Questions Thread - Technical Help for Art & Music

[NoobOfLore]

I'm a fan of http://tinypic.com/, myself.

Edit: Shit, apparently it does convert to jpg, never noticed that...

Yeah, I was using Tinypic.
Anyway, if I convert the file to PNG before saving, it won't have little ugly bits floating about when I upload it?
Edit: when I convert it to JPG, it fuxxes the image, but when I convert it to PNG it retains original quality. Does Tinypic even take PNG, or does it always display as JPG?

[Mme Sparklecakes XVII]

Ya it works fine with png, I was originally mistaken regarding jpeg conversion. Also gifs are fine, I believe.

[NoobOfLore]

Ya it works fine with png, I was originally mistaken regarding jpeg conversion. Also gifs are fine, I believe.

Thank you, flash file cat wearing makeup.
I'm sure this will alleviate my problems to some degree.
Edit: The file I uploaded to Tinypic was a PNG, and it shows it as being a PNG on the site, but the URL still contains JPG in it.

[Stephen]

Most image hosts convert to a JPG if the file is over a certain size. So if you use a BMP it will almost always be over that size, but a PNG will only get converted if you have a really huge image.

[NoobOfLore]

Here's the file, for reference. You can see that it's clearly labeled PNG when describing the file type, but viewing the "Raw image" always results in JPG.

Edit: huh. It converts it to JPG, but doesn't corrupt it. I suppose it's all good, then.

[NoobOfLore]

One more question:
Can you delete images off of tinypic? I want to but don't seem to be able to.

[dragonpaul99]

I'm trying to start a new MSPAFA. I have drawn the first picture already. Now for the question that probably incredibly obvious to everyone else in the and will likely earn me much ridicule.......... How do you get images from MS Paint onto the internet?
I have searched for the answer on the Forums Fora and on some search engines, but I cannot find an answer. Hopefully, one of the people who has already created a MSPAFA will be able to answer my question that is probably painfully obvious.

[Wesley Foxx]

Find an image host. I like Photobucket myself because you can organize your stuff with an account, but other people seem to prefer imageshack

Upload to the site, copy the image link, and put it in the Img tag.

[dragonpaul99]

Thanks, I'll try that.

[HotAndColdAF]

Random survey of sorts. When it comes to digital coloring, do you reuse palettes? Like, if you've got somebody wearing a blue shirt in one picture, and then another picture, somebody has blue, say, shoes, or is wearing a blue coat or something, do you use the same shade of blue with the same highlight color and shadow color as in the first picture, or select shades from scratch each time or what?

[Shaon]

I do both, to be honest. It really depends on the color, though. If I need a blonde shade, for example, I pull up a picture where I nailed the color I'm looking for and take it from that. And if I'm doing lineless pixelly stuff like this I almost always take my colors directly from my references. If I'm doing something more painterly I will make the shades from scratch, however.

[Stij]

Random survey of sorts. When it comes to digital coloring, do you reuse palettes? Like, if you've got somebody wearing a blue shirt in one picture, and then another picture, somebody has blue, say, shoes, or is wearing a blue coat or something, do you use the same shade of blue with the same highlight color and shadow color as in the first picture, or select shades from scratch each time or what?

I pretty much always use palettes.

For shading, I just use the dodge/burn tool in the GIMP. There's probably a nicer-looking way to do it, but hey, it works for what I'm doing.

[GenTrigger]

How do I speed up the framerate of a .gif?

The preview has this particular .gif looking like it's having a God damn seizure (And thus more hilarious) but I don't know how to get it to actually move at that speed when I save and upload it.

[Mme Sparklecakes XVII]

Photoshop, right?

In might be exporting properly, with simply a couple issues:

Note that the human eye can only see things so fast, so if I take a square, and rotate it 90*25 degrees per second, it will appear to stand still, so perhaps it is moving too fast?

Furthermore, browsers have a lower limit on gif frame rate. Firefox will convert <= 10 ms to 100 ms, and IE (and I think all the other browsers?) will also convert <= 50 ms to 100 ms (or rather, these are my findings).

