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Post by June Scarlet on Nov 6, 2022 9:57:33 GMT -5
The filesize limit (and bane of every Neopian Times comic artist) is 200 kilobytes. How do you fit an entire comic into this limit?
There's many tips and tricks, and I thought it would be nice to gather them all into one place on the forum.
I was asked personally on how I managed to make my Ink comic series be so long, with many panels in each part. But I figure this can be a place where anyone can post what they do. Thought about posting this in the Discussion channel, but I realized it's really specific to the Times, and it would be best suited for here.
There's a lot that goes into compressing my comics, so I'll be making several posts on the subject myself. Free feel to join in with your own tips, though!
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Post by June Scarlet on Nov 6, 2022 10:28:27 GMT -5
The first thing I recommend is planning ahead. You know you're limited on space in the Times, so keep that in mind when writing your script. Keep your writing tight, and use as few panels as possible.
When writing Ink or even Dinner with the Scarlets, I usually draw a bunch of thumbnails panels, more than will fit. Then I go back and figure out what can be combined, what doesn't need to be shown, and generally edit it down to as few panels as I can manage.
Dinner with the Scarlets is generally four panels at 470px wide when drawn traditionally. I can usually fit in an extra couple panels when doing digital art. When using color, traditional art is harder to compress than digital art, I think because it's harder to keep the color blocks super-consistent traditionally. Color variation makes files bigger.
I don't shade much to begin with, but even if I were into shading, I would avoid it for Neopia Times comics. Shading adds a lot more color variation. Solid blocks of color are easier to compress, and therefore are preferred for the Times.
Of course, you can shade, or draw traditionally, just keep in mind that you'll be able to fit less panels into the comic that way.
Meanwhile, I've been able to have an Ink comic be up to 18 panels long. Ink is in black and white, which cuts down color variation to the extreme. It's also 400 pixels wide, which is less than the maximum of 470 pixels. Those pixels that would be to the side are now helping make the comic longer.
Color variation applies to even black and white comics. I've noticed that panels with a lot of scribbly lines add more bytes than a panel with solid blocks of black or white.
That's some of the basics covered. In my next post I'll be getting into the nitty-gritty of it.
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Post by June Scarlet on Nov 6, 2022 11:22:59 GMT -5
Now I'll be explaining how to get your traditional art scanned and cleaned up for digital presentation and compression. There's still things that apply to digital artists though, and I'll point them out as well. I'll be focusing on black and white comics as well for this portion, though much of it applies to traditional linework colored digitally. There's a set of textbooks out there specifically for making comics, and much of this information from and adapted from there. The first is Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, and the second is Mastering Comics. I recommend this set of book in general, very excellent, however, their website happens to also have a copy of the section for scanning and cleaning up traditionally drawn comics. You've planned and edited your comic. You've sketched the panels. You've inked them, possibly just the linework, or possibly filled in the black portions all the way as well. You are ready to scan! How? I always refer back to my book on that, or this part of the website: dw-wp.com/resources/cartooning-quickguides/quickguides-scanning/I draw my Ink panels on 8.5x11 inch paper, so it fits into the scanner quite neatly. I don't have to worry about merging two different scans of the same page. But there's still important stuff in there for me. Scan your comic with these settings: -Color/Color mode: Grayscale -Resolution: 600dpi -Scale: 100% -File Format: TIFF -Image Compression type: LZW The Color is in grayscale because we'll be moving this into black and white soon enough, we don't need color. Resolution should be at least 600dpi. You should save the file in TIFF, even though we won't be submitting it in that format. TIFF creates high-quality image files that are much easier to work with and compress. Even if you're working in color, jpg and gif files look better if originally saved at full resolution in the TIFF format. I don't know about the LZW compression thing, but the guide recommends it, and it's worked for me, so I do it. The guide scans in Photoshop, however I always used Windows Photo Gallery's scan dialogue on my old scanner/computer combo. I... haven't figured out how to scan properly with my new scanner/computer combo. My new printer only gives me the option to scan in jpg or pdf, and the computer system dialogue will let me scan a TIFF, but only as high as 300dpi. It's frustrating, and probably part of the reason I've been doing mostly digital comics now. This post is getting pretty long, so I'll go ahead and break clean-up into its own post.
