FA+
Shop
Moar Pixels!
8 years ago
Hey, let's talk about these newfangled high resolution monitors and how they may change how we send cartoon animal smut around on the web!
My current desktop monitor (a fairly old UXGA, 1920x1200) has been developing a dark spot, which is making it less than ideal for doing digital coloring work, so I'm looking at replacements. I also sometimes use my Surface Pro 4 for drawing, which has a much higher resolution (2736 x 1824).
Also, I've recently been drawing in resolutions much higher than my desktop monitor displays, and shrinking them down significantly for release. So for pretty much any art I've posted in the past half year or so, I've got versions that are higher resolution and often not as tightly cropped sitting around on my HD.
Most newer devices (especially portable devices like phones and tablets) are getting an incredible pixel density that was unthinkable a few years ago. It's not uncommon to see phones with screens as small as 5 or 6 inches pushing a 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution. Much of the web wasn't really designed with these higher density displays in mind, and often leave images to get pretty mangled by upscaling. This includes most furry art sites, including FA and my own personal gallery. FA in particular still has a "limit" (although it's easily breakable) of 1280 pixels in either dimension for uploaded artwork, and I scale down most of my work to fit within that limit.
So this raises a couple big questions:
How should higher-resolution furry art be distributed?
Naturally, file size increases with resolution (unless of course you're also dropping compression quality). A complication here is that since images have two dimensions, an image that looks only "twice" as big actually has 4 times the pixels. One of my larger images in its natural resolution in lossless PNG form ends up in the 4 or 5 megabyte range, which is large enough that it'd probably load too slowly for a lot of people.
What's the answer here? Upload it in 1200px "display" resolution, and offer a full-rez download link? Upload different versions or maybe an alt account for high-rez releases? Wait for FA to get some sort of high-rez-friendly feature set? Or just keep hoarding all the good stuff to myself? >_>;; Are higher-rez releases actually desired at all out there?
What sort of monitor is right for high-resolution drawing?
There's a lot of weird options in monitors these days. You've got these super-wide curved monitors that try to do the job of two side-by-side monitors; You've got competing adaptive refresh rate techs like G-SYNC and FreeSync; You've got competing expanded color spectrum techs like Adobe RGB and HP DreamColor. It's all pretty confusing, and I don't think any of that would actually help with drawing. Well, the expanded color spectrum might.. but I don't think Clip Stuido would even know how to use it.
I think I'm leaning towards a fairly vanilla 4K monitor (3840 x 2160), but I'd probably also have to upgrade my graphics card to push that many pixels. Dell has a good one that's relatively affordable and has IPS (which has better color reproduction than your usual TN type display).
My current desktop monitor (a fairly old UXGA, 1920x1200) has been developing a dark spot, which is making it less than ideal for doing digital coloring work, so I'm looking at replacements. I also sometimes use my Surface Pro 4 for drawing, which has a much higher resolution (2736 x 1824).
Also, I've recently been drawing in resolutions much higher than my desktop monitor displays, and shrinking them down significantly for release. So for pretty much any art I've posted in the past half year or so, I've got versions that are higher resolution and often not as tightly cropped sitting around on my HD.
Most newer devices (especially portable devices like phones and tablets) are getting an incredible pixel density that was unthinkable a few years ago. It's not uncommon to see phones with screens as small as 5 or 6 inches pushing a 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution. Much of the web wasn't really designed with these higher density displays in mind, and often leave images to get pretty mangled by upscaling. This includes most furry art sites, including FA and my own personal gallery. FA in particular still has a "limit" (although it's easily breakable) of 1280 pixels in either dimension for uploaded artwork, and I scale down most of my work to fit within that limit.
So this raises a couple big questions:
How should higher-resolution furry art be distributed?
Naturally, file size increases with resolution (unless of course you're also dropping compression quality). A complication here is that since images have two dimensions, an image that looks only "twice" as big actually has 4 times the pixels. One of my larger images in its natural resolution in lossless PNG form ends up in the 4 or 5 megabyte range, which is large enough that it'd probably load too slowly for a lot of people.
