look, like in your challenge image below: (gifs are so bleh when large and pngs are too huge in size)



The apng (smaller in size):

That is soooooooooooo cool. I love the flame moving on the glass. The flicker and brightening around the flame are perfect. Nice work, mahvin! Looks like a movie of a candle.

I certainly agree about gifs. They can sure wreck a nice image.

Funny thing is, O. My wife was sitting along side me telling me when the flame flicker was at the right speed. Then she had me adding more incremental flame to give it more fluid movement. But that's only changes to 3 frames of 12. This stuff is easier than many of us actually think it is.

Ah, a man who does directions. A rare person indeed. Your wife had some good ideas there. Hi Mrs. Mahvin!

Of course, if you don't follow any directions in GIMP stuff, you're not going to learn a lot about it.

@ mahvin,What were the ending file sizes for each image format, if you don't mind? It seems to me that a 1-layer png saved with max compression is about 2x larger that the same image saved as a jpg with max compression, but I haven't tried it with gif vs apng.

Your images are a great example of the better quality of the apng vs gif. Very nice! Probably due to the creative input of Mrs. mahvin, no doubt...

The apng was at 25.7 meg at 90% before compression and resulted in 1.1 meg after compression. The gif, at the larger size, was at 5 meg at 85% before compression and resulted in 959k after. I'll be honest, even though apng provides a better animated view, the astronomical file size, even against comparable gif sizes, is unreal. Totally unacceptable for web use, imho.

Sure, especially since the apng was physically smaller.

Wait a second.

1.1 meg is unacceptable for web use, but 959k is fine?

Not what I was saying. The comparison between file sizes and image sizes from .gif to apng is ridiculous. A small 100px animated gif was 7.3k, the same animated png file (the same image size) was 2.3 meg. Both were 12 frames (or layers, however you wish to see it). That "is" unacceptable.

In addition, even the large gif was unacceptable. When I say unacceptable, I am making reference to the majority of web users who don't have high speed connections. Viewing animations would be rendered pointless for most. Until the world goes completely high speed, large animation files are unacceptable, regardless of what format they are in.

Have you seen this:
http://gif2apng.sourceforge.net/

You convert GIF into APNG and they become smaller. Believe it or not.

OMG, where have you been? This is awesome stuff! Gonna give the command line conversion a whirl. Thanks, Max!

UPDATE:

Not working for me in Ubuntu. It was worth a shot.

You're welcome!

Here's my APNG projects on sf.net:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/apngasm/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/apngdis/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gif2apng/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/apng2gif/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdubapngmod/

Usually you'll get much smaller APNG size with my software, since I use a lot of optimization tricks.

It should. What was the error message?

Well, I'm uncertain of the command line syntax, since I am using terminal in Ubuntu 10.04.

For windows it has gif2apng.exe anim.gif [anim.png] My binary doesn't have the .exe, so I ran it without the exe and this is the result:

No command 'gif2apng' found, did you mean:
Command 'gif2png' from package 'gif2png' (universe)
gif2apng: command not found

Try it like that:

./gif2apng anim.gif

(I'm assuming both gif2apng and anim.gif are in the current directory)

Or you can use the drag-and-drop method, like it's shown on the webpage.