On Sat, 2004-08-07 at 20:33, Adam Pearson wrote:
If I do this, what I want to preserve is the "perceived" orange, affected by the slightly blue glass. I am not actually worried and don't need or want a transparency, this was my fault in explaining the question, please accent my apologies. What I want is to retain the colours achieved by overlaying transparencies in Inkscape, preferably as a .jpg, or a .gif will do. I find .png files sizes a bit big, is this not usually so?
So this is really just question of which formats have good color preservation/accuracy and decent size?
Of widely web-supported formats, here's the breakdown:
PNG (RGB color) - what Inkscape produces; larger, but best color accuracy and preserves alpha channel
JPEG (RGB color) - good color accuracy, but can bleach colors from fine details depending on the subsampling options you use; you can also have weird artifacts on the sharp edges that are common with vector-produced graphics
GIF (indexed color) - smaller, but if the image is very colorful GIF may have problems reproducing the colors using a palette of only 256
PNG (indeded color) - smaller than GIFs, can preserve alpha (subject to browser support), but otherwise same limitations as GIF
As you can see, PNG supports both RGB and indexed color modes.
Note that indexed PNGs will only be smaller if you create them with decent software (read: not Adobe Photoshop, which has crap PNG support), or run something like pngcrush on them afterwards.
-mental