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Post by June Scarlet on Nov 6, 2022 11:59:45 GMT -5
You have a 600dpi grayscale TIFF image at this point. Now it's time to refer back to Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, or its website equivalent: dw-wp.com/resources/cartooning-quickguides/quickguides-cleanup/The guide does this in Photoshop, but I use GIMP, which is a powerful and free open-source image manipulation software. I use Clip Studio Paint for drawing, but GIMP for technical stuff like this. The first thing you do is change the dpi (dots per inch) from 600dpi to 1200dpi. A small but very important step. Next you'll want to use Threshold. This converts a grayscale image into two colors: black and white. Your current image may look black and white to the human eye, but to the computer it's filled with lots of that pesky color variation still, the the form of grays. Threshold converts every gray pixel into black or white. You can decide what the "threshold" it chooses based on a slider. I experiment with each scan. Some need to go darker, some lighter. Enough that the pencil and other unwanted marks don't show, but that the lineart is strong. You can preview and adjust the slider as needed. It won't be 100% perfect, but it's a great place to start. If you've drawn digital lineart, I imagine you'll want to do something similar if you're looking to compress to the extreme. You may have been using black for the lineart, but unless you use a tool with a hard edge such as done with pixel art, you have anti-aliasing. The guide explains anti-aliasing very neatly, but basically you still have that gray variation at the edge of the line. If you zoom way in, you'll see it. Threshold gets rid of this grayness and replaces it with stair-step pixels. At 1200dpi, however, you can't see it with human eyes, not even when printed out. What you do see, however, is very crisp lineart. You've got a completely black and white image. There's probably some clean-up that needs to happen still. Little flecks of black that need to be erased. White areas you planned to be filled with black. Lettering that isn't quite clear enough. Now is the time to fix that, though remember not to use anti-aliasing; you want that pixel stair-step to keep your art completely black and white. Continue to do this until your linework is clean to your satisfaction. The guide also talks about converting the art to bitmap once you're completely done, but I don't do that, as I'm publishing it digitally. If you're coloring digitally, you can still follow these steps to get that crisp black linework, then export it and fill in with color as you like. You've got your art all cleaned up and pretty! But it's a huge file that's way over the 470px width limit, not to mention that pesky 200kb. In the next section, I'll be talking about how I compress the comic.
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Post by June Scarlet on Nov 6, 2022 13:55:12 GMT -5
All that planning and work, and you still have a comic that's too big! Now it's finally time to compress. There's a lot of ways to compress, so I'm going to be focusing on what I do. Please chime in with your own methods! At this point, I have a 1200dpi black and white comic. That's about 2400 pixels wide for a comic that will end up at 400px. I export it from GIMP as a TIFF file. Then I pull that TIFF file into Microsoft Paint. I resize it to a 400px PNG so I have a copy for my files. And then I save that as a GIF. Yes, I still use MS Paint as my compression tool for many things. I find it compresses well for basic things like this. For color comics, I export as a JPG, and it usually works out well. For black and white comics like Ink, I do GIF format. MS Paint does NOT work with compressing color GIF, though. I've tried. Even using of the 256 websafe colors that GIF will accept, it will create these little dots throughout solid color which look terrible and also eat up file space. For color GIF, I have to resize and export from GIMP directly. GIMP's compression isn't as elegant, though, much choppier. If a color comic compressed using MS Paint into a jpg is still too big, I take that 470px PNG and put it into GIMP. I export it as a JPG. When you do that, it has a dialogue box that pops up that lets you play around with image quality. I lower the quality and finish exporting it. I look at the comic file I just created and re-export as needed. If it's still too big, I lower the quality. If it's under 200kb, I up the quality until it's it's as high as it can get without going over. If you're pretty close to getting under 200kb, another thing you can do is make the comic slightly narrower. If you intended to make it 470px wide, try it at 460px. It's a small difference, but it's been enough to get some of my comics under 200kb. When working digitally, you can save yourself a lot of headache by drawing directly at scale, making your canvas exactly at 470px or however wide you plan to make your comic. But Twillie can talk more about that. I think that's about everything on my side, though I'll probably think of more as others contribute. So what do you do to make your comics under 200kb?
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Post by Huntress on Nov 6, 2022 16:00:33 GMT -5
Every time people talk about digital art and invariably bring up Photoshop and GIMP, I turn into the shifty-eyed monkey puppet meme because the ancient unholy abomination that I use for all of my art to this day is called Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8. I've tried to upgrade to something less hipster many a time (photoshop can't be that hard to use, right?) and always back out again because none of the other programs have had the option of zooming in and out by scrolling with the mouse wheel, which is an absolutely critical part of my drawing process. Even newer versions of Paintshop didn't have that any more. It's now etched into my muscle memory and I'm pretty sure I have that program backed up on some forgotten flash drive and a few different computers for good measure because for me, no PSP = no art. PSP is cool in that once I get my comic all done, I can click Save As - Options - Run Optimizer and then move a slider to adjust compression value and it'll show a preview of how big the filesize will be and what it looks like as an image. So my comicmaking process looks roughly like this: - draw and ink on what has since been upgraded to standard ol' printer paper. This is a big upgrade because the vast majority of Shad and Saura, which I have fully preserved in a folder, were drawn on the backs of whatever scrap paper I had lying around, meaning the folder has also immortalized pages of my highschool chemistry report on organic acids. Should've had a bit of forethought there. I've been meaning to get me some actual good drawing paper but that means a stint to town with a toddler in tow and, well. My go-to (read: