Plain White GIF |
White GIF With Color Switches |
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I cheated a little and began with a Senior picture of my high school sweetheart that already had a "white" background [not really white but a mixture of white, various shades of yellow and gray pixels]. I used the ellipse selection with "feather" set to 5 pixels. Thanks to Jerry Haberer for this tip! I then copied and pasted this selection into a new image with a pure white background. I selected the largest areas of background and flood filled them with pure white. Then I began sculpting pixel by pixel around Lou's head using various brushes and brush sizes. Flat hair helps make sculpting heads from the background much easier! Finally, I set the transparency value to white and saved as a GIF.
My advice? If you want to float your high school sweetheart's head on a webpage, use a background color that approaches the original background of the photo. Dark background in photo? Use a darker background. You get the picture.
I was actually pleasantly surprised that the aqua, lime and yellow background worked as well as they did with this floating image.
 256 Colors |
 16 Colors |
 2 Colors |
 256 Colors |
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Chrissie
This is my niece, Chrissie, 10 years ago, during [what the rest of the family called] "her black phase". She sent me a black and white xerox of a photo and I then took a photo of it. Pretty amazing after all that, it's still this good! I picked this one because I had a feeling it would work well. I had to go down to 2 Colors/2 Bit to get any real pixelization to show. It even works well with monitors set to 256 colors. The 16 Color/4 Bit reduction is a good savings on the 256 Color/16 Bit photo. Just for kicks, I adjusted the RGB values to give a purple tint to the last photo...She's coming out of black and moving into color...
256Color GIF/8 Bit 10.5k |
 16 Color GIF/4 Bit 4k |  2 Color GIF/2 Bit less than 1k |
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Lou
Because I used a b/w photo of Chrissie above, I felt I should show another b/w that, in my opinion, doesn't work well when color is reduced. On this image there is already some degradation when reduced to 8 bit/256 colors and even more at 4 bit/16 colors. In my opinion, reducing this image to 16 colors leaves much to be desired in the quality department especially when viewed with a monitor set to 256 colors. I would "spend" the download time to have a better quality photo on a page. The 2 Bit/2 Color image is really degraded but gives an "artsy" quality that opens many possibilities....hmmmm...