I Will Steal Your Face (13 stolen so far)

Posting here is a free face-steal for me. So you don't have to post here. Just read, and fear/laugh on the inside.

I will post in this thread pretending to be those who's faces have been stolen, as well as to update the list of stolen faces.

Currently, I have stolen:

• Mirdini's Face - Stolen in "I Will Steal Your Face"
  
• SleepingOrange's Face - Stolen in "I Will Steal Your Face"
  
• Coldblooded's Face - Stolen in "I Will Steal Your Face"
  
• Paper's Face - Stolen in "I Will Steal Your Face"
  
• a52's Face - Stolen in "I Will Steal Your Face"
  
• Whimbrel's Face - Stolen in "I Will Steal Your Face"
  
• ICan'tGiveCredit's Face - Stolen in "I Will Steal Your Face"
  
• The Blue Avenger's Face - Stolen in "I Will Steal Your Face"
  
• Schazer's Face - Stolen in "I Will Steal Your Face"
  
• Wheat's Face - Stolen in "I Will Steal Your Face"
  
• Gatr's Face - Stolen in "I Will Steal Your Face"
  
• Kieros' Face - Stolen in this thread
  
• Sai's Face - Stolen in this thread

Once I have a few Official Stolen Faces, I will get rid of the less legitimate face steals, so that everyone has a fair chance of winning. The prize?

...

I don't know, why are you asking me?

Honk Honk

How are face steals of varying legitimacy

(Don't make a pun about facing off. Don't make a pun about..... oh fuck it.)

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Why have you stolen wheat and schazers faces when neither of them have posted in this thread.

don't

What a lovely collection of faces~

I think I'll keep them!

badump a dum a dum-dum-dee-dum dum dum

that there. was darude sandstorm

How are face steals of varying legitimacy

Why have you stolen wheat and schazers faces when neither of them have posted in this thread.

Those faces were... not taken through the official channels. They've been returned.

don't

do not

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SpoilerI love that you managed to get the gif ones as well. Good thieving.

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Magic.

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SpoilerBut actually Gimp.

Put it back

Cease.

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DO MINE DO MINE DO MINE

(a still is fine. take your pick)

I'm going to steal faces tommorow, I need to go to bed.

I'm going to steal faces tommorow, I need to go to bed.

Stealing Gifs takes a long time too, and I spent most of the night making art and playing CAH

Stolen!

Surprise, surprise, the more technical answer is... Reyweld didn't. To get from the numerous colors in all the other avatars down to just 256 for a .gif, quite a few sacrifices had to be made.

FOR EXAMPLE:
This is Credit's avatar.
And this is Credit's avatar in Reyweld's facesteal.

"What's the difference?" you might be asking yourself. Well, if we use CSI's favorite camera technique¹ (aka zoom to 3x the size without interpolation²), we get a different comparison:

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Spoiler

The facesteal version looks a lot blockier, with not as smooth of a gradient between different colors. And there is the loss of all the different colors used from the original .png to the modified .gif. A colorcube analysis reveals that this a lot of information was lost (and that this is where most of the colors in the entire .gif come from):

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"Okay, so what?" I hear at least zero of you shouting. Well, thankfully, GIMP has a feature to take the difference between two layers³. A perfect match should be completely black, yet lo and behold:

Quite a lot of color. And if we just up the lightness a little bit⁴, we get a veritable rainbow of lossy compression


"Now Kieros," you might be saying, "Won't Reyweld steal your avatar too?" To which you'd be correct. However, mine poses a problem in two ways. Firstly, let's look at Reyweld's current color pallet.

Notice what it's lacking? That's right, a mid-brightness band of greys⁵. Which when we apply that color pallet to my avatar, leads to this mess:

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Spoiler

Therefore, if Reyweld adds my avatar using the current pallet, it will result in this blobby, off-colored mess reduced from 216 colors to only 16. However, if Reyweld recreates the pallet, it'll result in a loss of vibrancy for everyone else (and may require more work to do)⁶.

And secondly, the face steal is only allowing one second per person, which is the length of the shortest frame in my avatar. And since it's aperiodic⁷, it should be more difficult to figure out how to capture it.

