Color comics/dealing with 2MB size limit

[areyoshi]

I'm trying this site out in advance of releasing my newest comic, but the pages are full color. Half the time I can't even upload black and white pages of my other comic to my Smack Jeeves, which has a 5MB limit, compared to Tapastic's 2MB limit (I skipped right over the IB era.) I always end up having to compress so much and saving in different formats that in the end it's not worth it. I size down by a lot already anyway.

My question, then, is how other people choose to deal with this? Is it best to slice and dice a page and upload it in pieces? Or is there something else that people do to get around this?

[yuliusefferven]

yep just cut the picture into vertical parts, even if you cut your picture in half readers won't notice anyway.

[ovisrock]

I upload panel by panel. I actually create my comic this way to suit the online format, but I think it's the best way to conserve quality even if you're drawing in the traditional page-by-page format.

[myung]

What format and compression settings are you using?

Edit: sorry, meant for the OP

[areyoshi]

I prefer .png pretty much all around. My pages start at 2100x3150 and then I scale them down to 720x1080 for SmackJeeves because it fits my template best. (This is just for the upcoming color comic. My black and white comic is 1650x2325 and scaled down to 700x986.)
I even have a lot of problems with uploading my bw comic, though, and there are times where, because I'm not sure what else to do, I just resave as a .jpeg and hope it's small enough. I use Paint Tool SAI, though, so when I save as a .jpeg I get the choice of 'original' or 'compressed'. I pick original because it still lowers the file size but has minimal quality loss.
Unfortunately that's really only effective for my black and white comic. The color one looks AWFUL when saved as .jpeg, even with minimal compression. I could split it into pieces for this site, but then I'm still at a loss about my SJ location for this comic. :\

[myung]

TBH, pngs are great if you have transparency in your image, but, JPEGS for flattened art give you the best bang for your buck. I create my pages at 3600x5400 and typically resize down to 600x888, 72 dpi using compression setting of 80%. I get roughly between 200kb to 300kb per image. The art quality at those setting seems fine on the web:

colour sample
grayscale sample
I've checked this on mobile, tablet, desktop and on Mac and PC monitors.

Would you mind linking a sample of the color difference between your largest export setting and JPEG? Also, have you tried opening your original file in another program and exporting from there? I remember a long long time ago I used to export from Painter and the colours looked like crap compared to PS save for web.

[nobebocafe]

Hi areyoshi.
The heaviest part of an image depends on its dpi, not only in its size. So an image with a 300 dpi (the best to draw but also to print) or more is going to be very big for the web, even if you scaled. And uploading an high quality image to the web can have a little unpleasant inconvenience: you are given to anyone the chance of downloading your work for printing and sell your work without your permission.
So please, better avoid to upload high quality images always.

Photoshop, gimp and other similar programs can optimize you images for the web, so they convert your 300 or + dpi in a reasonable and good looking 72 dpi image, with a better quality and they give you the control (and allow you to preview the final image result) of the size of the final image and how much you want to compress it.

There is also a rough way to reduce the size of your final image, that could work in PT Sai:
When you have your final image finished (and all in one layer), create a new document with 72 dpi. Copy-paste your final image there, scale it, and save it. Now you have a smaller size version of your work to upload .

[UzukiCheverie]

I think most of us can agree here that the easiest way to do it is to just cut your pages into parts. We have lots of beautiful comics here that would normally easily surpass 2MB on their own (Fisheye Placebo oh god lol), so it's not like Tapastic just doesn't allow for high-quality stuff. High-quality image doesn't have to equal a large file size u w u