Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
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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:
--- Quote from: DoubleJ on 04 Aug 2009, 04:05 ---Finally, for the "PNG is always better than JPEG" crowd
--- End quote ---
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 8-) ) - 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.
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