Database Users

Today screen color depth?

Why is it that today screen images show up rather poor? They seem to be locked to 16-bit color instead of 32. The original image show up fine in the album but has visible shades when used as today. I read that the Theme Generator (from Microsoft) always locks em to 16-bit. Any ideas? Thanks.

sekinoss said:
Why is it that today screen images show up rather poor? They seem to be locked to 16-bit color instead of 32. The original image show up fine in the album but has visible shades when used as today. I read that the Theme Generator (from Microsoft) always locks em to 16-bit. Any ideas? Thanks.
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The Magician can only show 16-bit colour i.e. 65536 colours. But I know what you mean about the today screen. I used theme generator and get the impression its using closer to 12 bits.

sekinoss said:
Why is it that today screen images show up rather poor? They seem to be locked to 16-bit color instead of 32. The original image show up fine in the album but has visible shades when used as today. I read that the Theme Generator (from Microsoft) always locks em to 16-bit. Any ideas? Thanks.
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try to save your wallpaper in .gif 256 clrs 294*320, rename it to Default_stwater.gif and replace the default in /windows dir. Then, reset your today and all be fine!!!

I see. Almost forgot that the screen's only 16-bit. The problem is, the image showed up great on the Album, but displayed poorly when used as today (thru theme generator, image as wallpaper, etc.). GKill, I don't understand what you're talking about, but I'll try it out anyway. Thanks!

sekinoss said:
GKill, I don't understand what you're talking about, but I'll try it out anyway. Thanks!
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I am talking about replacing the standart windows wallpaper (blue with win. logo) that located in widows dir. This image you cant delete, but it is possible to replace it! TYou must search this .gif file (see above) and copy to your desktop, then open in photoshop. Make own wallpaper and save it with similar dimensions in .gif. Then replace, like I said and you will receive own designed wallpaper as windows default!!!
It is good because it suitable as for portrait, as for landscape modes!

Hey thanks! The pic looked better now but I just realized that today's are limited to 256 colors (GIFs)?? If so then is there any way to display 16-bit pics? Thanks!

sekinoss said:
Hey thanks! The pic looked better now but I just realized that today's are limited to 256 colors (GIFs)?? If so then is there any way to display 16-bit pics? Thanks!
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Glad to hear this!!!!! :wink:
Do you really want 16 bit??? Heh, but try to notice any difference (withe bare eyes) between your 16 bit unconverted (jpg for examle) and converted 256 colors .gif!!! What do you see??? Yes, it is VERY hard to see ane difference! Man, dont f*ck your brain, girl is better :lol: :lol: :lol:

Could someone help me with this: the gifs have only 256 indexed colours, so if you have a nice picture, like a sunset, the smooth gradient turns into bands or ugly pixels (dithering?). So how cannot one make the difference between a jpg and this horrible gif ? The jpg files are displayed OK in the album view. If I try to set one of these jpgs as desktop image it gets whitish like through a fog. How can I set a sunset without pixels or bands as the "desktop image". It seems so complicated ...Could someone please help ?

Could someone help me with this: the gifs have only 256 indexed colours, so if you have a nice picture, like a sunset, the smooth gradient turns into bands or ugly pixels (dithering?). So how cannot one make the difference between a jpg and this horrible gif ? The jpg files are displayed OK in the album view. If I try to set one of these jpgs as desktop image it gets whitish like through a fog. How can I set a sunset without pixels or bands as the "desktop image". It seems so complicated ...Could someone please help ?

kelu said:
Could someone help me with this: the gifs have only 256 indexed colours, so if you have a nice picture, like a sunset, the smooth gradient turns into bands or ugly pixels (dithering?). So how cannot one make the difference between a jpg and this horrible gif ? The jpg files are displayed OK in the album view. If I try to set one of these jpgs as desktop image it gets whitish like through a fog. How can I set a sunset without pixels or bands as the "desktop image". It seems so complicated ...Could someone please help ?
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When converting in photoshop, set dithering options to "off" (no dither). remember that display in Magician is 65K. This means maximum colour depth is 16 bit. In any case, I'm using the 256 .gif pics with beautiful landscapes and it looks great! If you want, I can post here one...

Unsharp Manila background degrades the whole home screen appearance

I might have missed this in another thread but could not locate it.
Why on Earth is the Manila home screen background so terribly unsharp?? I've tried images of all sorts of resulotions, the outcome is always the same.
It does not scale the images, it seems to be the exact size, but the backgrounds are ALWAYS unsharp...
Can anyone confirm this, and does anybody know how to fix this??
Try viewing a 480x800 image in the album view, 100% sharp. Then set it as home screen, and it looks more like a stretched, compressed 240x400 image. I never noticed this on my Diamond. Is this one of the "software optimizations" HTC talks about? That's a no brainer, making a device faster by reverting to low res images...

