bazilracoondog

About original image resolution change

Published: November 8th 2024, 10:31:37 pm

I also completely forgot to share probably the most important thing in my October summary post. When I posted "Sharing the Beauty Potion" artwork I promised to explain it in the upcoming monthly summarywhy it's all in a 5000 pixel wide resolution instead of a regular 10000 but when the time finally came to write it I told you about everything but this one last thing.

So, yes, from now on my works will be posted in a 5000 pixel wide resolution but I have to say you don't need to worry, it doesn't mean my works will lose half of their quality. In fact, 5000 pixel wide resolution is way closer to being called the original resolution while 10000 is more like a forced resolution in a certain way. I'll explain it now, for this I have to tell you about how the whole odd process of combining traditional art and digital works in my case.

First of all, obviously, I make a pencil artwork on paper, regardless of it being black graphite which is 90% of my works or colored pencils, the remaining stages are the same. I scan the artwork and the final image is about 10000 pixel wide. It can vary a tiny bit as I need to crop it sometimes. As a perfectionist and the person who's very eager to get everything as better as possible, I couldn't force myself to lower the resolution, I wanted my works to be as hq as possible, so if my scanner allows me to have my works in 10000 pixel resolution then they all should be like that. This was my decision but it came with big problems that slowed down my working process and made it very frustrating.

Maybe you already guessed it. Just like any artist who does complex artworks and especially who cares A LOT about making extra versions with extra details that require extra layers, my artwork projects usually get VERY complicated with 30+ layers. Imagine having 30 layers in 10000 resolution being open simultaneously. My PC probably hates me for being its owner. Of course I'm not making my projects 10000 pixel wide, I decided long time ago to compress it to 50% its size to make it somewhat possible to work but still my PC lags a lot with loading some stuff.

To sum it up, pencil scan is the only thing in a whole artwork that is originally bigger, everything else you see in my artworks, all the colors, backgrounds, special effects, lights, body hair, sweat, gases and so on is drawn in a 5000 pixel wide resolution from the start. What I do next when everything is done is I take the 10000pixel wide scan and stretch all the layers from the project from 50 to 100% its size, from 5000 to 10000. One. By. One. And I even timed it not so long ago, it takes 50 seconds to stretch a 5000 pixel wide layer to 10000 while I have dozens of layers and several alts where the same layers should be stretched over again and again, not to mention time it takes to save the final image. This is a VERY slow process and what I call "Converting original size images" can take 2-3 hours of my life. And for what reason? As I said, mostly everything I draw is already done in a 5000 resolution and then stretched two times bigger, it's not a real 10000 resolution. All the fine body hair which I think is the most important reason of marveling over the original version don't get better too.
The only reason is to make this
Look like this.
A damn big difference, right huh? And all this suffering is for this. But does this barely noticeable pixelation really worht it? If I show you a 5000pixel wide image without zooming and then the original 10000 one you'll never tell which one is 2 times smaller than the other if you not try to zoom it and no one needs to zoom images really that close.
But still I got stuck doing things that way for YEARS. I don't know why I didn't bother myself to think how absurd and pointless it is to waste my time and mental peace like this. But the recent beauty potion commission put an end to it. I already mentioned my PC processing everything slow and lagging but I didn't mention crashes which are way worse. These horrible crashes that make me lose my progress happen pretty often but still it was tolerable until I got to this stupid process of "converting" the original images for the comm. Usually I have the least cases of my GIMP crashing when I start this process after drawing but for some cursed reason the stupid crashes happened THREE times not allowing me to save even the first basic version of the artwork which required to stretch about 10 layers and I failed three times to get to the point of having it done. I got so pissed off by all this shit I finally got hit with realization of how stupid and pointless all this stretching is and how fake this 10000 resolution feels. And so, I realized that it's time to end it. Now there's no copy-pasting layers from project to the original scan, no hours of waiting for hundreds of layers to stretch and no crashes (well, at least much less of them), now I can just open the project, make the layers needed for a certain alt version visible and save it as jpg directly from the project. And even more, this way the full single file archive of all alts combined now fits Patreon attachment file size limitations so I don't have to painstakingly post all the files one by one, now it's just one click and done and no need to make a compressed 2000 pixel wide versions of each image for the archives. I think it's less confusing for patrons as well.

It saves A LOT of time and brain cells for me and as you can understand now it doesn't mean you will be getting worse images from now. Really needed to make you know just in case.