Weird Question about Image formats and Cool effects...

[oceaneyes]

I've got a quick question.

I was just walking along a row of cubicles in the office where I work pretending they were trees and wondering how I would photograph them (fyi, I don't even have a camera yet) and I thought it would be neat to take several pictures, making the focal point further and further away while at the same time increasing the depth of field so the closer ones stay in focus as each new one comes into focus...

So, supposing I were to take this set of photographs...would it be possible to create a single image from all of them that cycles from one to the next and back again? I know GIF has the ability to have cycling images, but I've never heard of something like this for jpeg...is there a significant loss of quality in converting the pictuers from jpeg to gif if this isn't possible with jpeg? I guess I really should learn about image formats if I'm going to get into photography...

I can imagine that if what I described above is possilbe it would be able to create pretty cool effects by varying placement of objects in the photos and implementing some sort of fading effect as it cycles...

 

[Big Mike]

As far as I know...JPEG is a static image format. it's just one set of pixels with assigned colors. GIF, on the other hand, is a format that can change/move...I'm guessing that it has something to do with the viewer (or browser) that you aer viewing the image with, as well.

 

[oceaneyes]

As far as gif images go, I think as long as the application supports gifs, it will support the dynamic effects...but I could definitely be wrong there. EDIT: And different applications may actually treat the dynamicism (that's right, I can make up words...I'm cool like that) of gifs differently.

I know I used to have a dynamic gif on my desktop and I'd like to see what I can do to make a set of photographs dynamic like that, though I'm still not sure of the quality of gifs compared to jpeg. maybe another format is available also...

 

[Big Mike]

I think you can have high or low quality with either file format. It's just a matter of file size and loading times. I know of a site by a guy who makes and edits GIFS. A lot of what he does is optimization, which makes the GIFs smaller (file size) and therefore easier to load and use.

It's a pretty cool selection of GIFS...http://www.mikesfreegifs.com/

 

[killcrazy]

GIFs will always give a lower quality image than jpeg as the compression is diferent, and also uses a smaller colour pallet.

this means you can have a significantly less number of colours within your image.

JPEGS CANNOT be animated, as they are completely static. but, this alows them to give higher quality results.

The other option that you have is to make a movie out of a series of jpegs, and save it as a .avi or .mgeg or some other similar filetype. this would hower turn the images from images to a video/movie file. and it would depend on where you used this project if it would be suitable or not to use this method

 

[sparr]

MNG is probably the best format for something like that. Or an actual video format, could easily make it a very-very-low-framerate MPEG.

http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/