comic format?

D

do50

Big Geek
Does anyone have any suggestions for working with a comic strip format?
The jpg cells all all made, and inserted into a Word doc. (The whole thing has to fit on one 8.5x11 page.)
The regular page text is in place.

I'm having a really hard time managing callouts / text boxes. This is so awkward ....I've got to be missing something obvious! :confused:

If you know, PLEASE clue me in. Thanks!
 
dont use something like word for images, it will screw up big time.

assuming you have photoshop, use that, just create a document the necessary size and insert the image on to a layer, then lock it. if you'd likei can do that for you.
 
Thanks, Waffle!! That's what I needed to know!
I've been going at this backwards. I'll be back if I hit a snag.
 
The comic goes on a textbook page (with instructions etc). Thanks to Waffle's wise words, I got it done and pasted into a word doc - the total is under 900 kb. Is there a good way to make it a smaller file? The resolution is 300.... cutting it back to even 250 messes up the text. The background is transparent (that helped a little). How can I do this better? (General critique is also welcome.)

 
missed out an S :P on "it's" i believe.

hehe

you could, in photoshop, use the "Save for Web" option, assuming you have this facility in the version you have.

you've saved it as a *png, which isnt a very web friendly format, as some browsers cant display it properly.

I would suggest saving it, in photshop. as a jpeg, and reduce the quality to about 8 or 9.

If you want, send it to me, and I'll see if I can optimise it a little.
 
Waffle said:
missed out an S :P on "it's" i believe.

hehe

you could, in photoshop, use the "Save for Web" option, assuming you have this facility in the version you have.

you've saved it as a *png, which isnt a very web friendly format, as some browsers cant display it properly.

I would suggest saving it, in photshop. as a jpeg, and reduce the quality to about 8 or 9.

If you want, send it to me, and I'll see if I can optimise it a little.
Click to expand...

:eek: an S !!! :x:

GOOD EYE (and I do appreciate it)
Thanks, Waffle. As soon as I track down the lost S, I'll jpg it and send it on. Takes forever to upload. There's no rush. I'd really like to know how to do this with more grace and less file size.
 
hehe I've reduced the size about 3x the original.

I've saved it as a GIF and limited the colour pallete to only 4 colours, as opposed to 256.

You only need 4 colours, as its greyscale, so black, white, and two shades of grey. No quality drop, and file has gone from 568kb to 203.

Haven't finished yet :).


I've now got the GIF version down to 180kb, and I'm going to try a jpeg and see if thats any better.

Nope. Jpeg is still over 300, even with compression.

GIF it is.

Enjoy.


Original -

Optimised -

And I'll eat my hat (metaphorically speaking), if you can spot any part thats not quality. The only difference is the blackness in the GIF version. and thats because I limited the colours to only one black.

Good thing to remember for general image editing:

Save it as a GIF when the colours are very limited, or is very simple, such as website graphics.

Save it as a JPEG for a photo, or when quality matters.

As the piece was only a few colours, the GIF is the best format because it just duplicates the pixels where it can, reducing the file size. So i've read anyway.
 
Waffle, you never cease to amaze! :good:
So what did you do to accomplish this?
(hopefully you're writing up a tut on optimizing... or maybe a checklist of sorts? )

Any insights on why the text gets weird when I move it?

Can't open your image right now, so I'll go play with saving the image off line in different formats. I'll undoubtedly have more questions as I try to duplicate what you've done. Thanks!

Well, that was yesterday... had connection problems - it didn't post. (really wish the crows would find something better to do than jumping around on my phone line)

Spent some time trying to repeat what you've done... but not even getting close to your size change.

Beyond going to gray scale - I didn't see how to get it down to just four colors. Is this part of "save for web"? (Haven't tried that yet.)

Given the end result I wanted, [the quality and file size you achieved] how would you go about putting it [or the next one] together from scratch?
 
have you got the image ok?
i can email it if you havent got it.

it may not be possible in ps elements.

as for the text, thats expected. a tremendous amount of processing power is needed using photoshop, believe it or not, and actions like moving text really strain it and the monitor - the monitor is refreshing around 75 times a second, and your moving something very tiny around, so it will distort.

you dont need to use a 300 reso. when you create a large document, it assigns a 300 reso by default. simply change it to 200 or even 100 to reduce the file size greatly.
 
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