Hi, humbly requesting advice on file size and quality of images.
Recently I've started using .Png's...find they're a good mix between image quality and size.
But lately my images have been larger in size (example, last page was 389kb)
Normally wouldn't care...but cant help but feel someone using dial up would hurt. lots. Especially since I recently saw a .jpg with quality comparable to the ones I've been churning out at 196kb
So is there some sort of trick to this that I'm missing?
What works for you guys?
Thanks
The better the artwork, the bigger the file size you can get away with - because it feels worth it. You can see those KB are going into some really gorgeous visuals and you don't mind so much.
For most comics, being amateur productions, up near 400KB is probably too much. Remember that although you will notice every flaw in your own artwork, the average reader will, well, read it. They'll scan the page in ten seconds flat and move on. Perfect clarity isn't needed and probably won't be noticed anyway.
Optimally, you want the quality about where you'd notice a bit of compression if you actually looked, but certainly not enough to be noticeable or - heaven forbid - distracting for Joe Webcomic Reader.
I think that some artifacts are more acceptable than others. Paint Shop Pro for example lets you preview so stuff such as artifacts in shadows, blurrs or gradients are not stuff to care about. But when someone's face ends up glitching up then it's time to start moaning.
Sometimes the failed experiments are the ones that don't try to kill you
Your PNGs are full RGB (i.e. millions of colours) with full alpha channel. You may want to flatten them and convert them to indexed (in Photoshop Save For Web, that's 8-bit PNG) for use on the Web.
Some dithering may occur in an indexed-colour version of the comic on your front page, and you may decide against it for that reason. Flattening/removing the alpha channel should be completely safe though, because you're not using transparent backgrounds in your image at all. Those gutters are white.
Usually, image editing software has a function called "Flatten" in the Image (GIMP) or Layers (Photoshop) menu. That should do the trick.
In Photoshop, if you use Save for Web, you can also uncheck "preserve transparency" or whatever it's called - I don't have Photoshop on the machine from where I'm writing this. If you save as an 8-bit PNG or GIF, it will remove the alpha channel anyway because transparency in those formats is either on or off, with one colour reserved as the transparent colour. (Alpha channel is a range of 256 values from complete transparency through partial translucence to complete opacity, and indexed, 8-bit images only have 256 colour values anyway. You don't have to remember this.)
Personally, I hate seeing shitty jpeg compression artifacts in comics (or any art.) If you're presenting it to me as a finished product and you want me to take it seriously, don't intentionally make it look bad.
I used to save my comics in .gif format with transparent space between panels. They were roughly 65KB or so. Then I started saving them as .jpgs with a white, bordered background, and did my best to keep them at or under 100KB. Now I still save them as .jpgs, but the height of the strip is taller and can fluctuate if there's a lot of text, and they are usually around 125KB.
I started going .jpg because it got to the point where I couldn't stand how pixelated my strips got when I converted them to indexed color, even with full dithering. .jpg format isn't much larger, and saving them for the web with a quality of about 75 in Photoshop produces a file that looks almost perfect to the casual reader.
Mine fluctuate a lot based on how long I've made that particular episode. Saving as JPEGs with compression 35, they run between 100 and 400 KB, with an average of about 250. More compression just looks bad to me, and I'd rather have quality than the accolade of 15 dial-up users.
That may seem harsh, but with dial-up now composing less than 60% of Internet users (and I suspect the division is even greater amongst webcomic readers) I don't feel a great need to cater to the technologically deficient. (No offense, dial-up guys, really)
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All my comics (Planescape, Harry Potter Comics, Star Trek: Federation Star Defense) are available on: Swiftbow.com
