Files types

[hartford]

The lightning effect in panel 4 looks a lot better as a jpeg but my archaic site code only loads PNG comics. Oh well. One more reason to overhaul it one of these days.

herp derp derp derp derp derp derp

[GenericName]

If you look closely, he called his site archaic, not the file format. If I had to wager a guess, when making the site he thought PNG was a good idea originally, because it is 99% of the time. However, the archaic thing about it is that his site will not support showing this one strip as a jpeg, or (I'm guessing) a higher quality PNG. Although, perhaps you should take this anger elsewhere? I don't really think this is something to get so worked up about.

[Trollstormur]

herp derp derp derp derp derp derp

[bicostp]

Will lossless 24 bit .PNG work with the backend? Does it just look at file extensions?

[lunchmeat]

Will lossless 24 bit .PNG work with the backend? Does it just look at file extensions?

I don't see why it shouldn't. This site runs on PHP, so it's probably only checking extensions and MIME types - so no, file format details shouldn't make a difference.

Jeph, I beg you. Please don't use JPEGs for your artwork. Your art has gotten very nice to look at and I would love to enjoy it without compression artifacts.

PNG is capable of the same color depth as JPEG images. No reason to update the site code - keep on doin' what you're doin', man. Peace.

[smartalco]

Oh please god don't switch to .jpg

Yes, I registered on these forums expressly for the purpose of telling you how horrible of an idea that is. (which should clue you in about just how horrible that idea is)

[Jimor]

Unless of course, the artist himself says that it would look better for THIS PARTICULAR COMIC.

Believe it or not, there are occasions when an inferior tool produces a superior result because it fails in a specific way that enhances the artistic effect, or does one specific thing better than an overall better tool.

[zmeiat_joro]

So why not just convert that part of the comic to jpeg and then paste it back to the png?

[Jimor]

That depends on what the issue is. If it's the artifacting you see in the comic now, it wouldn't do any good to paste a non-artifacting segment in that then gets compressed back to the artifacting version. If it's a different compression effect that happens to look cool, there's still no guarantee that it will survive the addition of the PNG compression. Somebody suggested a non-lossy PNG compression, which might work, I dunno.

Still, it's the people having kittens about converting ONE comic to .jpg as if it was going to destroy civilization as we know it that are just being ridiculous. The .jpg is the version Jeph prefers, END OF STORY.

[bicostp]

As long as he uses a fairly high quality level of JPEG compression, rather than whatever MS Paint spits out, it shouldn't be too noticeable. Even the existing settings would look better if there was some dithering to imitate the gradients better (it's kind of obvious that there is none, hence the big bands of color on the lightning glow), however that might cause stray pixels to show up on solid colors without some manual pallet tweaking.

Copying the JPEG compressed version into an 8 bit .PNG would just add the JPEG artifacts on top of the fixed-pallet dithering.

EDIT: At 85% quality (below that you start seeing compression artifacts at 100% zoom), today's comic comes in at 410k. In PNG-24 (lossless), it's 419k.

[bhtooefr]

Here's an idea...

If you've got a strip that needs the better color of a 24-bit PNG, use that, I doubt the backend would have trouble with that.

If you've got a panel that would, for whatever reason, look better with JPEG artifacts, save that panel only as a JPEG, and then copy and paste it back into a 24-bit PNG. Bam, JPEG artifacts on the panel you want them on, and none on the other panels.

[Random832]

Unless of course, the artist himself says that it would look better for THIS PARTICULAR COMIC.

Believe it or not, there are occasions when an inferior tool produces a superior result because it fails in a specific way that enhances the artistic effect, or does one specific thing better than an overall better tool.

Except it wouldn't. There is absolutely no conceivable way a JPEG can look "better than" a PNG because it is impossible to construct a JPEG that cannot be exactly duplicated as a PNG. The problem, for this comic even, is not PNG itself, it is the 8-bit palette-based aspect (using a png like a gif in other words). PNG itself is capable of so much more.

[Zombiedude]

y'all are goddamn nerds.

[Jimor]

Label accepted. I just didn't realize I was getting involved in some goddamn religious war. JPEGs must have must have attacked and pillaged some small third world nation in the past few years when I wasn't paying attention.

[lunchmeat]

Label accepted. I just didn't realize I was getting involved in some goddamn religious war. JPEGs must have must have attacked and pillaged some small third world nation in the past few years when I wasn't paying attention.

Never get involved in arguments about file types on the internet, man. Nobody wins.

[DoubleJ]

I don't get the ferocity behind it, but in general for Jeph's work JPEGs aren't a good option -- to avoid getting artifacts in the large blobs of color he'd have to lower the compression pretty far. As others have said, PNG-24 is probably the best option for the comic as a whole in this case, but the fact that doing so would basically triple his bandwidth requirements for the day was probably enough to make him not want to.

Maybe now that it's a few days old and in the archives, it might make sense to re-export?

Oh, and for people comparing JPEG to PNG-24: You have to re-export from the original to get any useful data. Otherwise you're trying to interpolate color into the gradients around Momo, and that's not necessarily going to give a realistic end result. I suppose if Jeph comes by he could give us the real numbers for this proposed experiment, but since he's already behind on his comicking duties for the day (see his Twitter) that's not too likely to happen.

Finally, for the "PNG is always better than JPEG" crowd, that depends entirely on requirements. Yes, a PNG-24 will compress any image you can come up with without losing any data. But for something like a photo your file is going to end up a great deal larger than a mostly-equivalent JPEG and in a photo you can easily get a compression level of 40% (meaning, move the slider to 60 in the "Save to Web" window in Photoshop) without introducing obvious artifacts. Since bandwidth is a concern for anybody hosting their own site, JPEG would be a far better choice in that case. So be careful with those absolutes.

[Random832]

Finally, for the "PNG is always better than JPEG" crowd

That wasn't what I said. What I said was that it's impossible for (as another poster misinterpreted Jeph's words to mean) JPEG to be visually superior than a full-color PNG.

Anyway, it'd be interesting to see just how much bigger the comics actually are as PNG-24 - the dithering that's used currently makes the sizes bigger than they otherwise would be, and even with the dithering, saving the comics as-is as PNG-24 does not triple the size*, it only makes it about 50% larger.

*I suspect this belief comes from the fact that 24 is as much three eights (and that's terrible  ) - but with large areas of solid color that doesn't necessarily translate to what the compressed size will be.

[pwhodges]

This comic was over double the size when I converted it to 24-bit and saved it as PNG (192kB to 477kB).  It lost the palette, of course.

Also, it looks to me, from what I remember, as if Jeph has rewritten the image using dithering to get the gradient to look OK without going to JPG.

[DoubleJ]

@Pwhodges: Good catch. There's still a tiny bit of banding on the window, but the dithering does make things look better.

@Random832: I'll grant that I'm a couple versions of Photoshop behind, but between losing the palette (going from 8 to 24 bits per color) and the switch from blocks of color to gradients, my experience has been a rough triple. It would be interesting to see what the difference between the newer, dithered 8-bit version and a 24-bit version would be. I'd assume the two sizes would be closer.

[pwhodges]

I found a copy of the non-dithered image.  It's 161kB, and when saved 24-bit goes to 389kB.  The ratio is pretty similar.

[Random832]

Not all PNG compressors are created equal. On Vista, I get 308kB - and, for the record, whatever Jeph's using gets it smaller than mine - I get 212kB instead of 192.

212 vs 308 is only a 45% increase, and that's not taking into account that there is some dithering present in the 8-bit version (zoom in and look for yourself)