Contributing Professional Wallpapers [The curent ones are ugly]

Ask Fedora
1

Hi,

I may have some professionaly created wallpapers, I’ve done in GIMP. I could contribute to Fedora. I also have fixed the existing ones. Please do not provide PNG 8-bit wallpapers anymore. They are big, gradients are completely broken and masked with low, washed contrast (very bad hazy wallpapers) and nothing can be done with them. They are of a very poor quality. Nonetheless I tried to fixed them (see the attachment).

PNGs are very bad in terms of loading speed (size and because of being PNGs). I created 4k s and used advanaced options from AV1 (aom), like better bith depth, increased colors from default to achieve a sweet spot between size and quality, advance quantization, delta in chroma planes and tuning for ssim. The difference between is hudge:

  1. Faster load of SDDM
  2. Faster load of wallpaper
  3. faster load of lock screen
  4. drastically smaller size
  5. drastically better quality
  6. Better responsiveness of the system

Let me know.

In the future please provide 16-bit PNGs with the highest resolution. I will contribute by scaling them correctly (with 16x9 canvas size) to 4k, 2k and 1k with sinc functions and compress correctly (se above) with modern license-free, non-patented compression methods (alliance for open media). The current art is of very, very bad quality, loads too long and is wasting the space. System should be more bautiful and more responsive.

As example I do attach some fixes of the wallpapers that already exist in Fedora (unfortunately the sources were bad, bad quality, 8-bit only, unsuitable for anything). I can also contribute my own, if you wish so. Please compare them to the original graphics side by side. If you don’t have the original wallpapers ready then it will not tell you much- you will assume that these look like the original, but not. Seeing is believing.

Since I cannot upload it here (the process is already annoying), I securely uploaded them here:

Just in case the b3sum:
bf0cfb1719ea223076c22afdfb590ff41e5fbbdb92b6ab11e466529ceb56fe21

There are 12 fixed wallpapers there. Enjoy!

Besides comparing the quality you may now also check the difference in sizes. Can you see what you were doing wrong?

I’m eager to help, but if the process to contribute is too complicated then, I’m out.

2

Oh, I’m in just the mood for this, today. So, sure, I’ll bite.

[Weaponized condescension]

…You seem fun.

I have an initial question, right off the bat: Where did these backgrounds you’ve “fixed” even come from? I have never seen a single one of the images in that upload before, and not one of them appears in the “Background” section of the GNOME settings “Appearance” pane on my Fedora 42 system.

So, right off the bat I can’t compare your “fixed” images to the originals, because I have no idea where to find the originals. And I have no idea whether they’re even Fedora images or not.

The only Fedora backgrounds that anyone really cares about, for the most part, are the official desktop background images for each release. For example, Fedora 42 has the f42-01-day and f42-01-night backgrounds, provided by the f42-backgrounds-base package. It’s a fun cartoon-style hand-drawn image with a relatively small color palette and no gradients. It started life as an 8bpp Krita file, and is being distributed as an 8bpp JPEG-XL file. I fail to see how it could possibly be improved by expanding the color depth to 16bpp. So apparently 8bpp files aren’t “unsuitable for anything”.

(This is actually a PNG conversion of the official background, because Discourse doesn’t support JXL uploads.)

f42
f421920×1440 220 KB

There are other backgrounds, from previous releases, some of which could potentially benefit from 16bpp color. but each release’s background is a user-created image. (None of them are “professional”, and as a volunteer, hobbyist contributor holy crap do I hate that term being used as a synonym for “high-quality”.) Most start life in 8bpp format.

Those generic, ugly images you “fixed”, though, I personally can’t fathom why anyone would bother trying to improve them. They’re terrible at any quality level.

Besides comparing the quality you may now also check the difference in sizes. Can you see what you were doing wrong?

. o O (…Other than indulging in this conversation?)

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