rotane

Yes, image compression is still a thing

As you might recall, i wrote about this issue some time ago. Yep, it’s been over a year. What has happened since? Not too much, i’m afraid. Things were being discussed for a while, until back in March of this year when we got one final official update (that i know of). Has the issue been fixed since? Nope, it certainly has not.

Now here’s the kicker: I did some digging and found a shockingly easy fix.

Let’s take this image by the talented JenZee:

Note: Jen Zee isn’t just anyone. She’s the Art Director of Supergiant Games, responsible for the amazing games Bastion, Transistor, Pyre, and now Hades. And what does she write in the artist’s description? “Hmmm, not sure why but it’s uploading super blurry on deviantart !” That should tell you something.

Alright, back to the image. If you rightclick on the image (either the full view or small view) and hit ‘view image’ and then take a look at the URL bar of your browser, you’ll see a rather long string, akin to this:

https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/86c763db-05d4-49d1-b781-18edc71c539b/dc1whkn-f634fd71-ca87-41d3-81d2-137738a18705.png/v1/fill/w_900,h_900,q_80,strp/celeste_and_tariq_by_jenzee_dc1whkn-fullview.jpg?token=[snip]

I highlighted this little detail for you: q_80. Which you can guess, means, quality of 80. If you change the value to 100, you’ll get the pristine quality you would expect and want from a proper art site (like DeviantArt). (Note: Sometimes you’ll find q_70, usually on smaller views and thumbnails.)

Now, if someone could write a userscript that automatically changes this value to 100 across the board, that would be awesome. And i do mean ‘across the board’, since this compression also applies to thumbnails and small views, as i’ve mentioned – even if the actual images are PNGs (where you won’t see this q_80 setting).

So there’s your fix. Didn’t i mention how shockingly easy it would be? What i find even more shocking, however, is that DA is deliberately withholding this best quality from us. I find this unacceptable – even if we had a script that fixes this. After all, this is not Facebook or Instagram, where i go to when i’m bored. This is DeviantArt, and i hold them to higher standards. Yes, q_70 and q_80 uses much less bandwidth compared to q_100. But if this image processor they’re using isn’t up to the task, there are dozens of alternatives that can be implemented in its stead.

I’ll end this with my usual plea: Please DeviantArt, stop ruining our images!

P.S.: If you’re reading this in Eclipse, sorry that this journalskin looks so bad!

Pinging some of you admins again: spyed ikazon danlev Heidi moonbeam13 ArtBIT dt

Note: This journal is now many months old, and a lot of things i talk about here have since been fixed, or at least addressed. Not all of them, mind you; and the gist remains: Eclipse is vastly different from the current “Green Site” and introduces many changes, and not all of them for the better (in my opinion). Feel free to continue to share/mention this journal (you have my thanks!), or read Part II of my analysis.

Alright, where do i begin? After having used the Eclipse Beta for a while, i have collected a bunch of thoughts – and i have also submitted lots of them as feedback via the appropriate channels. Regardless, i wanted to have all of them collected in one place, and this journal seemed as good a place as any. Be warned, though, this is going to be fairly lengthy. And also rather negative, i’m afraid, so i apologize in advance if i seem overly blunt. But never forget, if i seem harsh, it is only because i care deeply about this place, and i would hate to see it gone or change into something unrecognisable.

Anyway, i’ll begin with my conclusion, so you’ll all know where i stand:

Eclipse looks like an iPad app that has been blown up to fill a regular desktop monitor.

My second conclusion would be: If i wasn’t a member of DeviantArt before and was looking for a new site to feature my art prominently, then yes, i could see myself joining (once my main point of critique of everything being too large has been fixed and the smaller bugs have been ironed out, of course). However, as someone who has been a member for over 16 years, i simply cannot come to the same conclusion. Instead i have to say:

This is not the DeviantArt that i signed up on anymore.

DeviantArt has too much history, and i have too much history on this place. And almost none of that is reflected with this update. Eclipse feels like it was being made by people trying to capture what DeviantArt could be, while not really knowing what it actually is.

Vision and Purpose

Who is all this for? How do they want us to use DeviantArt in the future?

That’s what i’m still trying to figure out, but upon using Eclipse for a while, it’s becoming clear to me that the target audience seems to be professionals rather than hobbyists, and that a strong community (or strong communities) isn’t as desired or important anymore. Several observations bring me to this conclusion, but also the general “feel” that i have when using Eclipse.

But i wanna highlight one thing, first and foremost: Collapsed comments. Why they think this is a good idea is beyond me, because the implication i draw from this is very simple:

Long-form interaction is no longer desired.

