h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have noticed you are a Community Artist and I know you enter entries for The Post so I need to ask you what do you do about compressing pictures for The Post and h2g2. Is there a certain limit.

Hi.

The limit is 100KB - even for the big ones in The Post!

That's why those are sometimes a bit artefact-ey - I have to compress them to be small enough.

I don't know the limit for blobs, it's just never been a problem since 200px square isn't very big anyway!

Oh good that is great news. Thankyou.
I have recently made a picture and I know they compress my image which makes it a bit crackly. I don't want my picture to be crackly because there is writing and otherwise it will be blurred. It is 400x400 pixels and do you think they will except it being 70 kb.

They don't compress the image further unless it's too big - so just save an optimised version yourself, and check the file size before you send it off.

Ah, here it is - the 'conversation with the Community Artist'. Thought it might be you, Mal

Just to clarify, we don't have 'limits' at The Post, really. We have an understanding with the Italics that we can use graphics pretty freely as long as we're considerate in their use. This includes making them as small as reasonably possible to reduce bandwidth and for users with slow connections.

Regular contributors get to know what we're after, or we might get offered something in particular and talk about filesize, width and height and quality issues with the contributor in advance. 100kb isn't a target size for graphics at all - it's always a balance between quality and size, and most graphics are actually around the 30-45kb mark. Anarchy Gordon is very much the exception.

I always recommend that new contributors send us their work uncompressed and as large as possible. Filesize vs quality is very much a sliding scale, and if it's left to us we can usually get the image around the right mark.

Right. Listen to Rich, he's the man what knows stuff

It was very good advice, Mal. Except that if we started getting 400x400 8images through, optimised and 99.99kb in size, we'd probably upset a few artists

I'd actually rather get an image totally raw at 3000x3000 and 5mb in size than one that I just have to reduce a bit. I find it's easier to keep the quality that way.

True. If I recall correctly, we went to the 600 width on AG because it was *easier* to get a smaller image of acceptable quality.

That's right But if you'd submitted it at 700 wide and I'd reduced it to 600, it would have looked dreadful.

Well, it starts out at 1400 wide, I like to work at higher resolutions. I just reduce it myself.

That's the best way to do it, I think. You keep more quality by going from 1400 to 600 than from 1400 to 700 to 600. There's a logical explanation for that which escapes me on a Sunday morning...

It's because you don't cut quite as many pixels in half, more or less. You just eliminate some entirely. I think.

Yes, something like that. You're just-under-halving them instead of halving them then halving them again.

Or - the average of a larger sample is closer to a true representation than that of a smaller sample. Boy, aren't I sounding scientific?

I reckon you made that up

I reckon I did

Oh, JHawkesby - it shouldn't be much of a problem to make the picture small enough; unless you've got a lot of gradients, you'll hardly notice a difference! It starts by filtering out colour changes that are so small they're all but invisible anyway.

That is great.
Thankyou for helping me out.

Sure. If I ever get it off the ground, I'll ask you to help out with another project, too