> And as I recall, Windows only accepts BMP files for this, right?
> Stupid...Mac OS allows anything QuickTime can open: JPEG, PNG, GIF,
> TIFF, etc.

Yup. I know, it sucks. Linux accepts all kinds of images as well, which is
kinda fun, especially with neato effects. :-) But most of my software
requires Windows, and I'm not yet that much into Linux as if I could switch.

> But the smaller file size isn't a benefit?

It would be, if it'd be needed. I've got several GBs to spare, so rendering
at BMP isn't a threat. Additionally, I do almost no post-processing on my
images, so I can just keep the source-code. Most of my images render in
under a few hours, so that's sufficient. Those that don't... Well, just a
little more patience required. That aside, I regularly update my hardware,
so after a year or so, images render even faster than initially. In a sense,
I don't have to keep as many images as I do, and for lazy reasons I keep
them in BMP to use them as wallpapers.

There are good arguments to use a different format, I don't deny that. It's
just much easier this way in my current PC situation. Why go through the
hassle of converting images everytime I want a new wallpaper? It's that
simple. :-)

That all aside: is the PNG compression Povray uses the optimum? I've found
that I could use Paint Shop Pro to convert the images to even smaller PNG
images and didn't notice any loss. Maybe I should experiment again and see
why PSP was able to reduce the size, but perhaps there's an issue with
output from POV-Ray to disk that can't be overcome that easily? I've got no
clue how the PNG-specs are, so maybe POV could save space if it would save
the PNG once it knows how the image looks like, but this isn't done for
buffering reasons etc. Just curious.

> That's what it does, and it does work...if the software displaying the
> PNG handles the gamma value. I don't know how common that is...

Me neither, that why I was asking. I wouldn't notice any difference on my
own PC of course, and the PC's I normally have access to are much like my
own (Screenwise), so I wasn't able to check on that yet, and also wasn't
required to work around such an issue. But we all know of the "too dark"
comments on binaries.images... I rarely do dark images, so I've had that
problem only once or twice here.

Regards,
Tim

-- 
"Tim Nikias v2.0"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>
Email: tim.nikias (@) nolights.de

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