Ultimate Fade-in slideshow artifacts in IE8

[chriscubed]

1) Script Title: Ultimate Fade-in slideshow (v2.4)

2) Script URL (on DD):
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamici...nslideshow.htm

3) Describe problem:
Hi, I've successfully installed and have the slideshow script working. It would be perfect except for on IE8, it has little artifacts of white pixels appearing randomly over the images. I've tested in FireFox and it works fine, but for me it's unusable unless I can show it working in IE.
It seems to work ok on the original images, could it be because I'm using larger images, in this case 935*135 pixels?

Could you please look at the test page I've got at:
http://www.valleypark.kent.sch.uk/test/fade.html

[jscheuer1]

IE has a bug when fading .jpg images. Pixels that are 100% black (rgb 0, 0, 0) appear transparent.

You could use other formats like .png, .bmp or .gif, but they're not as good in several respects for these types of images. Your image editor identifies itself as Adobe Photoshop CS3 Windows. I'm not familiar with that one but it probably has something like (from its main menu or one of the menus):

Colors > Adjust > Levels

Do this with the image already loaded in the editor. Keep a backup just in case. You will see some sort of dialogue box with thumbnails, numbers and sliders. Using the numbers or the slider, set the output level 0 to something else from 1 to 9. Often this varies from image to image, and may have to be established for each via trial and error. 7 is often good. For a set of similar images it might work out to be the same number for all.

Save the changes and test them out in the slideshow.

There may be an easier way. This is the only one I'm aware of.

[chriscubed]

Ah I see. I'd just found similar information - posted by you as well! - on http://www.dynamicdrive.com/forums/s...817#post151817
I'm not much of an expert on Photoshop and couldn't find the menu items you talk about, but I figured I could just lighten the problem pixels with a paintbrush tool and it would solve my problem, and it did.

You were right of course about the black background, on a white web page, having the image fade from a black rectangle doesn't really cut it, but I hadn't related my change to the issues I had - a mistake on my part.

So thank you very much for the help, I believe I should be able to use the script on the new design of our website soon.

[jscheuer1]

Yes, you can do it like that. It's a bit more tedious. It would yield an image that's closer to the original's overall brightness/darkness, though the difference would be hard to tell.

I did an experiment thinking "What if the background were white to begin with, then changed to black?" But the problem with that is the images themselves have large portions of white in them, so one bleeds through to the other. The script would need to be edited, perhaps extensively, to prevent that. The fade in/fade out effect might not be as smooth looking then, and/or there still might be times when one image bled through to the other.