If this was not their intent, this feature has to go. If this was their intent, i’m out. (Sidenote: Isn’t it amazing how such a seemingly tiny thing can have such a massive implication? That’s the power of UX right there.)

The Positives

I want to focus on the specifics now, and i want to begin with an overview of the things that i like about the redesign:

• A dark mode! Yes! But more on that soon.
• The overall appearance does look fresh and modern.
• The tiny details of rainbow gradients add peppy accents throughout the site.
• I like that we can now tag a deviation with a location and models. This was long overdue.
• A profile header! Great addition – even if it is rather big. … Yes, it should be somewhat smaller.
• Bigger thumbs.
• Our own Shop page, that now lists all our Prints and Premium Content images (where you can buy a larger version for Points). Great addition as well.
• Deviant cards: Yep, that’s a nice feature too. Though i’d like to see a tad more info on those.
• No more ads? Great!
• Love Meter? Hmm, why not, i guess…

Next, i will focus on specific things in greater detail:

The Dark Mode

This is a fantastic new feature! I love the addition of a dark mode, and also the fact that it seems to be the new default mode. What i don’t like is its implementation:

Having 100% white text on a 100% black background is never a good idea.

It is extremely taxing on your eyes. Reading 1 or 2 lines of text is fine, but having to read an entire journal is not. A *good* dark skin only uses shades of grey: dark grey background and light grey text. (See this journalskin as a rough example, or look at how the latest Adobe products implement their dark mode. I would urge dA to not look at the extreme dark and extreme light modes, but the more “moderate” ones inbetween. Those are the ones that are most easy on the eyes.)

Furthermore, all the shades of black are extremely similar and nigh impossible to distinguish. As a result, it is very hard to tell apart all the elements on any given page, and there seems to be no visual hirarchy. It seems like everything blends together. (Of course, nothing is actually *overlapping*, but there are no clear boxes, dividers, and other visual cluses to help you tell things apart.)

And finally, a proper dark skin has *everything* skinned. Right now i see several parts that come in bright colours in both modes, like the dropdown menus in the top right, the modal that opens when you click to see more replies, the emoticon pop-up menu, the many tooltips and popup menus inside the Watch/Feedback page, or even the Submit page/modal.

Oh, and i could also add that some pages are not yet brought over to the new design at all (sta.sh, the Forums, the Shop, Manage Watchers, etc). The combination of new and old looks, frankly put, garish. I dearly hope that dA will skin all of these pages BEFORE they release Eclipse to the public, otherwise it’ll just come across as sloppy and, well, unfinished. But if their track record is anything to go by, we’ll have to live with these two designs side by side for a long time.

The Light Mode

There’s not much to say, other than this:

While the dark mode is too dark, the light mode is too bright.

Visual overload

This is a weird thing to say, because the new site is actually rather minimalistic. But browsing Eclipse feels strangely like being hit by a brick: Everything is extremely “in your face”. Maybe because everything is unproportionally large and there is hardly a visual guide between each element on a page.

Looking at my profile page is like, i can only see a fraction of what is actually there. Not necessarily in terms of customization, but – again – because i can’t see many things at the same time. I need to scroll like a madman to see more than one thing: I see either a huge header image, or my recent deviations, or one headline or two of my posts/journals, or my Friends and Watchers. With the old site, i can see several of these things at the same time at ease, without feeling cluttered. There’s boxes and lines and colours that guide me, and fonts are at a reasonable size; but on Eclipse there is almost none of that.

I feel lost even if i know exactly what i’m looking at.

Functionality

While the new look is indeed very modern, clean, edgy, and cool, it somehow “feels” wrong. And while a lot of this can be attibuted to these overly large design elements, another aspect is a lack of functionality, in particular responsiveness and feedback. (Bear with me please, this is rather hard to explain.)

One vital aspect is mouseover (or hover) effects. I cannot stress this enough (and i have been for almost a decade – so this is in fact a fairly old problem that dA is having):

Every link has to change its appearance when you move your mouse pointer over it.

Why is this so important? It makes your site appear functioning properly. Seems crazy simple, doesn’t it? But there really is nothing more to it than that. What’s worse, if some links have a mouseover effect and others don’t, your site feels broken. Example: The usermenu at the top right! (This apparently got fixed already.) And with so many different colours trying to fight for your attention, it’s difficult to say what is a header or highlight and what is indeed a clickable link.

Next, visual feedback. When i click a link, i need to know that something has happened. Let’s take these blue-ish links on your profile page or the white ones on Watch/Feedback page. With these you can, for example, edit your profile widgets or group comments into stacks. But you’re forced to wait up to a second (!) until something happens, leaving you confused and possibly very angsty – if only for a moment. You’re thinking: “Why is nothing happening? Did i do something wrong? Is the site broken?” (These are all emotions thath your brain formulates within milliseconds!) Something must happen as soon as you click a link. Immediately!

