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gif187.9 KB

Head and shoulders portrait of a black (gif 256)

The same 512x512 photograph written as gif 256. GIF cannot hold more than 256 colours, so this is quantised by the format itself. Every member of this group is identical pixels, so a decoder returning different dimensions or a different pixel count has lost something rather than simply produced a different file; the 24-bit PNG in this group is lossless and is the reference the lossy members are measured against Source plate a-av-f3.

Preview of Head and shoulders portrait of a black (gif 256)

Specifications

Palette Colours
256
Lossless
false
Width
512
Height
512
Variant
gif-256
Source Plate
a-av-f3.png
Synthetic
true
Disclosure
AI-generated / synthetic. Not a photograph of a real person, place or event.
Schema Version
1
Alt Text
Head and shoulders portrait of a black woman with locs, plain terracotta studio background
Alt Text Source
prompt

Testing contract

Expected to pass
Scenario
Decode this file and the 24-bit PNG in the same group, compare dimensions and pixel count, then check the decoded properties against the ones declared in its specs.
Expected result
It decodes to 512x512 with the properties in its specs. The encode is lossy, so the pixels may differ from the reference while the geometry may not. Every member of this group is the same source image, so a reader that returns different dimensions has demonstrably lost something rather than read a different file.

What is a .gif file?

GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is a raster format limited to a 256-color indexed palette per frame, using lossless LZW compression. It supports simple frame-based animation and a single fully transparent palette index. It is widely used for short looping animations and low-color graphics.

How to use this file

Use an example GIF to test animated-frame decoding, palette and transparency handling, frame timing, and conversion to modern formats like WebP or MP4.

How to use this file for testing

“Head and shoulders portrait of a black (gif 256)” is a deterministic Novus Examples fixture for Media handling. Generated stills, clips and audio published in several encodings of identical content, so a media pipeline can be tested on format handling, quality loss and frame or sample extraction against a reference that is known rather than assumed.

Documented properties for this file: 512×512. Compare results against paired or grouped companions on this page when present (clean↔damaged, searchable↔scanned, or format twins) so scores stay reproducible across runs.

Download the file once, keep the path stable in CI or local scripts, and treat the spec table as the contract: dimensions, seeds, field lists, and roles are intentional. Corrupt or invalid samples are labelled as such, expect parsers to fail loudly rather than silently accept them.

For image AI or enhancement tools, run the model or filter on this file and diff against the clean or ground-truth companion in the same group when available. Keep seeds and documented damage parameters in your evaluation notes so regressions are attributable.

Code examples

<img src="a-av-f3-gif-256.gif" alt="Example image" width="640" loading="lazy">

Generated by generation/image_format_wave.py. Free for any use, no attribution required, license.