The above illustration from Key’s visual novel “Tomoyo After – It’s a Wonderful Life” conceals an amusing easter egg visible only to users of dread browser Internet Explorer.
To view it, first enlarge the image, then press Ctrl + A, or alternatively select the image (so it is highlighted).
As stated, only Microsoft’s superior browser will display this, so users of rebel browsers will unfortunately have to resort to IE.
For those who haven’t figured it out, this effect is achieved by merging two images in a checkerboard grid fashion, alternating pixels showing the two images, increasing the brightness of one of the images first way up and then cranking the gamma way back down (I can’t remember exactly how low achieves the proper effect as I’m too lazy to check the chunks used in that image, but if memory serves it’s around 1.5% of the original). Gotta use the actual gamma chunk to achieve this, mind you. Simply lowering the brightness on the image as a whole far down would show the same image for all users.
The reason it shows up as a “different” image in IE is because IE’s rendering engine fails to comply to a host of standards and even fully implement rendering of a lot of things, such as png transparency or, as is showcased with this image, png gamma settings. All png images can have a chunk, or tag if you will, that specifies what gamma setting it should be rendered with. Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari etc all obey this gamma chunk and so display the “right” image. IE doesn’t and will instead render the image far brighter than it should. The pixels that appear to be black in most browsers aren’t entirely black and when their gamma is cranked up you can see the other image easily as the “right” one now consists of near-white pixels instead.
Fucking magic.
Why does it only work on this page though?
If you right click on the picture, steal the source from the properties, and view the image alone in another tab then it doesnt work.
I also noticed the picture is a .png file, is that the only picture file type that this feature works on? Doesn’t seem to work on other sites.
THAT IS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!!!
Interesting