Trouble exporting vector based art


Comment hidden
Comments5
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
UwUMoeO-OUwU's avatar
So, I've just started Devianart and I was wondering if any of you could check out my gallery. I mostly draw in an anime art style and draw characters and real people alike. Here is the link to my page: www.deviantart.com/uwumoeo-ouw… I will really appreciate if you added some of my art to favorites or started watching me too.
trezetreze's avatar
ppi is for print or scanning, it's the "depth" of your bitmap file
pyrohmstr's avatar
Definitely don't export for the web in CMYK - that's going to force a bad conversion for display. Only use CMYK for printing.

300 PPI doesn't mean too much without the corresponding size. I mean if your workspace is 1"x1" (extreme example) then you're looking at a pretty low-res image being saved.

You should save it as a 1600x800 jpeg - that's what DA wants to use and the conversion will be better if you control it.

You can read more here: www.deviantartsupport.com/en/a…

You're not the only one seeing quality and compression issues on the site recently - whether that's a bug or the new normal remains to be seen.
Comment hidden
pyrohmstr's avatar
PPI doesn't really matter for web display - only printing. In your case it's just the conversion between Illustrator's "real world" units and bitmaps. So you can set it to whatever you want. The internet won't care if it's 2"x2" at 300DPI or 4"x4" at 150DPI - both will get you a 600x600 pixel image! What's important is that you pay attention to the final resolution - you should be able to define it by pixels when you export and let the program work out whatever PPI it needs to get the resolution you want. The metadata of the image DPI setting might be used by some programs if you click "zoom full size" type of a deal. That shouldn't have an effect on DA though.

Bitmap formats like PNG or JPG are going to move the CMYK space into RGB on export. There's no way around that on the web (there might be a weird way to make a CMYK jpg but you don't want that)! Computer systems and screens want RGB. When it does that conversion it's going to change the colors (but you may not see much of a difference since the monitor you're using is only showing you RGB anyway). It's best to open the resulting bitmap in a bitmap editor (like photoshop) and adjust the curves a bit to make the colors pop since CMYK->RGB can go dull. Although Illustrator should have fairly robust settings for that conversion.

Personally I use CorelDraw instead of Illustrator but the process should all be the same. I also teach a class about this stuff :dummy: we do design for printing and design for web display.
Comment hidden
pyrohmstr's avatar
Looks a bit blurry on my end.

A lot of people have that problem though from what I've seen. It's a known issue with Eclipse. My banner is a vector exported as bitmap as well and it's blurry too. I think the problem is that they ask for 1600 wide and they scale anything you upload to that - but what if you're monitor is larger? Like mine is 1920 wide so it's going to have to upscale which will make it blurry.

I haven't played with whether uploading a 1920 image makes it crisp on my screen.

For an art site it's annoying how imprecise they are with image formats and scaling right now with Eclipse - I do think it's something they're aware of and working on.