What frame rate are you using?

[GenTrigger]

I think the problem is the browser since the preview plays it at the rate that I want but as soon as I view it on firefox it's framerate goes way down.

Well at least I know now that fiddling with settings won't fix it.

[Mme Sparklecakes XVII]

Okay, art geometry logic question:

Say I have a two dimensional rectangular object, and I want it to bend. Obviously the two bent sides stop being even length, but how do I then decide what side should be how long? Should simply the average of the two sides (the middle of the object) be the original length?

Diagram:

[Epamynondas]

Physically, it should.

[ink.]

But simply keeping in mind the average of the two sides may lead to some sort of bizarrely shaped bent parallelogram where the ends are at impossible angles. In the end I think you're best off eyeballing it and working on intuition, but for the sake of a more mathematical approach...

The way I visualize it is in terms of circles. Depending on how far bent it is, the bent rectangle could be formed on the outer edge of a circle, with the two un-bent sides angled straight towards the center of this circle. The shallower the bend, the larger the circle, and the deeper the bend, the smaller the circle.

You should also keep in mind how flexible you imagine this hypothetical rectangle may be. Each side may or may not remain consistent depending on how malleable each side is.

A sort of late response... Hope it helps / makes any sense.

[Mme Sparklecakes XVII]

I just went for the averaging method since it only needed to be kinda right when animated.

[GenTrigger]

Herp-a-derp it's Gen again.

I've been practicing with my tablet for quite a while now and yet still it's just frustrating to get the line I want. Straight lines curve horribly or go back and forth in some grotesque squiggle, Curved lines don't go in the direction I want them to, it's just a mess. Sketching in photoshop is pretty much impossible so I just end up sketching it up on a sheet of printer paper and scan the sketch in to use.

Now usually I think of this as a normal attribute of tablets that I just had to practice through but I'm starting to wonder if maybe the size of my tablet may be adding to the problem since it's an awfully small 5"x3.5" travel sized graphire tablet that I got forever ago on the cheap.

I know better than to blame my equipment for shittiness but when a careful straight line turns into a squiggle I start to feel like something's up.

[Mme Sparklecakes XVII]

Um, could you elaborate, possibly visually?

[GenTrigger]

*totally messed up with the image sizes*

I dunno... Maybe it's just my frustration and myself trying to justify getting a new tablet.

[Chrysolith]

I've been using gimp for my stuff and I'm kind of getting tired of it. It works fine and all, but I would like make some pictures with smoother coloring style, and I can't figure out a good way to do that in gimp (other than smudging/blurring/soft brush tool, none of which I like all that much). What other freeware programs exist? I have paint.net, but I don't think that will help me much either. Maybe I'm just not using gimp to it's fullest, so if anyone has any suggestions or tutorials, that'd be great too.

[HotAndColdAF]

You're not going to get anything smooth in Paint.NET without using blurring, I'll tell you that straight up. But you shouldn't have any trouble getting smooth shading in GIMP, either. Have you got a tablet? A tablet with the brush dynamics set to associate pressure with opacity should produce some pretty smooth shading. If you don't, there's always manually adjusting the opacity.

[tynic]

when a careful straight line turns into a squiggle I start to feel like something's up.

You're right, that does sound odd. It could be a driver issue. Or if the tablet is sufficiently old and your OS sufficiently new, it's possible they're not living harmoniously together. What model graphire is it?

I've been using gimp for my stuff and I'm kind of getting tired of it. It works fine and all, but I would like make some pictures with smoother coloring style, and I can't figure out a good way to do that in gimp (other than smudging/blurring/soft brush tool, none of which I like all that much).

HotandCold is right, GIMP has a fair few limitations when it comes to digital colouring, but lack of smoothness shouldn't be one of them. I assume you're using a tablet? Maybe you can post a screenshot?

What OS are you using? If you're on Windows, check out OpenCanvas - that can be rather nice. But I use GIMP with a bamboo for basically everything, and I've never found it exceptionally primitive (although obviously I'd switch straight up to Photoshop if I had the option). Corel Painter is good too, but not freeware.