Sub-pixel re-workings of YouTube and BBC favicons

by marcusbooster • 17 years ago

154 44 17 years ago

jrwoodruff• 17 years ago

That's amazing. Stuff at this scale is so difficult to work with, one pixel is the difference between readable and unreadable.

rbanffy4• 17 years ago

Interesting idea.

Unfortunately, I have one of my LCDs rotated 90 degrees and, so, any sub-pixel smoothing fails miserably unless it accounts for the rotated sub-pixels.

windsurfer2• 17 years ago

Perhaps there needs to be a new standard for pngs where you can have one image for each subpixel order.

Or we can get everyone to use RGB. Either would work.

rbanffy4• 17 years ago

Why not just reference a larger .png file in your HTML and let the browser deal with the specifics?

amalcon3• 17 years ago

This problem would also be solved by actual widespread support for SVG or something similar. With vector rendering, we can just let the client handle any subpixel business.

twak• 17 years ago

Another solution is to put the pixel order in the html header.

A smart browser showing the same page spread over two different monitors would then download twice as much, but everyone else would be happy.

ajkirwin3• 17 years ago

I actually hate the one on the right. I don't want my favicons to be necessarily readable, or a blur of colors like that.. they're ICONS. Visual REPRESENTATIONS. Infact, most of the 'better' versions on that page sucked a lot more to my eyes.

dchest• 17 years ago

Visual REPRESENTATIONS can still be improved using subpixel antialiasing, even if there's no text on them.

kristiandupont• 17 years ago

Are you using an LCD monitor?

ajkirwin3• 17 years ago

Yes, I am.

anigbrowl3• 17 years ago

How good are your eyes? - I am curious about whether you have had them tested and if so what visual acuity score you received. It might very well be your vision is abnormally sharp and the colors are a distraction.

ajkirwin3• 17 years ago

My eyes are very good. Infact, even sitting at a distance of a few meet I can see individual pixels and sometimes even the subpixels.

mmt• 17 years ago

Me, too.

The ones on the right appear as a blur of color.

Anti-aliased fonts always, similarly, look color-smudged to me, so I make sure to turn off that "feature" completely, whenever I can.

I suspect that, unlike some replies have implied, this isn't a defect in visual acuity (which could be the case, since the one eye I didn't bother to have laser surgery on is far from normally shaped), but, rather, an increase in sensor resolution. Might we have more cones? Perhaps our cones are distributed differently? Do we saccade [if you'll pardon the verbing] at a different frequency and/or to a different extent?

If my dominant eye can focus the image (unassisted now, with spectacles pre-surgery), I tend to prefer smaller font sizes, even on a tight pitch like a 17" 1920x1200. I still wish Apple would come out with a 15" laptop with 1200 vertical pixels.

Erwin• 17 years ago

Another blog post by the same author introduces a 3 pixel font taking advantage of the subpixels: http://typophile.com/node/61920

I might get that for xemacs and annoy coworkers with 500-character long lines. "But they don't wrap on my screen!"

masklinn• 17 years ago

Damn…

dazmax• 17 years ago

That is amazing, make sure to scroll down to the zoomed in "ipsum dolor."

jcromartie• 17 years ago

Heh, I have made 2-pixel-wide text before. I certainly wasn't as pretty as the 3-pixel one here... but it worked! It always impresses people, but there are so many "gotchas" that it's really not practical.

mhansen• 17 years ago

Link?

antirez2• 17 years ago

I did a 1-pixel-wide font some year ago. It's not that hard, for instance look at the 'i':

Other chars are similar to this.

Timothee• 17 years ago

Wouldn't it be rendered differently depending on displays, OS, etc.? I'm wondering if it's just an exercise or if it could be really used.

It's interesting and I wish s/he went into more details on how to do it.

ars3• 17 years ago

It's called Sub-pixel rendering.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-pixel_rendering

And google it also, there are many sites that explain it, so I won't repeat them.

It only works on LCD's, and the order of the sub-pixels on your LCD has to match the authors.

There is an option you can set to tell your OS to use sub-pixels when anti-aliasing fonts.

Basically for each pixel, there are actually 3, one for each of red, green, blue. By using this, you can increase the horizontal resolution by a factor of three (more or less).

Horizontal resolution, because most LCD's have the three sub-pixels in a horizontal row.

JulianMorrison• 17 years ago

"Only works on LCDs", I'd question. I've seen it working on CRT screens too, and I see no reason it wouldn't - they also have 3 subpixels horizontally.

ggchappell• 17 years ago

Very interesting. Apparently we can make images clearer by shifting the red half a pixel to the left and the blue half a pixel to the right (very roughly speaking; I know there is more to it than that).

What's up with that? Can anyone find/give an explanation of this phenomenon?

EDIT: This guy Miha is amazing. Check out this tiny little font he is working on (go to nearly the bottom of the page for a more complete version):

http://typophile.com/node/61920

anigbrowl3• 17 years ago

It's from a phenomenon known as chromatic aberration which is a characteristic of lenses, including the one in your eye (more so if you have astigmatism).

Have you ever looked at someone silhouetted by a bright light, and noticed color fringing on the left and right sides? That's the reason (if you haven't, you have very good eyes). It's also something you often see on photos from cheap digital cameras, where it is introduced by cheap lenses shining onto tiny sensors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberration

Interestingly, if you look at the typophile page through a vertically-oriented prism, you'll see similar color fringing on both images - the giant red and white 'pixels' in authentic favicon will shift towards...yellow and purple. Make sure you are looking through the second rotation of the prism - the first rotation does not induce color fringing but reverses left and right instead.

edit: Also, someone should hire that guy, like now.

ars3• 17 years ago

No, I'm sorry, but none of what you wrote is correct.

The color fringing is due to an effect similar to a diffraction grating. It's caused by light bending as it travels near an edge (like a prism makes a rainbow by bending light). Chromatic aberration exists, but has nothing to do with the color fringing.

The color fringes on the icon are clearer because an LCD monitor actually has 3 times as many pixels as the typical count. It has 3 pixels for each normal pixel: one for Red, Green, and Blue.

These images make use of that, to basically have 3 times the resolution of an ordinary image. So smaller details are now visible.

It doesn't work on CRT's (it actually looks worse). And it only works on LCD's if the order of the sub-pixels is the same as what the author expects.

Luc• 17 years ago

I made a 'sub-pixel accuracy scrolling' demo once on the Gameboy Color: one half of the screen scrolling at 1 pixel a frame, the other at 1/3 pixels. Amazing how jarring the normal scrolling looks once you get used to the sub-pixel smoothness.

robin_reala• 17 years ago

Got a link to a ROM? I’d like to see that.

zokier2• 17 years ago

This is kinda neat demo of subpixel rendering:

http://antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/sample_aria...

Each line shifts 0.1px to right. Taken from.

http://antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html

which is excellent introduction to subpixel rendering

antirez2• 17 years ago

What about a paint-style program where the user is presented in one side with the magnified version of the image that is actually split into RBG, and the actual image on the other side? This could allow to do similar things much more easily.

est• 17 years ago

Sub-pixel is a new way of captcha generating.

Sub-pixel re-workings of YouTube and BBC favicons

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