IMage on background
FOr now I dont have any problem with images on background. Everything is sharp, even contacts are great. Not sure what the problem is there

wfhowell said:
FOr now I dont have any problem with images on background. Everything is sharp, even contacts are great. Not sure what the problem is there
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no he is correct. the wallpaper isnt sharp at all

nin2thevoid said:
I might have missed this in another thread but could not locate it.
Why on Earth is the Manila home screen background so terribly unsharp?? I've tried images of all sorts of resulotions, the outcome is always the same.
It does not scale the images, it seems to be the exact size, but the backgrounds are ALWAYS unsharp...
Can anyone confirm this, and does anybody know how to fix this??
Try viewing a 480x800 image in the album view, 100% sharp. Then set it as home screen, and it looks more like a stretched, compressed 240x400 image. I never noticed this on my Diamond. Is this one of the "software optimizations" HTC talks about? That's a no brainer, making a device faster by reverting to low res images...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have the same problem !!
Pictures in Album looks great but on wallpaper not ! I dont know why

Can anybody else confirm that the diamond did not have this problem? could there be some setting to change or to port from the diamond manila?

Its because the larger screen size decreases pixel density at 480x800 resolution. Where as the tiny 2.8" screen on the diamond and pro have a higher pixel density. You have more resolution spread over a larger space. Just look at an iphone images aren't that sharp.
I have no problem with the image quality on the homescreen background.

utvol06 said:
Its because the larger screen size decreases pixel density at 480x800 resolution. Where as the tiny 2.8" screen on the diamond and pro have a higher pixel density. You have more resolution spread over a larger space. Just look at an iphone images aren't that sharp.
I have no problem with the image quality on the homescreen background.
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No, you dont have right. Tell me why picture in album looks great (very sharp and clear) and this same file looks terrible on the homescreen background...

For the Today Screen:
Programs > Pictures & Videos > menu > Set as Today Background
Set Transparency Level to 0%
​

That's for the today screen... What about the TF3D home screen? Two different images. I think the OP was talking about the touchflow screen.

i can confirm and many of us also
in can confirm that images viewed with album or whatelse are very good. but when setted in tf3d homescreen background images of differents resolutions are terribles..

darthbane2k said:
no he is correct. the wallpaper isnt sharp at all
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yes same thing here

Shoot me down if I've got this wrong
I was getting the same thing when I first attempted to change the wallpaper, BUT I'd made a basic error and just "Saved As" the thumbnails instead of properley clicking and downloading the correct sized file.
Just a possibility.

jackthekayman said:
yes same thing here
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Click to collapse
same thing here also!!!

I don't think it is an issue with resolution. It seems like the image has been converted to another format and lost some image quality. See the attached jpeg for a comparison between the two.
When you choose a wallpaper does it get saved somewhere? If it did you could check it to see whether it's been altered in anyway from the original.

elmarko99 said:
I don't think it is an issue with resolution. It seems like the image has been converted to another format and lost some image quality. See the attached jpeg for a comparison between the two.
When you choose a wallpaper does it get saved somewhere? If it did you could check it to see whether it's been altered in anyway from the original.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You may be able to see more of the wallpaper in this image...

Maybe this is an optimisation performed to reduce the memory overhead for the TF3D process by reducing the quality of the image.
You can guarantee that if HTC's software didn't do this then someone somewhere would have assigned a 4MB jpeg as their background image and then be complaining about a lack of memory, sluggish performance etc.

I found out what manila does with our backgrounds, it reduces it's resolution.
When you save a background (resolution 480x800), manila saves it as the file "HomeBackground.img" in your windows folder and uses it for your background. I copied this file back to my computer and changed the extension back to HomeBackground.jpg (I can't open *.img on my pc). This picture has a resolution of 307x512 !!!
So that's the reason why our backgrounds get this low quality look
Like i mentioned in another thread, changing your original 480x800 picture to HomeBackground.img and placing it in your windows folder doesn't solve the problem
I've put 2 files as attachement: original pic and the "manila-pic"

stu420 said:
I found out what manila does with our backgrounds, it reduces it's resolution.
When you save a background (resolution 480x800), manila saves it as the file "HomeBackground.img" in your windows folder and uses it for your background. I copied this file back to my computer and changed the extension back to HomeBackground.jpg (I can't open *.img on my pc). This picture has a resolution of 307x512 !!!
So that's the reason why our backgrounds get this low quality look
Like i mentioned in another thread, changing your original 480x800 picture to HomeBackground.img and placing it in your windows folder doesn't solve the problem
I've put 2 files as attachement: original pic and the "manila-pic"
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Click to collapse
Good find. I wonder if it'll be possible to make manila use full resolutions pics. what happens when you place an image named HomeBackground.img into the windows folder? Does it resize it or just not open at all?

