Just a bit longer…and more Merlin art!
Oct23
Here’s more Merlin art, this time of Werewolf Greg! Pretty!
Sorry for the delays, like I said before, the next page I need to completely redraw because none of it was finished, not even the sketches. I’m also doing two other things at the same time and fighting a bout of exhaustion/or whatever it is. I’ve already got big plans for what happens once we start hitting New Material and I’ve also got a couple more backstory filler stuff to put on the Extras page; for example, Mori discussing the nature of Magic in this setting!
Speedball, if you get a chance, please try out compressing your comics as PNG files instead of JPEG.
JPEG works best on photographs of soft things (such as people). With line drawings, JPEG can have visual artifacts. On the current comic page (ch-12-page-36), in the lower left panel, Ernie has rippling “ghost” lines around the thick black line on her side; that is an example of a JPEG artifact.
PNG is lossless, so it never introduces visual artifacts. With a photo of a person, a PNG will be a much larger file than a JPEG; but for line art comics with solid color fills, PNG should compress very well (possibly even making a smaller file than JPEG).
I would especially like to see your navigation bar saved in some lossless format (either PNG or GIF) because the artifacts are distracting and the navigation bar is always showing on your site!
I gather you are super busy right now, but maybe sometime you can look into this. If the PNG images are about the same size, it would still be a win because your comics will look better. If the PNG images are actually smaller, it’s win/win.
Thanks for making a comic I want to read.
Hmm. Now that I went ahead and posted that, I’m starting to wonder if at least part of the visual artifacts I am seeing are caused by the computer I am using (the video drivers or a monitor issue). If you don’t see the wavy lines I described, then the problem might be on my end! If so, sorry to have bothered you. I need to check out your comic on another computer.
Still, it might be worth trying PNG for your comic. If the PNG images are smaller, maybe your bandwidth costs might go down?
THERE! Now the latest page is a PNG. Looks identical to me, but it is smaller file-wise. Ugh. Do I REALLY want to go back and reupload the first 300 comics after converting them to PNGs? ARRRGGH. MUST GIVE READERS NEW CONTENT.
I’d say don’t bother re-encoding the ones you already uploaded — just save any new files as PNGs (or GIFs). Unless the file is a tiny fraction of the size, it’s probably not worth the additional effort (unless you’re super bored one weekend or something).
I’ll see what I can do about that, though converting everything might just add another step to the whole process.
If you are already so busy you are going crazy, maybe now isn’t a good time to re-convert the old files. Unless someone can batch-automate the process for you?
But maybe start saving new files in PNG.
Whoa, the latest page went from 403 KB to 126 KB! That’s almost a 70% reduction in size! So, lossless image, comic loads faster for your readers, less bandwidth bill for you; win/win/win.
P.S. And I think this computer needs to get a new graphics card! :-/ The PNG still shows the artifacts that were bugging me.
If the image was originally scanned or originally saved as a JPG, the artifacts are already there – re-encoding won’t change that. The true artifact acid test is when a comic is done in PNGs from the start.
That’s another reason why I’d say it’s not really necessary to go back and change the archive images.
Speedball, I didn’t mention it, because I assumed you knew it. Packbat is correct though… it’s not ideal to save an image as JPEG and then save it as PNG later. I assume that you are coloring your comics as images in Photoshop or whatever, so you should have uncompressed originals as the save files from the editing program. But if all you have is the compressed JPEG images, there is less benefit from re-saving as PNG. (If the image files get smaller, though, there is still some benefit.)
I didn’t save the JPEG as a PNG! I always save the original Photoshop file.