The outline colour, width, or even its existence is highly situational and use-case-specific. I just left the default value in Joomla's colour picker which happens to be black. The point is that you get to use whatever you want. FWIW the option to choose an outline colour was there since version 3.0, you just had not noticed it. I just didn't say anything because it is entirely inconsequential whether you noticed something existed before or not.
Regarding the intended contrast between text and image, again, it is highly situational and depends on your art direction. If you are doing International Style minimalism or 2010s Brutalist web design you are going for lower contrast, giving it a more subdued and quiet look. That would work for luxury brands, spas, and hipster-catering sites. Also remember that the contrast you get depends on both the image and the text. Black would be 100% contrast against a pale image (e.g. applying a fair amount of desaturation, increasing brightness, lowering contrast) but 0% contrast against a mostly black / dark image (e.g. an image from a space telescope). I understand contrast; my software is accessible. You ask me if I can magically change the outline to make it have high contrast? No, unless you want to be spending a hell of a lot of money and stupid amounts of time to run AI inference at least thrice, once to do computer vision, once to come up with a good contrasting colour, and once again to do computer vision on the composite to ensure acceptable results – with the loop repeating up to X times until the result is satisfactory. Or, you know, you can use contrasting colors for the text and its outline to come up with legible text regardless of the background image.
The way the image is encoded is limited by what is supported by and works with PHP. Dropping the alpha channel causes catastrophic rendering artefacts.
Besides, no file format conceived the last 30 years uses just RLE; the "newest" format doing that was BMP introduced in 1987. Lossless WebP decorrelates colour channels and uses LZ77 + Huffman coding; RLE is just a small part of the overall LZ77 implementation which is in itself a very small part of the compression pipeline. If you choose lossy compression for WebP the alpha channel is dropped completely and the image is expressed in YCbCr colour similar to JPEG with 8 bits per channel. However, the size difference does not come from the drop of the alpha channel, but the nature of lossy compression (at the expense of compression artefacts, of course).
You can force the regeneration of all images by clearing the image cache. There's a button for that in the component. If there's no cached image, it gets regenerated. Simple enough, eh? :)
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer and Director
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