So you’re on fire and have produced your very first webcomic. If you’re using photoshop, or photopaint, you’ll be probably saving it first in the format associated to that program (PSD, CPT, ETC).
This is where you face a dilemma. Do you want it to look awesome, and weight 11 MB? Of course not. You have to save it for the web.
Graphic formats for the web, as discussed at lenght everywhere, are as follow:
GIF: Max: 256 colors. Good for flat colors and grayscale.
JPG: Millions of colors. Good for gradients, and generally speaking, the best format for full color.
GNP: Hate it. Still, if you find a program that can make good compressed GNPs, they generally weigh less than 256 color GIFs.
These are the most used formats. But which one to use?
If you use flat colors, use GIF or PNG, because the dithering and compression will make your graphic look like crap. BUT. If it’s a big graphic (size-speaking, not KB speaking) both GIFs are PNGs are way too heavy so you will HAVE to use JPG, probably. The thing with JPG is that you can move the slider for more compression so you’ll be able to figure out a reasonable ugliness/KB ratio.
This is an example of a grayscale pic saved in different formats. Yes, it’s a greyscale, NOT black and white. The antialiasing used to soften the jaggy scales on the black lines have to be gray. See the next post for a tip on that.
A “Doomies” strip, saved in jpg.
This file is 103KB. Now, the previous strip:
That file is 41K, because it’s a GIF. Even if both comics are the same size.
Check out how HIDEOUS the jpg version of the first comic looks, IF you compress it to make it around 41K.
The only way that thing could be uglier would be if it had warts on it. Compress it even more, and the compression artifacts will make the dialogue unreadable.
So gif is the way to go here, in this case. But beware! This file is grayscale, but it’s a 8 “color” file. That means it has 8 colors, all of them grays, black and white. If you do save it as a true grayscale, with whoppin’ unnecesary 256 colors, the file size will climb to 80K.
However.
Theory is one thing, but in practice I have noticed that the bigger (dimension-wise) the file, the less practical gifs become. If your gif is too huge, try saving it as jpg instead, and see if it comes to a more reasonable KB weight.
This article might seem unnecesary in this era of broad bandwidth and fast connections. However, it’s not, IMHO. Take in account a lot of people live their web lives now on the move: smaller files mean faster when you’re talking about devices that have little memory, or shared Wi-Fi hot spots.
Remember, no matter what kind of format you use for web presentation, ALWAYS keep a pristine copy of your work, with no compression of any kind. Save it in a different folder or you’ll inevitably overwrite it. If print time comes around, you’ll find yourself in a boring hell of cleaning up and touching up your comics. EW!