TRSE: How To Draw Tutorials:
Posting the Artworks on Internet

    Each of the BMP, PNG, GIF and JPG have different uses and naturally, they have the pros and cons. An important thing to take in consideration is the memory size of each artwork you did which is NOT related to the pixels. Each picture always come with a memory cost in form of KB, MB or GB that can cost your assigned place in an art gallery or website hosts some memory space, and more importantly, bandwidth allocations. Bigger an artwork is, slower it will show up on the screen, and eat up more bandwidth allocations which can result in fewer visitors. I had been hearing about how several people have been complaining about their websites being temporarily closed for exceeding the bandwidth allocations (typical of "free website hosts") and I can't help but wonder if they actually paid attention to the memory costs of the graphics they use on their websites. It can get really expensive if your website has both big pictures and lot of visitors. Let's show the pros and cons of each art format.

    The BMP is obviously best for rough drafts which you use to save your unfinished works, and the best thing about BMP is that the BMPs won't get distorted no matter how many times it have been saved. But since BMP saves EVERY pixel making up a picture, BMPs tend to be very big, and very expensive in terms of memory cost. See the picture below for example and notice that my SailorMoon fanart as BMP is 791 KB, very expensive for its size.

    GIF is great for small graphics like banners (like those "Back to" ones above), logos, and even spirites/dolls because they can be saved as 16-color(cheap!) or 256 color types without any color distortions at lower memory costs. The GIFs are the only format I know of that can have a transparent background, and be used for animated graphics. I saved my SailorMoon fanart as a GIF, and note that its memory cost is 162KB which is far cheaper than BMP. Those GIFs are also widely used in the video games.

    JPG is the most common art format used to save any artworks, because the JPG is most economical (cheapest) type. Any artworks saved as JPG will load much faster than any other formats with same pixel sizes. There had been many cases when larger JPG pictures are cheaper than smaller GIF pictures. Note that the memory cost is only 57.2 KB when I saved my SailorMoon fanart as a JPG at 25% quality (adjustable), and that's lot cheaper than BMPs and 256-color GIFs.

    The JPG does best with any multicolored artworks that have been done by hand with coloring pencils, pencils, watercoloring, painting, etc.., but JPGs tend not to do well with any artworks done with solid colors (computer-coloring). See the pictures below for examples.
Saved as GIF
(9K)		 Saved as JPG,
35% quality (6K)
    Many colors especially very bold colors tend to be distorted when saved as a JPG. You can get better pictures with higher quality percentage, but it'll cost more memory. Lower the percentage quality, the colors will get more distorted, but with lower memory costs. You can see why I tend to prefer to use GIFs only for small graphics. JPG is the kind that can destroy what are intended to be GIFs (like my Kawaii GIFs) by distorting their colors including the backgrounds that are supposed to be transparent.

    Recently, some artists started saving their top quality artworks as PNG. The PNGs are great for preserving the quality of any artworks specially computer-colored ones, because the artworks suffer very low color distortions when saved as PNG. But the big downside is that PNG is more expensive than both GIF and JPG (but cheaper than BMP). I saved my SailorMoon fanart as a PNG and got a memory cost of 235KB. Too expensive for my large website (and my poor modem too!) and there are still some computers and older art programs that can't read any PNG artworks.

    Let's move to the next page to learn how varying pixel sizes can affect the memory costs of the artworks.