look, i get it. i REALLY do. hear me out: for the first like 5 years of my art career, i ONLY saved out my art in gigantic png's because i wanted it to look SO GOOD.
but then i found out something that changed my life and my load times instantly: 98% of the time, a jpg at compression quality 9+ will look EXACTLY as good as a png to everyone who views it but will be much, much, much smaller. unless you are doing extremely color-sensitive work or something cool with transparency or you have some very exacting gradient requirements, please just use a jpg. your png will not make a difference when viewed on thousands of unique and uncalibrated monitors and phone screens!
"WOW... it's jpeg! saves time - saves bandwidth!"
it seems like a lot of people who post art or host webcomics really want to use pngs, but then i stop looking at their art because my internet just wont load it very fast. like... i have really fast internet, but a huge png is slow to load no matter what kind of pipes you got, cuz the server hosting the image has to crunch it out to you.
looking to get hired with your art? i've even seen big heavy pngs used on people's portfolio site and let me tell you from experience: if i go to your website and it takes seventeen goddamn years to load all your art, i won't get a good look at it and i'll probably pass on your application! when your images are in competition with every other image, you gotta pull out all the stops in getting them in front of some eyeballs.
jpg = fast
in conclusion: you're not sending that salmon fursona picture to be printed on archival paper; you are posting it on cohost and discord for your 6 friends to see. so PLEASE do them and us a favor and save it as a jpg. it will put a smile on your face.
"jpg: They aren't bad!"
I sell my photography on smugmug, and at first when I was setting up my gallery there, I uploaded all my finished files as PNGs.
I was baffled when it wouldn't let me offer prints of any of them, before i looked again and it said jpg only for print.