"KIEROS," you are probably now saying "SHUT UP!" To which I say, in a highly elegant manner, no, you shut up. This is graphical mathematics at its finest and I will not allow any of you to be deprived of it. Let's just calculate the specific information lost from those two compressions.

Now, information is measured in entropy, which has the simple formula of ∑-plog(p) for all possible values⁸. Assuming all colors are equally likely, one pixel in a .png holds 24 bits of information, while a .gif image only holds 8 bits, which is why a .gif image is smaller⁹.

For Credit's actual avatar, the colors are about evenly spaced, so assuming they are evenly likely, the original avatar holds 14.396 bits of information per pixel¹⁰. The modification, making the same assumption, has only 7.96 bits of information per pixel, meaning a loss of about 44.7% of information between the two images. However, for something with that much prior information, this loss actually isn't that significant. This is why compression works well, you don't really notice it when it's done well.

However, for my avatar, the story is a little different. My avatar has 216 colors in it, and they are not fairly well distributed¹¹. This already only has 7.755 bits of information at max¹². The modification only has 4 bits of information per pixel, and a different distribution of colors¹³. This is at least a 48.4% loss in information, and probably closer to a 60% loss. The problem is that this image was already quite compressed beforehand, so now we are starting to lose more significant bits in the compression, and as such, the image appears much worse.

It just falls into the worst possible location: Too much information and it can be compressed without losing much; too little and there isn't anything to compress¹⁴. But right in between is the Goldilocks region of "Just... wrong". It'll be interesting to see how Reyweld deals with this.

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1: Yes, I know this isn't what they do, but it's the zoom portion of the "zoom and enhance".
2: The use of no interpolation means that GIMP will not try and blur out the colors to make it look smoother. Specifically, since I am increasing the image an integer multiple of times, each pixel becomes that many times larger on a size, with no weird effects.
3: Specifically, I set the layer mode to "difference" and took a screenshot of the result. The fact that this is a screenshot (along with the colorcube analyses) accounts for the border around the edges.
4: By going into Hue-Saturation and bumping up the lightness to 35. I was originally doing this with the brightness/contrast, but because of the border, contrast just turned everything to black and brightness greyed out the colors.
5: Or more accurately, slightly-warm greys, because most off-greys are blue toned rather than red toned, simply because grey is a cool color and gets paired most often with them.
6: I don't know how Reyweld is doing the face steals. They could have a secondary image which does not get converted into a .gif in which the original images are stored, in which case, it would be a lot less work to do the modification of color table.
7: The last frame doesn't lead to the first as in a cycle like the previous .gif images in this thread, it instead jumps back to the first frame.
8: Where p is the probability of a certain value showing up, and the logarithm used is actually the binary logarithm, instead of the natural or common logarithm. If all n options are equally likely with p=1/n, then since you are adding up n times the inside result, the information contained is log(n). This makes intuitive sense, as a random bit of information should have one bit, and if the bits are completely independent on each other, each bit added should also add one bit of information.
9: .jpg images use a different method of compression than a .gif indexing. This is beyond the scope of this post, but feel free to read up on it¹⁵.
10: If you don't want that assumption, this is a maximum value, so it's probably actually closer to 14 bits, while the modified is probably closer to 7.7 bits.
11: Colorcube analysis not shown, but it is very strongly trimodal, corresponding to the lighter and darker of the grey fur colors, as well as the blackish color for the hands.
12: This is probably much lower, likely closer to around 7 or so accounting for the strongly non-uniform distribution.
13: The distribution is now bimodal, likely due to the fact that the fur has been mapped to only one color, as opposed to the twoish beforehand. This also reduces the information, probably to something around 2.5 bits.
14: For an example of too little, Schazer's avatar had only four colors beforehand for approximately 2 bits of information, which got compressed to... almost exactly the same four colors, in the exact same distribution, for a loss of no information.
15: Yeah right, like you were going to read that at all.

Kieros I think I love you

You have footnotes in your footnotes. This is... this is advanced nerd.

But yeah, great post. I read the whole thing and everyone else should too.

I have never stolen more than the first second of another's GIF. If you look at Shredded, I clearly do not have the full thing, but only a second of it.

Also: got your face(s).