Hello and so forth. At the moment I'm in the process of changing over to full-color comics and for that and a few other reasons, I'm reworking stuff like file size.
I've been looking around fruitlessly, then figured asking the many artists here should work just dand... ily? Obviously there's no "right" way to do anything and everyone does what works best for them. But, I'm just curious what resolution and dimensions and whatnot any of you use out there to create/edit your comics.
Personally, I'm most familiar with Photoshop, so I'm not too sure how different other programs may be. My PSDs were too large, so I'm just fiddling around to make it easier on myself and my laptop. I'm not having any trouble or anything, just getting input on random little things like this.
Okay, my final comics are 2880 pixels wide (reduced to 741 pixels wide for web viewing) and in the neighborhood of 1250 pixels tall, although that number fluctuates from comic to comic. I, too, use Photoshop, but only for layout, lettering, and shading; I use Flash for line work and coloring.
Killing, not yet. But switching from grayscale to color mode may have made the final push to killing. My old format was 6300x8100 at 300ppi. After tinkering, I've come up with 4800x6168 at 1200ppi... effectively reducing my file size by approximately 99%, from 292Mb to 3.15Mb. Productivity is up 9269%!
You may want to try TIFFs, instead of PSD files. In my experience, TIFFs tend to be smaller, at least once you've flattened or merged all the layers you may use on them (or you avoid using layers altogether). I generally scan in my inked pages at 600dpi in TIFF format to create files that are around 4900 x 6500 and 20 MB in size. That can balloon up to 40 MB or more once I add layers for colors, shadows, highlights, effects, etc. Once I flatten the layers, though, the file sizes go down to between 2-4 MB.
One thing you may want to think about in the future is buying a larger hard drive-either upgrading your internal one or getting a large external. Once you've been doing your comic for awhile, even 2-4 MB files start to take up space-especially when there may be dozens or even hundreds of them
Or you may want to archive your comic files to CD or DVD and remove all but the most recent ones from your hard drive; that's another space-saving option.
I don't use PSD files as the final comics, of course. After working on them in Photoshop, they become 600x771 GIFs. Dunno why, I've always liked using GIFs, they warm and soft, like a cat... but they don't purr.
I use a handy 250GB external hard drive for backup. I know where you're coming from, themacnut, even the smallest files already have started adding up.
No harm in seeing how editing PSDs and TIFFs are different, I'll check it out, thanks.
I pencil and ink on bristol board breaking a standard size printcomic format into doublesize "slugs" (3 - 12x6 or 4 - 6x9) and scan into photoshop at 300 dpi for colors and lettering. Resized as 72 dpi jpegs for posting.
THE CATES: the sci-fi fetish fantasy bdsm romantic adventure dysfunctional family theater comix serial:
NSFW!!!
My PSDs are at about 100MB each, with 50+ layers, colored. There are separate PSDs for post-processing, and compression/text.
I would not recommend shrinking things, or reducing file sizes if you are planning on printing, or improving your work. A fat hard drive might be a better idea.
You can try the following though:
- flattening some portions of the image
- decreasing layer use
- decreasing scanning DPI.
- Wow...for my first "official" page, I scanned it at 300dpi and got 3300 x 2550. And that pretty much killed my computer. I somehow got an 80mb file once all my PhotoShopping was done. And...I couldn't open the file after that. My 256mb of ram seems to have kept me from doing that.
- So, now with another 256mb of ram added, I keep my comics at 150 dpi at 1275 x 1650 under 10mb. The final comics are saved to png and shrunk 50%.
- I feel so unprofessional now...or poor.
Holy poop-shoot, people! Who has the ROOM for those kinds of files? Maybe this is because I never draw/color to make my comics for prints, but my max filesize for a layered/colored comic is 15 MB. I color at 200dpi, and resize to 100dpi for web viewing. Even then, my file sizes for jpegs are around 300kb, at the max compression I will allow.
Excuse me while my mind explodes. 100MB, Levi?! Wow!
Once I get 3.5 GB of files in the comic folder, I burn a disc. Storage isn't a problem with 2TB of drives. I'm going for more soon. They are sooooo cheap.
My PSD files are alway hitting the 1Gb size... mind you I use ridiculous amounts of layers and I do everything on a 600dpi 5060x7516 pixel canvas.
If you want to reduce your file size then you have to use lower dpi resolutions like 300 or even 150... sure they'll look like the dog's breakfast but at least you'll be able to use them. You could also bump your RAM to 2Gb, that's how I manage.
Wow, I have 2.1 gigs of PSDs, 341 of them. Many are really crappy DPI, though. The 300dpi ones are about 8-9mb. If you're having storage problems, hard drives are honestly dirt cheap for like 150gig extra room.
I'm used to having pretty large documents, since I work in print. I'll start a comic as (usually) a 2800 x 1200 pixel canvas at 600 dpi. 600 dpi is big, even for print (where resolution is normally 300 dpi), but I like keeping big files and shrinking them down.
When I publish a comic to the web, I usually reduce them down to 800 x 343 (still at 600 dpi). In Photoshop CS3, there's an option under File that says "Save for Web & Devices". The option allows me to automatically flatten the image and save it as a JPEG at 72 dpi (which is standard for the web).
Some people work in multiples of 72 so that when they save the images, they still look high-res when they print. (Ex: I'm working on a document that's 360 dpi - high enough for print, but proportional to when I shrink it down to 72 dpi for the web. A lot of pixel artists do the same thing when they print their work.)
You can compress files, but I honestly have never seen the purpose of doing so. I just back up my PSDs to CDs or my extra hard drive on a regular basis so I can move them off of my computer to create more room.
