Wizard quality

This is an excerpt from Reviving JustWizards.com

I discovered that there’s a higher-quality version of the wizard out there. The original website used a 680px-tall image, with heavy JPEG compression and all. Since then, there have been new uploads of the same image to the internet, and Google’s reverse image search has been improved, so I was able to find an image that is 3114px tall — a remarkable improvement!

Previously I had used the Fuzzy Select tool in GIMP to remove the background from the wizard, which had some rather jaggy results. Even if you feather the edges, it isn’t ideal. With this higher-quality wizard, it would be easier to do a cleaner job (even if just from virtue of any jaggies or stray bits of background getting scaled down) but I instead opted to use ClipDrop’s AI-driven background removal tool since that was easier and did a better job than I probably would’ve managed.

The free tier of ClipDrop capped the resolution to 1024px. I find this is generous enough, given the wizard is never displayed larger than full height, which comes out to less than 1024px on a 1080p display unless full screen.

Conversely, the quality of some of the images is now worse than it was. They were something like 40MB in total, and the high resolutions were a bit of a strain even once downloaded, so I’ve compressed them down to a more sensible 3.4MB. I also figured out how to apply SVG masks and get arbitrary filter colours out of it, which is helpful. The latter seems to tank performance due to applying a whole chain of filters, but it’s cool!

The exception to quality reduction is the “Press F to pay respects” one, as I mentioned in Behind the Wizards.