calcified) system is draw a 10 cm vertical line to mark the width of the comic, chip away at panels until I run out of vertical space, then frankenstein the rest of them on free space on other pages and piece it all together after scanning. So one A4 sheet fits two comics, or rather the beginning of two comics, or the beginning of one and then some frankenstein patches. - once I have it all inked, it goes in the scanner at 400 dpi and usually in black and white, unless I forget and scan it in color instead, in which case I need to click some extra buttons to clean it up. No real difference in outcome. - clean up lineart, color and whatnot. The longest process but also the most personal-preferency so I doubt the details would help anyone. I've struck a sort of balance of effort vs outcome with my comics over the years in that I've started doing fancier effects (water ripples, transparency, gloss, etc) while still keeping my standards robust enough that a comic doesn't take me too much nitpicking over quality, otherwise I just wouldn't be able to complete one within any reasonable period of time. I remember that they used to take me about six hours start to finish when I had an entire day of leisure to devote to them (ha), now a comic gets stretched over two or three weekends in bits and pieces when I actually take it seriously. - there's probably a better method to do this (see: calcified) but the way I do text bubbles is completing the coloring at whatever size the scanner spat out at me (usually somewhere in the width of 1500 pixels, because the 10 cm original really doesn't vary much), then resizing the canvas to whatever size gets me the requisite 470 pixel width. Usually it's around 30%, give or take. Then I add the text and bubbles to this new resized canvas, which is going to be the actual published size in the NT. 470 px is barely wider than the 10 cm original so drawing it in nearly the same size ensures that I don't go too overboard with details, which I'm otherwise somewhat prone to. BONUS DUMB: as a rule, I don't save this resized version until all of the comic's text is done. If anything goes wrong, I have to reopen the color file without text and start the resizing all over again. Don't ask me why. I like to live dangerously. BONUS DUMB 2: I realize that one should plan out the placement of text bubbles ahead of time (and, uh, probably the text itself as well), but however else you might feel about my screaming-monkeys-flail-at-a-typewriter method of comicking, it absolutely is consistent. I finish the coloring, resize it and then start writing the lines, and pretty much see along the way where I can fit speech bubbles. I've covered up many a pretty detail this way and then gritted teeth about it, but do I learn from it? lolnope. - SO. Comic achieved. This is where Run Optimizer comes to my rescue and the size management process is as simple as saving it at the closest point below 200 KB. Does it make for JPEG noise? Yep. Do I mind? Nope, as long as the text is legible, and so far it has been. My longest comic to date is this lovely thing born from this very forum at around 2300 pixels and it can be read a-okay, and that's as demanding as I am with them. tldr: I am very gud arteest.
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Post by Killix on Nov 6, 2022 19:43:00 GMT -5
Every time people talk about digital art and invariably bring up Photoshop and GIMP, I turn into the shifty-eyed monkey puppet meme because the ancient unholy abomination that I use for all of my art to this day is called Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8. I've tried to upgrade to something less hipster many a time (photoshop can't be that hard to use, right?) and always back out again because none of the other programs have had the option of zooming in and out by scrolling with the mouse wheel, which is an absolutely critical part of my drawing process. Even newer versions of Paintshop didn't have that any more. It's now etched into my muscle memory and I'm pretty sure I have that program backed up on some forgotten flash drive and a few different computers for good measure because for me, no PSP = no art. Noice. First time in a long time I've ever seen anyone mention using Paint Shop Pro. I used it, myself! Mine was Paint Shop Pro 7 with Animation Shop. Yeah, used being past participle here... The ancient install disc has gone missing sooo I sadly can't install it on this newer computer of mine. 8I A real shame because it's a pretty solid program, and it could do some things that my copy of Adobe Photoshop 6 can't do.
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Post by Kengplant on Nov 18, 2022 15:40:46 GMT -5
I'm still working out my tricks but so far:
- I just tried using "sharpen" on my line art and it worked really well. It looks rough at first but by the time it gets scaled down and compressed, the jagged lines all get smoothed out. I prefer to start my work 3-4x final size at 300+ DPI. When touching up my sharpened lines I turn anti-aliasing off on my brush. "Sharpen" and "no anti-aliasing" reduces all the greys and transparent pixels the brushes add to smooth out the lines
- Limiting colours. Have I used a dark grey? That's my dark grey for all dark greys now. Red? There's only one red. It's ok. Just chant "colour is relative" as I colour drop previously used colours. Sometimes extra shades will be needed to separate elements but it's surprising how much the exact same teal blue will look different when place next to a different secondary colour. This can also create a unified look because the same colour palettes get repeated.
- Strong establishing Background, then leave subsequent backgrounds blank or simplified. Unless there's new information, this saves me time, KBs, and leave more space for text
- I use Krita when resizing. I save a high quality flat img first (i was using PNG but just tried TIFF and it worked well. I'd have to compare both processes on the same file to get more info). I crop out as much as I can, as close as I can to the edges of my panels, then export as JPG. I always re-export from the TIFF/PNG I have to try a few times usually, adjusting the "percentage" quality on my compression. Re-compressing from the same jpg deteriorates the img faster. When re-scaling and compressing, work from the higher quality img. 85% usually still looks pretty good if 90% is still too big. Getting below 85 it can start to degrade too much.
- I don't know if it makes a huge impact, but when scaling down to size, I also set DPI at 72. high DPI is mainly for printing and won't make a huge difference on a small digital img. This is partly why I start big. DPI scales down best when the img scale itself also goes down.
- Last resort I start scaling down below the 470px limit. This often doesnt need to be much. And previous cropping might mean I actually start below 470px.
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