What's the answer here? Upload it in 1200px "display" resolution, and offer a full-rez download link? Upload different versions or maybe an alt account for high-rez releases? Wait for FA to get some sort of high-rez-friendly feature set? Or just keep hoarding all the good stuff to myself? >_>;; Are higher-rez releases actually desired at all out there?
What sort of monitor is right for high-resolution drawing?
There's a lot of weird options in monitors these days. You've got these super-wide curved monitors that try to do the job of two side-by-side monitors; You've got competing adaptive refresh rate techs like G-SYNC and FreeSync; You've got competing expanded color spectrum techs like Adobe RGB and HP DreamColor. It's all pretty confusing, and I don't think any of that would actually help with drawing. Well, the expanded color spectrum might.. but I don't think Clip Stuido would even know how to use it.
I think I'm leaning towards a fairly vanilla 4K monitor (3840 x 2160), but I'd probably also have to upgrade my graphics card to push that many pixels. Dell has a good one that's relatively affordable and has IPS (which has better color reproduction than your usual TN type display).
Of course I also do all my work in an ancient copy of Photoshop 6, so I'm probably a bit much of a luddite for this conversation.
Of course anyone who does work for actual print is gonna be working in scales that make mine look really tiny.
Inkbunny or Weasyl, perhaps.
Re-uploading to break FA's limit is bad, in general. It means the pictures are a pain in the ass to view on most common monitors. Less than 3% of computer users have a monitor larger than 1920x1080, with almost 25% at 1360x768 or lower. (source:Steam Hardware Survey)
Dell makes good monitors, in general. I've been happy with the U2410 I've had for years. It also developed a dark spot after about six years, so I just got another one.
Adaptive refresh rate stuff really only matters in gaming.
Also re: pixels, did you ever update Moosebound for the release version of Starbound? :D
And yeah, most desktops still have fairly low rez displays, but a lot of phones and tablets are pushing absolutely ridiculously high resolutions on those tiny screens. I wouldn't be surprised if most of FA's traffic comes from mobile devices these days... but ofc I don't have any data to prove that.
My current monitor is an HP, and I've always had kind of a simmering hatred for it. It claimed to be an IPS monitor and was cheaper than the similar monitors at the time.. but its deep FOV colors are pretty false, it's super thick for a flatscreen, and it puts out a loooooot of heat. Time for it to go. I was also stung by one of their shitty laptops. Never buying HP hardware again, never never never.
And no, I never did figure out how to get Moosebound up to date. I put a lot of work into the ship AI, but then they changed how all the quests work and made the AI a much smaller part of the game. I also haven't even finished a playthrough of the vanilla game yet either. Without naked moose people all over the place, I just kinda lost interest. >_>;;;
Inkbunny can use the full browser width as default. Go into Settings and change 'Submission View Mode' to 'Wide'. It's a user option. If I had a really highres screen I'd have it set that way, but I don't.
(Does FA still default to the small-pic gallery? I know it used to, and I had to manually set it to load larger images, but that was a long time ago.)
You can also set 'Gallery Mode' to 'Widescreen' so you get as many columns of images in gallery views as fit on the screen.
As a sidee note it is possible for Aero/Metro to run without vsync. But as far as I know that's just a lucky bug since I've never been able to find a way to reliably force it.
Anyhoo tips on digital drawing?
http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/5/14.....tures-ces-2017
The price is a bit much, though.
I put some of the resolutions I'm looking at into Photoshop to compare 'em:
http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....esolutions.png
I kinda wish there were a desktop monitor in a resolution between 1440p and 4K, like about where the Surface is.. But I haven't found one.
Aww man, I shoulda titled this journal "New Years Resolutions". Ah well. -_-;
Eizo makes a square monitor. 1920x1920. I'd like that. But I admit my use isn't really typical.
Of course, what I REALLY want is a Sony GDM FW900 2304x1440, but my desk isn't strong enough.