It drives me crazy. I wrote earlier about my deciding to save my art pieces natively as Procreate files because it was so much more efficient in terms of file size. Well, I just finished a new crowtoon and when I saved it I noticed it was 20 Mbytes as a Procreate file. Seemed larger than it should have been. So I saved as a Photoshop and then saved as a Clip Studio file. And, in a direct reversal, the Photoshop was a lot smaller than the Procreate file and the Clip Studio was the smallest of all. Around 20/13/11 was the comparison.
Grrrr, I say GRRRRRR! It's a pain to have different file types - efficiency says "just use one". And yet now I don't know which is "better" - it seems to vary. And to make life just that extra bit annoying, text doesn't save when you go from one to another - it gets flattened into an image itself, not an editable text layer. Which means it's then much more cumbersome to do any editing down the line - I'll have to retype everything. Which comes with its own probability of new typos jumping on board. Once again. GRRRRRRR!!!! A peek of my newest Crowtoon. A bit of a closeup so you can see some detail.
What do you think? Just leave a comment below! Now just hold on. I've heard it during the broadcast and now read it again that K. Harris wore a purple dress to honor the first black woman who ran for president.
But ... it wasn't purple. Unless there was a color shift on my display (always possible) the dress was blue. A real RGB blue - not cyan or sky blue but a spectral blue. Which, I'll agree, is a warm blue (hence further along the spectrum toward infrared but ... still blue). Takes more of a red shift for it to qualify as "purple". Can I test it? Sure! In the world of digital color it's easy. Just take a screenshot, load it into a graphics program like Procreate, and sample the image. This then brings up a nice color gamut display and the sampled pixel's place within it.. As you can see, the sample is solidly blue. On neighborly terms with purple but only that. Just neighbors. Wow. Bevmo says that Lagavulin 16 yr old. retails at $130 but they're got it for the great deal of only $113.
Or ... I could go to my favorite liquor store ten minutes away from BevMo and pick it up for $69 all day long. Hmmmm. This is a tough one ... And in digital artist news - multiple epiphanies! Two, to be precise. The first is my belated realization that now that I can create EVERTHING I need purely in Procreate, it would pay to look at how the art file sizes are in the other apps I use. You see, even though I do almost all my art in Procreate on my iPad, I still export as a Photoshop file so it can them be read by Clip Studio and then archived in Clip Studio form. Due to inertia I never fully realized that, just possibly, this is dopey. And looking at the file sizes - it is. The biggest files are, in fact, Clip Studio files. Notably smaller are the Photoshop files. But uniformly the most compact, by a good margin, are Procreate files. Example: Clip Studio - 2.5 MByte, Photoshop - 1.7 MByte and Procreate - 1.1 MByte.
Is there a reason to save the files in a form that downloads slower and takes up more space? Ummm, no, there isn't. So from this day forward it's Procreate for the win! The second epiphany? I've been wishing for dual monitor capability when using an iPad and I just realized like a dope I'd been missing the forest for the trees. I already HAVE dual monitor capability. And modern Apple device has the same information (as long as it's up in the cloud) and all AirDrop to each other. So all I need to have a second monitor is to have a second iPad. Which I do. So - with zero added expense, wish granted! Yup, this inauguration day has been a great day all around. Funny. I'm a digital artist, as you all know. And there's a neato plastic "screen saver" called Paperlike that isn't actually for screen protection but rather to make the super slick and glassy surface of an iPad feel more like paper. I've used them in the past and needed a new one for my big iPad.
They come two in a pack and the inventor has a detailed video on applying them. He recommends doing it in a bathroom after running a hot shower to cut down on dust and that's what I did last time. Still got a dust mote under it. Grrr. So this time I decided to just do it in my dining area. There's a whole rigamarole involved. Little adhesive pieces, peel off the bottom layer, lay it flat, remove the bubbles and then peel off the top layer. I did all the prep, applied it and ... a tiny piece of something underneath. Clearly visible as a black spot on the screen. So - not ignorable like a bubble would be. Well, they come two to a pack, eh? So I figured I'd just take off the first try and do it right with the second. I worked faster and confidently and boom, a pretty good job. Until ... I noticed after turning it on that the cutout of the plastic was on the bottom. Wasn't that supposed to be on the top? Isn't that where the itsy bitsy camera is? Let's turn on the camera and check. DOH! In my confident 2nd try I installed the stupid thing spun around 180 degrees from what it should have been. ARGH!!! Why didn't I leave well enough along with the first application. Of course, I'd thrown away all the application sheets and what-not. But I decided that it's time for the caveman engineer to appear. Forget all that fancy stickers, and hinges, and dust cloths. I just picked at the Paperlike cover with my fingernail, got it up a bit, whipped it off and then reapplied the right way. And lifted it again and reapplied, and again (almost there) and again and ... it's on but with bubbles. LOTS of bubbles! No problem. Old plastic sheets out of the trash and my plastic. cast iron scraper to the rescue. Long story short (wait, it's already long, isn't it?) is that it's now not aligned perfectly (so OCD folks look away) but free of bubbles and 100% ready for art. Ahhhh. Old fashioned engineering. Doesn't get any better. |
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