What do you think of this experimental coloring style?

Welp, that just about wraps it up for laser tag, so now we return to normal NIU operations.

I started this coloring style because I was running short on time. There's no highlighting or shading like I normally have, but I think it looks fairly nice. Limited pallettes probably won't cut it for our normal cast (who would Lame be without his red Flash shirt? or Jim without his green hat?), but they have a nice stylistic ring to them.

On a sadder note, Amanda Hardy of What I Learned Today has thrown in the crayons and is quitting the webcomicing gig. It's a shame, because I really enjoyed her strip, but I am sure she has good reasons and it's for the best. After all, just like most webcomic folks, she isn't getting paid... we should be happy with (and enjoy!) what we got. So if you haven't read What I Learned Today, spend an hour or two and read through the archives... it's good stuff!

Don't read on any further if you don't want to hear about image compression theory. Seriously. Funny mode off, but if you're going to be on the internet, it's good to know this sort of thing.

Today's strip is mostly flat colors. The only use of soft shading is the flames on the birthday cake and the highlights on the boxes (intended to show that they were still shrink-wrapped, but I don't think that came through). This makes JPEG a poor choice for this strip.

"But it looks fine to me!"

Yeah, I know. That's cause I pushed down the compression levels, making the strip 60% larger than my target size of 100 kilobytes. JPEGs are best suited to images with lots of color changes -- photographs, for example. Images with stark color changes confuse the compression algorithm and make it look like there is sand scattered over the image.

In this case, GIF or PNG is a better choice for image compression. Here is a GIF version of the strip. Notice the crisp colors, and the sharpness between colored areas and the black lines.

That GIF is 101KB. Here's a JPEG at the same filesize.

WHOA!!! HOLY CRAP!!! Hopefully you can start to see the image breaking down and generally looking crappy. (If you have a really old and/or fuzzy monitor, though, it probably still looks decent. That's cause NOTHING is sharp, to you.) That multicolored sand around the "Happy Birthday" words and the blurry halo around the fork are caused by data lost in the JPEGing of this image.

To summarize -- if you have line art or art with lots of bold solid colors, use GIF. Or PNG. If you have a photo or artwork with lots of slow color variation, use JPEG. You will get better results, and usually have smaller files.

If you read this far, I'm proud of you. Lame should be on schedule for a Monday update. That is all...

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