What is the best vectorial format I can use to create resolution independent vectorial artwork for iPhone and iPad? PDF?
I have to draw large images 1024x1300 images on a quartz context. Suppose I use PDF. What technique would save more memory and consume less CPU: have the PNG image loaded and draw it on the quartz context or have the PDF loaded on the quartz context?
thanks in advance.
The Opacity image editor allows you to draw vector graphics, and output Quartz2D code that you can then use to duplicate the image at any size on any iOS device:
http://likethought.com/opacity/
It would be blazing fast and use almost no memory (well, a large CALayer will consume memory)
As usual 'it depends'.
Using PNGs of that size will require 5MB of memory to keep them uncompressed in a buffer. This may be fine for your app.
Memory usage of a PDF document is very dependent on the complexity of that document. In my experience vector graphics and text are pretty efficient. Specially when rendered to a Layer.
I think you will simply have to put together a small proof-of-concept app and run it in Instruments to get some real numbers.
Related
I have a vector graphics .svg to create a image for iPhone. I know I can't use a .svg directly to iPhone because cocoa touch don't render it (maybe with others libs).
So, I have to convert the image for a format to use in iPhone. So, what is the best format to have the best quality in iPhone? I will create image for Retina (2x) and for normal.
Is it .png the best choice? Any idea?
PNG is definitely the best choice as it's the de-facto standard on iOS. The SDK processes PNGs in build phase and they can be loaded into memory directly. So they're super fast. You need to have normal PNGs and #2x to support retina display.
Rendering vector-based graphics usually costs much resources (just as writing codes to draw with the Core Graphics API). On a mobile device, using raster graphics balances the performance and the quality. I think there's less cases in which we want to scale the UI elements to any level.
Creating 2 sets of design elements do cost you more time, but it's acceptable. With batch processing, you can save some time. Be sure to check each graphic on the real devices and manually refine it for better looking.
I have an app that will display a bunch of images in a slideshow. Those images will be part of the bundle, thus distributed with the app.
All the images are photographs or photographic, etc.
I've read that it's preferred to use PNG as the image format, but seeing that the JPG version will be much smaller, I'd rather be using that.
Are there any guidelines which format to use and in which case?
PNG's are pixel perfect (non-lossy), and require very little extra CPU energy to display. However, large PNGs may take longer to read from storage than more compressed image formats, and thus be slower to display.
JPG's are smaller to store, but lossy (amount depends on compression level), and to display them requires a much more complicated decoding algorithm. But the typical compression and image quality is usually quite sufficient for photos.
Use JPG's for photos and for anything large, and PNG's for anything small and/or designed to be displayed "pixel perfect" (e.g. small icons) or as a part of a composited transparent overlay, etc.
Apple optimizes PNG images that are included in your iPhone app bundle. In fact, the iPhone uses a special encoding in which the color bytes are optimized for the hardware. XCode handles this special encoding for you when you build your project. So, you do see additional benefits to using PNG's on an iPhone other than their size consideration. For this reason it is definitely recommended to use PNG's for any images that appear as part of the interface (in a table view, labels, etc).
As for displaying a full screen image such as a photograph you may still reap benefits with PNG's since they are non-lossy and the visual quality should be better than a JPG not to mention resource usage with decoding the image. You may need to decrease the quality of your JPG's in order to see a real benefit in file size but then you are displaying non-optimal images.
File size is certainly a factor but there are other considerations at play as well when choosing an image format.
There is one important thing to think about with PNGs. If a PNG is included in your Xcode build it will be optimized for iOS. This is called PNG crush. If your PNG is downloaded at run time it will not be crushed. Crushed PNGs run about the same as 100% JPGs. Lower quality JPGs run better than higher quality JPGs. So from a performance standpoint from fastest to slowest it would go low quality JPG, high quality JPG, PNG Crushed, PNG.
If you need to download PNGs you should consider crushing the PNGs on the server before the download.
http://www.cocoanetics.com/2011/10/avoiding-image-decompression-sickness/
The Cocoanetics blog published a nice iOS performance benchmark of JPGs at various quality levels, and PNGs, with and without crushing.