Possible solutions: The link (or the section that you are about to modify) could temporarily become greyed out, or you could get an animation; it doesn’t really matter, but something needs to tell you that your click has been registered and you can now wait for the changes to be applied.

This is basic, basic UX, and not just visual fluff!

And then there are the little details. Details like adding a comment or a reply: The new replybox just hangs there under a comment, but the margins are all wrong. On the old site, the replybox sits exactly where the new reply is going to be, but on Eclipse it does not. (Again, no clear visual hirarchy.) Then we have 4 little icons. The first 2 add deviations (why two – this is confusing*, doubly so since there are no tooltips), the next lets you add a YouTube video (why that, of all things??), and the fourth opens a (much too tiny) popup menu that lets you pick emoticons. Only the first and the last one are really necessary. Like, YouTube videos could automatically get parsed when one enters the link – just like emoticons get automatically converted when you use the old :emoticon: code. What’s curiously missing is a “Preview” feature.

* Don’t answer that, it was rhetorical.

No more Message Center

The fact that the Message Center has been split into separate parts really pains me. It was always possible to look at only one part (deviations, comments, etc), but the main landing page has all there is to see in one spot. And it was easy to see. Just like the rest of Eclipse, everything is excessively large; and while this can be a good thing for browsing art, it isn’t for scanning comments and replies.

Heck, i can barely see more than 2 comments at any given time – and i’m sitting in front of a large 34" screen!

Functionality has also taken a huge step backwards: No longer can i “X away” items that i don’t want to see anymore. With comments i’m forced to click on the ellipses and then click “Remove”, resulting in twice as many clicks as before. With deviations, at least, there is still an “X”, as well as a checkbox (good!), but gone is the feature, where i can draw a rectangle over several items and then dismiss them all at once (bad!).

The removal of the detailed message counters (in particular when using the Splintered Menu) takes away my feeling of “being in control”. I have always preferred this method of displaying messages to this fleeting red number. Why? Because once you click it, it’s gone. (To counter this argument, i have heard that always having a huge number looming on you on every page can give you a certain “anxiety”, and the new indicator does completely away with that. I never saw this as an issue, to be honest, and i’d prefer to always see how many items are waiting for me – and they will keep waiting for me until i actively do something about them. Again, makes me feel powerful.)

As positives, i’d like to highlight the possibility to display the parent comment inline. This is a good idea. (What’s not so good is the fact that you have to click the centre line to expand it; it would be much better if you could click the grey field anywhere.) Also, there is now a section for removed items (awesome), but no way to put them back or save (not awesome).

More negatives: I preferred the list view when getting new Journal notifications over tumbnails. To me, it’s easier digestible information: Title and author to the left, date to the right. (Incidentally, this is also the way i prefer looking at my files in the Windows Explorer or Mac Finder: in detail view, rather than miniature view. Miniature view to me only makes sense when there are only photos; or in dA’s case, deviations.) And finally, the clickable area of the 3 main links on top (Watch, Feedback, Notes) are way too tiny. (Lacking in usability again.)

Notes

Notes got a visual makeover, but nothing else. And Notes, more than anything, could have benefitted from a complete rewrite the most. I would have loved to see a more powerful messenger!

No more Categories

I know the old Galleries were plagued by miscats, but are you kidding me? This seems like such a massive nuke for no real benefit. Tags are no adequate replacement (plus, being able to use only 15 now is extra silly). How am i going to browse through Conceptual Photography, or Pencil Drawings, or any of the more obscure galleries out there? The content on dA is too large and diverse to be crammed into a handful of tags.

Deviation pages

The new Change Background feature is a nice addition, but the available pictures look rather low-res on my large monitor. Fullscreen support is nice, but i’d like to also see the description and comments there. As for the rest, it’s mostly fine, with the exception of my main point of critique: things are too large. The artist’s description (including tags and all that) is also a mess, since things just hang there without structure. Plus: Links and anything that is bold looks the same until you hover over them.

Browsing older Journals/Posts/Polls

This is going to be a real chore to use. The sidebar next to a Journal or Status Post only holds 3 thumbs to “related” posts, so it’s useless when looking for older stuff. The main Posts page (and subpages) are similarly limiting, simply because browsing these huge thumbs is not as “easy” as browsing a list of entries. The thumbs themselves (especially for Polls) also serve no real purpose other than being big.