This may be related to the work to get a 512x512 image on the background, or am I misunderstanding?
http://wiki.xda-developers.com/index.php?pagename=HTC_Blackstone_Custom
(near the end of the page)

elmarko99 said:
Good find. I wonder if it'll be possible to make manila use full resolutions pics. what happens when you place an image named HomeBackground.img into the windows folder? Does it resize it or just not open at all?
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it resizes it and placing HomeBackground.jpg in the windows folder doesn't work at al

Image does not look as sharp when used as wallpaper

I don't know if anyone else noticed this, but I set a picture to be my wallpaper and realised that at the home screen, it looks very blur. I checked the width and height of the picture and it is 480x800. Also when I view the picture in the photo gallery, it is much much sharper, like what it supposed to be.
Is there a way around this?
Thanks!

ave a look in the themes an apps section. 480 x 800 will show up unless you follows a guide on how to make it come up crystal.
Just do a search for Wallpaper Guide

c0nk3r said:
I don't know if anyone else noticed this, but I set a picture to be my wallpaper and realised that at the home screen, it looks very blur. I checked the width and height of the picture and it is 480x800. Also when I view the picture in the photo gallery, it is much much sharper, like what it supposed to be.
Is there a way around this?
Thanks!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just tested my phone and no probs all wallpapers or pictures look great
Can I ask how you selected your wallpaper?
Was it through settings wallpaper?
or another method

I've also noticed this as some pics transfer fine and clear to the wallpaper and some look enlarged and blurry. I'm thinking it's the larger screen size vs. the pic resolution size. My pro at 2.8" was not an issue. It hasn't bothered me enough to seek a fix, I'm using mobile shell and selecting the change image option. Ureka!! thats it, the shell! Doh!!! just my $.02

ozmoran said:
I just tested my phone and no probs all wallpapers or pictures look great
Can I ask how you selected your wallpaper?
Was it through settings wallpaper?
or another method
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Click to collapse
yeah i just used the simplest method.. just get to the settings tab in TF3D and choose from there.

cbreze said:
I've also noticed this as some pics transfer fine and clear to the wallpaper and some look enlarged and blurry. I'm thinking it's the larger screen size vs. the pic resolution size. My pro at 2.8" was not an issue. It hasn't bothered me enough to seek a fix, I'm using mobile shell and selecting the change image option. Ureka!! thats it, the shell! Doh!!! just my $.02
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
yeah i had a diamond before this and the wallpapers looked great there.
but the funny part is that the pics look great and sharp when viewed in the photo gallery, but only becomes blur when used as wallpaper.
OH and they don't look enlarged lol. the wallpapaer keeps the size, but it's really blur.

Just use the search button and read the wiki, this is another one of those topics that have been done to death, there's heaps of information on it.

Different background quality in lockscreen and home screen

Could anyone pls try the following?
Set as background for both lockscreen and homescreen the same picture with a gradient: you can use the circular gradient that the phone has already stored.
in the lockscreen the gradient is very visible while in the homescreen it's very smooth.
weird...

Can you take any screenshots?

The background in the lock screen is actually of higher resolution than the sense one. This is because sense does something awkward to images. It crops a smaller part and then stretches it to fit the whole home screen.

The lockscreen seems to recompress the images indeed. A perfect image once set as lockscreen appears like an awfully blocky JPG. I guess it doesn't use the image as is but makes a badly compressed copy.
I use S2U2 now, that sort of solves the problem

kilrah said:
The lockscreen seems to recompress the images indeed. A perfect image once set as lockscreen appears like an awfully blocky JPG. I guess it doesn't use the image as is but makes a badly compressed copy.
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Click to collapse
From my experience, it's the other way round.
The image you see on the lockscreen is the Windows Today background, and that's just a centered view of the image you select. It doesn't do any cropping or resizing whatsoever.
For the OP - try HDWall. It allows you to have high quality images for wallpaper, as well as having the wallpaper work on all tabs. It's in the themes and apps forum. If you do use it, you'll need to install the HQ patch in the first post the first time you use it, or the backgrounds don't look right. Using HDWall, I struggle to see the difference between the manila background and the start menu/lock screen.
Hope this helps

here are the screeshots

The images I tried were exactly 480x800 as I made them on purpose. When viewing them on the device (with HTC Album or Resco photo manager), they look perfectly good, but on the lockscreen they're awful.
Sense indeed applies some kind of "grainy" post-processing, but I don't mind it, in Sense the background is not very apparent, I actually just use a default WP.
But anyway, some screenshots:
Sense rendering:
Lockscreen:
S2U2:
See how the lockscreen one appears hugely blocky? OK the original pic I used wasn't perfect for a start, but you can clearly see the difference between S2U2 that just displays the image as is and the recompression the lockscreen does.

