Comic Genesis Forums

What is the best way to save a file to upload. I'm just starting and my example comic's quality really stinks from the way I had originally made it. Some people say that it's best to save a picture as a PNG. Others say Jiff or J-PEG. Which is best?

It's mainly space issues. PNGs and GIFs are lossless, while JPGs have a reduced quality. However, when saving something as a JPG, you can change the quality settings. Higher quality means taking up more space, but generally less than a PNG or GIF of the same picture.

That's not entirely correct -
GIF usually gives the smallest file size, but also has a maximum of 256 colours, so there's a loss if you work with more colours than that.
JPG has more colours, but reduced image quality due to compression.
PNG is lossless but gives big file sizes.

It really depends on what your comic looks like. If you're working in black & white or flat graytones or colours, go for GIF.

If you have a lot of intricate colour or grayscale shading or gradients, use JPG (for small file size) or PNG (if you don't want any image quality loss).

Bear in mind that lots of readers are still on dialup, so file sizes over a few hundred KB per image is generally not a good idea.

I just have to ask the obvious:
To the Original Poster, what does your work look like? It's the best way to judge what file format might suit your work better.

Another thing to consider with .gif is that it allows for transparency, which in some cases is desirable (although I usually stick with .jpg)

The best way to answer this question is simply through visuals. I donated one of my strips to some guy to make a tutorial to demonstrated what compression does to different kinds of comic art. Currently it has flat color/ink and my painty colors, and shows what happens to them on different file types and compression quality. http://www.fesworks.com/irfanview/PNG.html And it goes through PNGs, GIFs and JPGs.

I personally save JPGs at 90 quality, as it gives me the smallest image size for the best quality. If you have fancy colors, I suggest using a high quality jpg and if you have lineart or very simple colors, try gifs, which have limited colors, and if you have simple colors, see which type saves smallest for the least amount of quality loss.

I don't suggest pngs because, even though they're lossless, they're usually huge! I tend to not read comics if it takes too long to load them. JPGs can have decent quality for a smaller file, just be careful not to compress too much... under 70% and it starts getting notably grainy, I find.