No more Profile customization

Okay, this is going to be a controversial topic, but i don’t mind if excessive profile customization via the means of CSS fall by the wayside. To me, many of said profiles simply don’t look very appealing. This is my own view, of course, but i can totally see why many are going to be upset by the removal of those, but to me this is not a huge loss. After all, i have always seen this way of profile customization as an abuse of the system, an abuse that DeviantArt has merely tolerated. I guess i prefer a clean-looking profile.

However, having said all that, the available widgets on Eclipse are a far cry of what you can do today – even without the use of CSS. Let’s see what we have: Gallery folders, Favourites, Groups, Watchers, and Friends. Did i miss anything? Plus, the available options within these widgets is also very limited. I can, for example, not chose how many deviations i would like to display, or in what order. Likewise, i can not chose how to display my watchers other than the default way.

More Profile page nonsense

What’s with the separate “About” tab? And why does it sit left of the Home page? It doesn’t add a whole lot more information than the current deviantID box, mixed with a few bits from the current Activity page and Badges. (And my god does it look cluttered, but i think i’ve rambled enough about how large everything is in Eclipse.) None of this is interesting enough to warrant an entire new pageload. I would even go so far as to say that the devID block is vital information for the *main* Profile page. Of course, you could fill the new ABout page with much more stuff and stats, then we’re talking!

No more CSS

When dA introduced personalized journalskins many years ago, it was a huge deal! And for many it still is. The new Journal Editor may be easy to use, but it’s not a proper replacement for custom CSS.

Conclusion

As i said in the beginning, this was rather long. (Did anybody actually read all of it?) But what else can you do when a site that you have been using for 16+ years not only changes its skin but also vastly changes its functionality?

I’ll end this by saying, building Eclipse no doubt took a long time, and the result is not all bad, if not impressive in many areas. But i see a problem with the overal vision, as well as problems down to the very smallest of details of the implementation. A version 0.1, if you will. But definitely not a “Beta”. A beta version, by definition, is feature complete, and a beta-test is meant to iron out bugs. And Eclipse in its current form is far from complete.

Bonus: Collected quotes

I’ve read other people’s opinions and came by a few great quotes. Some are really insightful, others hit the nail on the head, so i want to add them here: (If you’re uncomfortable with your quote appearing here, please tell me and i’ll remove it.)

I’d like to use it full time to put it through its paces, but the Notification page was built by someone that hasn’t used dA for very long – I have to switch back to get anything done.

nichtgraveyet source

Just poked around for a while, and while I am still extremely excited about this, the new site feels very bloated. Everything is BIG and there's so much empty space.

Katy-L-Wood source

While I admire the layout for trying to be more art-oriented, I think there should be some options for profiles being more artist-oriented.

DetectiveRJ source

Instead of wanting to make everything look “cool”, your main concern should be accessibility and user friendlyness.

KaijuRomance source

Also a small thing: I don’t like featured comments not being highlighted any more.

Fenbound source

Just saw that the Emoticon gallery is completely gone, so how will one be able to add new Emotes to the Community Emoticons in Add media?

Krissi001 source

The comment section is hard to read, the text is just floating in space and its hard to follow what is being discussed and replied to.

LIFE0N source

Stats bar: It actually looks pretty sleek. Problem is, it takes up too much space and conveys too little. In contrast the original was compact and told you everything at a glance.

spiketail94 source

Eclipse is not dA. I can’t even recognize it. It’s not cozy, it’s not welcoming and it’s confusing and cluttered.

Ghostdragon1 source

Taking away features because one group of users can't utilise them is extremely counterproductive.

neonUFO source

I feel the design is nice, but other sites are wearing it better.

JCoolArts source

Everything takes 50 more clicks and 10 more minutes to get done in Eclipse. The site is not user-friendly at all, and it's exhausting.

Mrs-Durden source

I’m done and i’m going to bed now.

Thank you.

Update

Good news everyone! I just got confirmation that it’s a bug and being worked on. Thanks, spyed!

Original journal

The eagle-eyes among you might have noticed that something is going on with our deviations: They look somewhat worse than before. Why? DeviantArt is now compressing the full-view – and rather aggressively so! Previously, the full-view was exactly what you were uploading (unless you specifically told the upload process to scale it down). But now, the full-view gets re-saved as well. Worse, they're in the process of re-saving all (most? some?) of existing deviations across the site. (It seems, only JPEGs are affected, PNGs are fine.)

Here, let me demonstrate. Let's take this logo that i made last year:

The following picture is a zoomed-in crop of the full view – and it looks pretty bad, right? You can see it has strong JPG-artifacts all over it. This is what DeviantArt is doing to our pictures now! Move your mouse over it to see how it originally looked like:

(Note: I have saved these in PNG format to not degrade its quality further. Click here to save them.)

