Scans Daily Resource Exchange

[schmevil.insanejournal.com]

Thanks to icon_uk 's One Perfect Moment theme, SD 2.0 has seen its busiest week yet, with +200 posts, and 51 posts on Tuesday alone! (So far. There's still time to get your OPM posts in - post people, post!) Round of applause for icon_uk , everybody.

One Perfect Moment brought a bunch of new (and nearly new) posters out of the woodwork, so I thought now would be a good time to do a resource exchange. Veteran SDers! Here's your chance to share all your hard-earned scanning, posting and general Scans Daily knowledge. *points to soapbox* Climb up.

• What image hosts do you recommend?
  
• Which ones should we stay away from?
  
• What hosts are good for adult content?
  
• Any scanning tips for noobs?
  
• Any image editing tips for noobs?
  
• What are some good places to find public domain comic scans?
• What are some good places to find comics on the cheap?
• What does every noob need to know about Scans Daily?

And, you know, whatever other burning questions SD can come up with.

Comments

Picture format advice:

[foxhack.insanejournal.com]

BMP:
Do not use these. These are uncompressed pictures and hella bloated. They'll take a long time to upload, and download.

PNGs:
PNGs are great if you want to archive photos or show game screenshots. The compression is great for archiving. But when it comes to posting stuff, the filesizes will just be TOO BLOATED for most people to download properly. A well-compressed JPG image can be much smaller than a comparable PNG image.

On the other hand, greyscale PNGs are pretty decent in size and compression, if saved properly (this depends on the program used). Stuff scanned from manga volumes or black and white books can be saved like this for maximum quality, but the file size will still be pretty high.

JPG:
The higher the quality, the larger the file. The lower the quality, the lower the file, but you'll see more artifacts in the image. Most of the scans I post here are set to 75% quality (or less). Image editing software usually has a preview feature which lets you adjust the quality and see the final product before saving the image.

They're pretty good for black and white / grayscale images too.

GIF:
These can only have 256 colors, so they're not really very good for posting scans. Avoid using this.

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When it comes to webcomics, the authors usually upload heavily optimized pictures so you can just save them and repost them without issue most of the time.

Re: Picture format advice:

[yaspis.insanejournal.com]

GIFs, however, are nicely lightweight for B&W work and won't bork the quality too much. :)