June 15, 2009

[Norutaru] Imagination Weather

I don't think I've ever seen a manga where so much action is going on,
when there actually isn't anything going on at all... or is it?

This is from Tenma 2009-06, and was scanned by Anonymous Scanner, who were kind enough to send me these humongous, cleaned, 1408x2000 PNG scans. I just get the feeling that PNG's should mean better quality, but I can't really see any difference.
Either way, there's both a JPEG and a PNG version of this (23,7 / 44,9 MB),
if you think bigger is better, go ahead and grab the PNG version.

RS | MF | (JPEG)
RS | MF | (PNG)

[caption id="attachment_2058" align="alignnone" width="418" caption="I can't choose!"]Tenma-2009-06-162fro[/caption]

21 comments:

  1. Not totally sure on this but I believe that png's can be compressed and then uncompressed without any loss of quality however if you do it with a jpg it loses quality each time (or if you edit it then save it it will lose quality that way too). Do it enough and it will look jagged and blurry.

    I'm probably wrong about that since I've never really read up on it aside from what I've heard from others, feel free to correct me.

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  2. I think you're correct J, PNG = lossless. Same thing when you're comparing FLAC to MP3...

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  3. ppl usually go with PNG-8 instead of normal PNG...
    you can get smaller file size without losing too much quality with that. ;)

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  4. Page 164 is corrupted on the JPEG

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  5. i DL-ed the JPEG file via RS, nothing wrong...
    dunno about MF...

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  6. yes the mediafire one is corrupt will try RS now

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  7. The PNG was primarily so you wouldn't be compounding whatever compression you save your JPEGs at on top of mine, as well as in case you save multiple times during editing. :)

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  8. Just switching them to png-8 with no extra compression (pngcrush/out) cuts it down to 20.6mb

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  9. Didn't mean to double post but anyways, png-8 with 16 colors, pngcrushed is down to 19.9.

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  10. Hi guys. Just to clarify: PNG is to JPG what FLAC is to MP3, or PNG to BMP what FLAC is to WAV. Couldn't thing of a better analogy.

    In other words, if you zoom in on a JPG image a lot, you'll notice the compression artifacts. You won't get that in PNG.

    Also, PNG is superior to GIF. No arguments. MNG and APNG debunk the purpose for animated GIFs on the internet.

    YQII, I'd favour the idea of working with PNGs rather than JPGs. It's cleaner and much nicer to have. Also, if the filesize is too big you can run PNGOUT on the PNG images to compress them even further with no loss in quality.

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  11. Just to add something more about PNG compression:

    JPG is compressed visually while PNG is compressed binarily or by ASCII. In other words, JPG compress the image by having a look at it while PNG compresses the image by compacting its code.

    I ran a quick test with PNGOUT (which is the best PNG compressing tool with AdvPNG close behind) and here's the filesize stats for all the images in the doujinshi:
    Normal archive as supplied by YQII: 45,959 KBs
    Archive supplied by YQII compressed with PNGOUT: 44,264 KBs
    Normal archive reduced to 4-bits per pixel, PNG-4 (16 colours)(using Irfanview and Floyd-Steinberg dithering): 17,373 KBs
    Normal archive reduced to 4-bits per pixel, PNG-4 (16 colours)(using Irfanview and Floyd-Steinberg dithering) and compressed with PNGOUT: 16,892 KBs

    I obviously kept the last one and scrapped the rest :P

    Note that by reducing the bit depth from 8 (256 colours) to 4 (16 colours) there is hardly ANY difference in quality and the difference in file size is substantial.

    Also, for those that still use PNGCRUSH, I'd suggest you move on to OptiPNG which is its obvious successor.

    YQII, it would be really nice if you released your work in PNGs.

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  12. Dumb, I forgot to make my final point:
    16.9 MBs in lossless PNG turned out smaller than 23,7 MBs of lossy JPG.

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  13. Um, I just wanted to take a moment to interrupt the PNG vs JPG discussion, if that's ok?

    I really liked this manga. The weird plot with the girl being able to enter the guy's fantasy, and the guy being able to modify the fantasy on the fly was quite entertaining. Thanks for sharing this.

    So, you can go back to PNG vs JPG discussion now.

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  14. Thank you YQII for your great work and to Anonymous Scanner for a brilliant scan. What a marvelous issue of Tenma. The whole issue could be easily done.

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  15. @ zhelkus : did you try this with full color page ?

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  16. Photoshop only had the alternative "save to PNG" without any configurations I could find. I don't know much about compressing, but if there is some sure-win way to convert the files to decent sized PNG's, like saving to PNG in Photoshop and running them through some program with configurations I don't have to change between different files, I could do that.
    Of course, the majority of the files I use (so far all but this) are JPEG's and not PNG's, but I suppose there could be some quality loss after editing them and saving them as JPEG again.

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  17. In Photoshop, use the "Save to Web and Devices" option instead of "Save as..." and you'll be able to tweak with some settings in PNG-8 (such as the amount of colors to use, dither, resizing, and the like). You can cut size by reducing the amount of colors used to numbers like 32 or even 16 (black and white manga doesn't really need to use many shades really, but don't use so little for color images. Might just wanna stick with jpg for color images since it's easier.)
    Resaving jpg files as another jpg causes more compression artifacts to appear, and if done enough times it looks really terrible. But this is porn so a couple of times doesn't really hurt :P

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  18. @Anonymous: The archive only had black and white images so that's all I processed. The most efficient use of PNG is with solid colour images. If there's a crapload of colours (say, more than 256 which happens to be defined as 8bit) then you're best saving them as JPG.

    @YQII: If your source files are originally JPG then it's best to leave them as that because they've already experienced a quality loss so there's no point in working with lossless methods. If you save a JPG as JPG again the quality loss is hardly noticeable as long as the compression slider is set above 80. However, if your source files are GIF or PNG then I can offer some assistance or advice.

    First thing to do with B&W images is to make sure the image palette isn't working with millions of colours, just those that are necessary. That's why I reduced them to 4-bit. Afterwards, I optimized them even further with PNGOUT and voila. Huge image, small file size, perfect quality.

    It's much easier if you get Irfanview. Simplifies this stuff a lot, just two clicks and it's done.

    Here's the archive with all the recompressed images for those that are interested:

    http://rapidshare.com/files/245307337/_Norutaru__Imagination_Weather__PNG___ENG___4bit_and_PNGOUTed_.rar

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  19. png is better for editing/working with an image, jpg is for distribution....

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  20. @anon: debatable. check the archive I uploaded to prove yourself wrong.

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