From his conclusion:
If you absolutely need an alpha channel or have to go with PNGs then
it is advisable to install the pngcrush tool on your web server and
have it process all your PNGs. In almost all other cases high quality
JPEGs combine smaller file sizes (i.e. faster transmission) with
faster compression and rendering.
It turns out that PNGs are great for small images that you would use
for UI elements, but they are not reasonable to use for any full
screen applications like catalogues or magazines. There you would want
to choose a compression quality between 60 and 80% depending on your
source material.
In terms of getting it all to display you will want to hang onto
UIImage instances from which you have drawn once because those have a
cached uncompressed version of the file in them. And where you don’t
the visual pause for a large image to appear on screen you will have
to force decompression for a couple of images in advance. But bear in
mind that these will take large amounts of RAM and if you are
overdoing it that might cause your app to be terminated. NSCache is a
great place to place frequently used images because this automatically
takes care of evicting the images when RAM becomes scarce.
It is unfortunate that we don’t have any way to know whether or not an
image still needs decompressing or not. Also an image might have
evicted the uncompressed version without informing us as to this
effect. That might be a good Radar to raise at Apple’s bug reporting
site. But fortunately accessing the image as shown above takes no time
if the image is already decompressed. So you could just do that not
only “just in time” but also “just in case”.
Just thought I'd share a bit of decompression performance data...
I'm doing some prototyping of a 360 degree viewer - a carousel where the user can spin through a series of photos taken from different angles, to give the impression of being able to smoothly rotate an object.
I have loaded the image data into an array of NSData's to take file i/o out of the equation, but create NSImage's on the fly. Testing at near max frame rate (~25 fps) and watching in Instruments I see the app is clearly CPU-bound and there's an approximately 10% increase in CPU load showing ~275 kb png's vs. ~75 kb jpg's.
I can't say for sure but my guess is the CPU limit is just from general program execution and moving all the data around in memory, but that image decompression is done on the GPU. Either way and the JPG vs. PNG performance argument looks to favour JPG, especially when the smaller file sizes (and therefore smaller sizes of objects in memory at least in some parts of the chain) is taken into consideration.
Of course every situation is different, there's no substitute for testing...
I have found massive differences in animation performance when using jpegs vs png. For example placing three screen-sized jpegs side by side in a UIScrollView and scrolling horizontally on an iPhone4 results in lag and a thoroughly unpleasant jerky animation. With non-transparent pngs of the same dimensions the scrolling is smooth. I never use jpegs, even if the image is large.
I think if you want to use transparent, you have no choice except PNG. But, if your background is opaque already, then you may use JPG. That is the only difference I can see
'Use JPEG for photos' as mentioned in Human Interface Guidelines under section Produce artwork in the appropriate format.
Should I use UIImage or CGImage ? Png or Jpg ?
I've read the doc and tried different things but did not notice significant improvement.
Loading an image can take 1 good second which seems slow
UIImage is just an ObjC wrapper of CGImage, so they're the same.
From the SDK doc:
You should avoid creating UIImage objects that are greater than 1024 x 1024 in size. Besides the large amount of memory such an image would consume, you may run into problems when using the image as a texture in OpenGL ES or when drawing the image to a view or layer. This size restriction does not apply if you are performing code-based manipulations, such as resizing an image larger than 1024 x 1024 pixels by drawing it to a bitmap-backed graphics context. In fact, you may need to resize an image in this manner (or break it into several smaller images) in order to draw it to one of your views.
If you have a huge image, you could try to use a UIWebView to reduce memory consumption.
The time to load an image has 2 parts: the time to decompress the image (relevant to choosing JPG or PNG) and the time to render the image.
For decompressing, I'd suggest you profile the simple statement
[UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:#"/path/to/your/image.jpg"];
It is faster for the iPhone to load PNGs than JPGs because PNGs are optimized when bundled in your application (although, not loaded from remote).
An except from Addison Wesley's iPhone Cookbook:
"Xcode automatically optimizes your PNG images using the pngcrush utility shipped with the SDK. (You'll find the program in the iPhoneOS platform folders in /Developer. Run it from the command line with the –iphoneswitch to convert standard PNG files to iPhone- formatted ones.) For this reason, use PNG images in your iPhone apps where possible as your preferred image format."
