Compression Info (Formerly: Tips on Keeping Your Entry under 75kb in size.)

[Gamerprinter]

JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group - a sort of unofficial consortium when JPG was being developed. Since DOS based file suffixes have only 3 letters, thus JPG instead of JPEG.

[meleeguy]

In in PhotoShop 7, I've found "Save for Web..." (to jpg) gives much better sizes than "Save as..." (to jpg). I'm sure there is a trade off but they look the same on my uncalibrated lcd monitor.

[Midgardsormr]

The same holds true for PNG. You get a lot more controls to fine-tune your image, including specifying a palette and the degree of anti-aliasing that occurs. You also get instant feedback on how large the resulting file will be, so you can see exactly how much savings each option gives you.

[Valarian]

Hmm ... have to look at this, I might be able to get a 100px=5' image of the deck plan
(2500x2100 currently weighing in 88kb)

[Redrobes]

I looked at your palette as soon as you posted it and its a 256 version and most of it is unused. I would think that you could do your pic in 16 col and go with a 4 bit PNG which would be a little less than your 8 bit version. If you made a custom palette of 8 shades of grey, two are three bright greens and that dark blue then you would probably have almost all of it done in about 12 out of the 16. Make sure that you go for nearest colour matching when transforming the palette tho. No dithering or half-toning or else it will shoot up the file size.

[NeonKnight]

OK, I must be a total idiot. I have made a pretty 'blah' map and it is coming in at just under 75k AFTER making big constraints (32 color etc), and I notice others have maps with way more detail than mine, and yet they have more detail. So what am I doing wrong?