My original file was 140kB in size, the new save is 55kB. This is insane! You can clearly see a difference, right? The compressed version is what happens to all of our images now!

I get it, though, where they're coming from. This has been standard practice on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. to save bandwidth and reduce loading times. Fair point. Plus, when you view a picture on a high-DPI screen (such as a Retina Display on a Mac, or pretty much any smartphone of the last 5 years) you won't really notice it as much. I also know that a graphic such as this looks worse than a photograph under a similar compression. Still, i have always seen DeviantArt as more than a "timewaster" where you casually scroll through an endless stream of stuff and soon forget about what you have seen. DeviantArt works differently: You ponder over one piece of art much longer! But you can't do that when an image looks so shitty. I've always taken dA seriously, and i expect them to treat our pictures accordingly. Display them as best as you can!

I don't want to start a panic or scream bloody murder, but i do want to point this out and bring it to your attention before it's too late and all the images have been converted.

Oh, and i almost forgot about the second part of this issue: Downloads. While images that you can download via the Download button (where said feature was enabled by the uploader) are indeed the originally uploaded files, the filename, however, is now more often than not garbled as hell. Previously a downloaded filename would read as follows: title_by_deviant_string.ext. Awesome! This way you could always see the title of a deviation as well as the artist. Helps a bit against art theft, too. Not a whole lot (it's very easy to rename a file, i know that), but every so often i find a hotlinked file somewhere on the net, and i can easily trace down the original artist. Plus it's very easy to track down what you have downloaded. It's convenient, you know? Now, the downloaded file often has a very long string of random numbers as its filename. Plus, every once in a while i come by a downloaded file that reads file.htm. Yes, a HTML file, when it's actually a JPEG. I'm sure this is a bug, but it has to be reported, too.

(I'm going to ping a few of you admins, so you see this – no spam intended: spyed makepictures Heidi danlev moonbeam13 aunjuli chris ArtBIT micahgoulart zilla774 dt)

As great as the little Sony RX100 was (read this journal for my first impression, or hop over to rotane365 for hundreds of shots that i took with it), after having used it for a few years, it became too limiting. I wanted a camera with more flexibility again, but not as bulky as my old Canon EOS 400D that i barely used.

So last year i bought an Olympus OM-D E-M10 mark II (what a mouthful). The Micro Four Thirds standard seemed to have matured enough, there were now plenty of lenses available (thanks to Olympus and Panasonic sharing the standard, plus a wide range of third party lens manufacturers), and the relatively large – but not too large – sensor meant excellent image quality but in a much smaller body than regular DSLRs. But while the kit lens was great (and tiny!), at 28 – 84 mm (equiv.) it was even more limiting than the Sony. So my new daily/default lens soon became a Tamron 28 – 300 mm (equiv.). Much better!

But you know all this. I've been posting pictures that i shot with the Olympus for a while now. You've even seen me experimenting with stranger lenses. (Shoutout to nichtgraveyet for nudging me in this direction.) What you don't know yet is that i've recently accumulated more old lenses, used lenses from the analog age mostly; the oldest being a Russian Jupiter-8 from 1963. And now that i have a few, i wanted to compare and analize them.

First, here's my current gear:

These are all the lenses that i currently own (plus the M.Zuiko Digital 14 – 42 mm 1:3.5 – 5.6 EZ kit lens [man, what is it with these long names?], that i shot this photo with). Here you see:

Back row:
• Tamron 14 – 150 mm F/3.5 – 5.8 Di III (the only "native" Micro Four Thirds lens)
• Super Carenar MC 1:2.8 / 35 mm (M42 mount)
Front row:
• Auto Kepcor Macro MC 1:2.8 / 28 mm (M42 mount)
• Jupiter-8 1:2 / 50 mm (model PT3070) (M39 mount)
• Fujian CCTV 1:1.7 / 35 mm (C mount)

The best part: None of these lenses (except for the Tamron) cost me more than 20€.

And now for a few comparison shots and notes. I shot a kiwi plant on my balcony, by the way, and the background is a few trees that are a good 5 meters further back.

Feel free to click on any of the photos to view it larger.
(Note: All these are out-of-the-camera JPEGs shot at ISO 200. All i did was shrink them down from 4608×3072 to 1920×1200.)

Final verdict? I love these lenses! They all have their own unique character; and while they won't replace the Tamron zoom lens as my everyday lens, they each offer something special. Of course, you're forced to focus manually, so every photo takes much longer – but this means that you're more invested in every photo that you take. And i really like that.