Hey all,
I see a lot of great fanart and pics being shared on this site. Need any tips? Read on. Have any questions? Lemme know.
Tip #1: Jpegs. Jpeg is the most commonly-seen image format because it compresses images way down — good for quick emailing and web page loading. It is a lossy compression method, however. In other words, each time you save an image as a jpeg (epecially with a 'low' quality setting), you lose some of the image data permanently, and it's next to impossible to repair. Images repeatedly saved as jpeg have significant quality loss. (See examples.)
What to do? Any image you get off the web will probably be a jpeg. If you will be working with it in any way before forwarding it, (compositing, resizing, etc.) save as a TIF. Keep saving it as a TIF as you work, until you're ready to post it to the web or email it. Then save it as a jpeg once, paying attention to the quality settings in your dialogue box. Saving it "down" even to 95% can shrink the file size all you may need.