Also, PNG is a lossless format, and JPGs are lossy. Apple chose this format for these reasons.
-Kevin
I have an iPhone application that downloads images from the internet and saves them for display later.
The user can select the images to view from a UITableView, the table view has custom cells which display thumbnails of the original images in varying sizes.
When the large image is first downloaded it is scaled to thumbnail size and the thumbnail is saved using UIImagePNGRepresentation.
What I would like to do is save the thumbnail in the optimized iPhone PNG format. How can I do that? does it happen magically just by loading the original large image into memory and saving it? Do I have to do any further processing on the thumbnail before saving?
Chances are the UIImagePNGRepresentation does not create the images, as they are non-comformant PNGs, and can't be read by anything else. If they API generated PNGs that could not be read I think it would document that, and anyone who uploads PNGs from the phone would notice that they did not work.
The optimization is useful, but most of the optimized PNGs are part of the UI where the optimization is done as part of the build process. Chances are the cost of performing the optimization will offset any gains you get from it.
So it turns out that the RGB565 colorspace used in the optimized format is simply not available in a CGGraphicsContext, which is the rendering class used by all the UIwhatever components.
So if I DID write some code to change the color space of the image before saving it, I couldn't get the texture back into a UI class. The only way to use it is to load it directly into the OpenGL innards and use OpenGL in my app.
Don't worry about the "optimized PNG" format, as it isn't making any significant difference.
It does not affect rendering speed at all, and loading speed is dictated by file size more than file format.
So simply save it in a format that will give you smallest files. If you're not using transparency, then it might be JPEG.
If you need transparency, and can spend more CPU time when saving images, then include pngquant in your program (it's under BSD-like license) and shrink those PNGs to 8-bit palette.
Is there a standard mechanism or known library that will convert .png images to compressed PVRTC textures on the iPhone itself (not during development using the standard tools on OS X).
I have a number of .png textures in my application but swapping is an issue. I'd like to create PVRTC variants of the .pngs on the device, should the available memory be low on application startup (or perhaps on first load of the application).
I haven't seen any information on the net regarding how to construct PVRTC images manually and to the best of my knowledge there is no support for this built into the iPhone (and it wouldn't be needed to read the PVRTC files).
For most applications, there is little sense to include or construct both versions of the files. Under optimal conditions, the PVRTC versions should be virtually indistinguishable from the PNG versions and are really just "pre-processed" versions of the files optimized for direct streaming into the video memory.
It is generally best to go through all of your images and make decisions regarding how to best package the image to balance memory conservation and quality for all users, not just under specific restricted memory situations.
A few things to consider (apologies if this is redundant knowledge):
PVRTC files can have problems with complex alpha blended images as the pre-processing can cause unsightly artifacts along the blended edges.
Opaque PNG files should have their alpha channel removed in the original image (saving memory and blending overhead).
For images with a limited range of colors, reduce the image from PNG32 to PNG16 or PNG8 to save memory on disk.
If this is for OpenGL based programs, consider using an enhanced version of Texture2D (such as from Cocos2D) which supports alternate pixel formats such as 565 and 4444. This can greatly reduce the overhead in the graphics card with minimal impact on image quality, by carefully choosing a pixel format which corresponds to the balance of colors in the original image.
Additionally for OpenGL based programs, avoid individual images (320x480) for backgrounds as this will result in a 512x512 texture in memory for each one. Break the image into smaller pieces or make the image 512x512 and fill the extra space with other images so that only one texture needs to load.
As with everything, focus on the largest images first to get the biggest bang for the buck.
It's also worth noting that since your application will be the only thing running (other than system applications), the only real memory overhead is going to be a limited amount of "disk" space. Making a second copy of all the image files will actually be working against you instead of helping.
Barney
I'd be careful assuming that this will help you. Once you reference the images once, i.e. load them into a UIImage, the iPhone will start to cache your pngs whether you like them or not. Compressing them will not serve you well to achieve what you're looking for here, in my opinion.
If you want to compress images to PVR on IOS, you may consider the OpenSceneGraph plugin pvr :
http://www.openscenegraph.org/projects/osg/browser/OpenSceneGraph/branches/OpenSceneGraph-3.0/src/osgPlugins/pvr/ReaderWriterPVR.cpp .