As far as I can see, the HDWall works only with wallpaperss in a cab file.
Is there an other way to have HQ Wallpapers in a "normal way"?
Im using the Theme Maker from Max as well but there seems no HQ option to be included.
tomylee

kilrah said:
The images I tried were exactly 480x800 as I made them on purpose. When viewing them on the device (with HTC Album or Resco photo manager), they look perfectly good, but on the lockscreen they're awful.
Sense indeed applies some kind of "grainy" post-processing, but I don't mind it, in Sense the background is not very apparent, I actually just use a default WP.
But anyway, some screenshots:
Sense rendering:
Lockscreen:
S2U2:
See how the lockscreen one appears hugely blocky? OK the original pic I used wasn't perfect for a start, but you can clearly see the difference between S2U2 that just displays the image as is and the recompression the lockscreen does.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I c u'r using s2u2: is it working fine on the HD2? any issue?

Perfectly fine.

kilrah said:
Lockscreen:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Any fix or workaround for this yet (other than using S2U2)?

SaintNULL said:
Any fix or workaround for this yet (other than using S2U2)?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Looking for the exact same thing....
Any update??

Samsung Vibrant Wallpapper Expanded?

I just recently bought a Samsung vibrant from t-mobile and i want to set a background of a photo. At first it tells me to crop a certain part of the photo then expands it and looks all pixelated. I searched around and theres this app called "wallpaper set and save" which didnt set the whole image as the background. is there any way of setting a full image as a background and the phone auto adjusts?

jhuynh92 said:
I just recently bought a Samsung vibrant from t-mobile and i want to set a background of a photo. At first it tells me to crop a certain part of the photo then expands it and looks all pixelated. I searched around and theres this app called "wallpaper set and save" which didnt set the whole image as the background. is there any way of setting a full image as a background and the phone auto adjusts?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Android lets you crop the picture when it's too big. If you touch the edges of the crop square, and drag it out, you can change the size of the cropped area, you might be able to drag it out all the way to encompass the entire image. Also, it shouldn't be pixellating the image unless the resolution is way low, like 170x200 low.

raduque said:
Android lets you crop the picture when it's too big. If you touch the edges of the crop square, and drag it out, you can change the size of the cropped area, you might be able to drag it out all the way to encompass the entire image. Also, it shouldn't be pixellating the image unless the resolution is way low, like 170x200 low.
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Click to collapse
if u want them to fit PERFECT the Image has too be 960x800 i will be makin wallpapers so stay tuned -----here are some of my other i tweaked for the MT3g & Nexus but i was making the nexus 50 pixels larger instead of 960x800 i was making them 960 x850
http://picasaweb.google.com/neffstarr

the image is bigger than the full crop window. so when i try to crop it it crops half the photo and expands it to fit the full screen therefore making it pixelated. its a photo that wasnt taken by the phone btw.

I'm having the same problem. I downloaded some 480x800 wallpapers and when I try to set the wallpaper, it asks me to crop part of the image and does not let you encompass the whole the thing. How are you supposed to set the wallpaper?

As stated above, make the image 960*800.
-bZj
_____
-sent from my Samsung Vibrant via XDAapp

Ahhh, I see. It works now, thanks a lot!

I still find the whole cropping thing a pain. I had images set at 960X800 but the cropping tool never lets me select it properly. I either end up with a small black band at the top and bottom or I have to under size it. I found this on the Market that lets you just set the image without cropping and it works on the Vibrant: "Application Utility".

Alakar said:
I still find the whole cropping thing a pain. I had images set at 960X800 but the cropping tool never lets me select it properly. I either end up with a small black band at the top and bottom or I have to under size it. I found this on the Market that lets you just set the image without cropping and it works on the Vibrant: "Application Utility".
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Then you're doing it wrong.
960 wide
800 tall
crop to 100%
done.
-bZj

i have yet to crop anything and have a wide array of resolutions so far. Wallpaper set and save. get it.