PIL: Image resizing : Algorithm similar to firefox's

Question

I'm getting about the same bad looking resizing from all the 4 algorithms of PIL

>>> data = utils.fetch("http://wavestock.com/images/beta-icon.gif")
>>> image = Image.open(StringIO.StringIO(data)); image.save("/home/ptarjan/www/tmp/metaward/original.png")
>>>
>>> image = Image.open(StringIO.StringIO(data)); image.resize((36,36), Image.ANTIALIAS).save("/home/ptarjan/www/tmp/metaward/antialias.png")
>>> image = Image.open(StringIO.StringIO(data)); image.resize((36,36), Image.BILINEAR).save("/home/ptarjan/www/tmp/metaward/bilinear.png")
>>> image = Image.open(StringIO.StringIO(data)); image.resize((36,36), Image.BICUBIC).save("/home/ptarjan/www/tmp/metaward/bicubic.png")
>>> image = Image.open(StringIO.StringIO(data)); image.resize((36,36), Image.NEAREST).save("/home/ptarjan/www/tmp/metaward/nearest.png")
>>>
>>> image = Image.open(StringIO.StringIO(data)); image.thumbnail((36,36), Image.ANTIALIAS); image.save("/home/ptarjan/www/tmp/metaward/antialias-thumb.png")
>>> image = Image.open(StringIO.StringIO(data)); image.thumbnail((36,36), Image.BILINEAR); image.save("/home/ptarjan/www/tmp/metaward/bilinear-thumb.png")
>>> image = Image.open(StringIO.StringIO(data)); image.thumbnail((36,36), Image.BICUBIC); image.save("/home/ptarjan/www/tmp/metaward/bicubic-thumb.png")
>>> image = Image.open(StringIO.StringIO(data)); image.thumbnail((36,36), Image.NEAREST); image.save("/home/ptarjan/www/tmp/metaward/nearest-thumb.png")
>>>
>>> image = Image.open(StringIO.StringIO(data)); image.convert("RGB").resize((36,36), Image.ANTIALIAS).save("/home/ptarjan/www/tmp/metaward/antialias-rgb.png")
>>> image = Image.open(StringIO.StringIO(data)); image.convert("RGB").resize((36,36), Image.BILINEAR).save("/home/ptarjan/www/tmp/metaward/bilinear-rgb.png")
>>> image = Image.open(StringIO.StringIO(data)); image.convert("RGB").resize((36,36), Image.BICUBIC).save("/home/ptarjan/www/tmp/metaward/bicubic-rgb.png")
>>> image = Image.open(StringIO.StringIO(data)); image.convert("RGB").resize((36,36), Image.NEAREST).save("/home/ptarjan/www/tmp/metaward/nearest-rgb.png")

But the results look much worse that just resizing in firefox.

http://paulisageek.com/tmp/metaward/images.html

How can I get a similar effect to the firefox result using PIL (or another python image library)?

EDIT : Hover your mouse to see what each image is

It looks like the RGB and then ANTIALIS looks the best. Any other recommendations?

For reference, this is the one that looked the best :

>>> image = Image.open(StringIO.StringIO(data)); 
>>> image.convert("RGB").resize((36,36), Image.ANTIALIAS)

Answer 1

I resized the "original" with Python and found the same results as you did. I also resized the "original" with GIMP and I got the same (if not inferior) quality. This made me suspect that Firefox cheats. Possibly it converts to RGB ("original" mode is indexed color). Thus the following code:

import Image
im=Image.open("beta-icon.gif")
im = im.convert("RGB")
im=im.resize((36,36), Image.ANTIALIAS)
im.save("q5.png")

The result is almost as good as that of Firefox.