I guess the first thing to know is that it was taken with a really cool digital camera (Nikon body with a Kodak digital camera back) while we were in Santa Monica, California building the web site for the PGA Championship. The camera could take pictures with outstanding resolution. And this was in 1995, way before digital cameras became the latest toy.
Perhaps more interesting though, is how I compressed it to about 20K without completely destroying the image. By using xv and the PBMPLUS tools I took a really small crop of my face and used the colors in that piece to quantize the rest of the image. Doing this preserved the colors in the most important part of the image and let the rest suffer.
After selecting the portion of the image I considered
most important I used
ppmquant 32 to choose the most used colors
in that piece. Then I used the -map and -fs
options of the
ppmquant command to map the colors of the original picture
into the reduced color set. The other steps are pretty standard.