Poor Image: Eldritch Abomination.Web Comics

Okay, I don't like much this image: poor quality, you can't reality tell what it is, and it's too dependant on the caption.

I was about first to suggest the Elder God from Rusty and Co., but there're few pictures where it looks good.

So, let's go rather default to The Order of the Stick and The Snarl. The last big panel can be cut to a more manageable size to focus on the tangle, and the stick figures below provide a size range.

Specifically, here's what I had in mind:

I'm undecided, but leaning very slightly toward .

edited 8th May '14 9:27:22 AM by Willbyr

Slight improvement.

Quality could be better. I can see JPG artifacts very easily when on phone. Other than that, good.

Yes, I usually get correct quality when doing a capture, but this time it just turned out artefacted. If someone want to go to the original pic and make a better-quality one, I won't be offended.

Is this any better?

Cool. (I would add, "maybe we don't need that much sky," but that's a minor point.)

I prefer the Elder God, actually. It looks less like another amorphous smudge.

Well, it is available as a wallpaper◊, so maybe we can indeed get something workable out of it, mostly by keeping the upper part of the picture. I wouldn't mind it either; the voluntary Conspicuous CG is a nice touch.

edited 20th May '14 1:45:15 PM by StFan

Clock is set.

I've made a wiki-sized candidate for the Elder God mentioned above:

How about a crop from today's Girl Genius?

Like this, maybe...

edited 11th Jun '14 9:00:30 AM by Madrugada

Whoa...that's got my vote.

Ha, I was just coming here to suggest that.

I'm a bit worried it hasn't resized very well (plus we're not supposed to use whole comics). Cropping out the red on the right would help, and while cropping out Gil and Higgs would too, that might mean there's not enough context to show the thing's size.

edit: Oh, you already cropped some. Well, then the "whole comic" issue isn't a problem.

edited 11th Jun '14 10:12:55 AM by Discar

Damn, that is cool.

Using all of one page out of an ongoing series doesn't fall afoul of the "don't use the whole thing" guideline. But yes, I already did crop it. If someone else wants to play with other crops, feel free.

I tried a closer crop. All that other stuff was a distraction from what the image should be about: the monster. Surprisingly, it didn't need resizing, though I was forced to JPG it. Whenever it comes to that, I always set the quality to maximum so long as it is under 200 KB.

counter-counter offering:

I left in more of the buildings to help make the scale of the thing clearer. With almost all the lower buildings and side detail gone, it could be smaller and closer than it really is. The street sign helps establish how far away the church steeple is, and the steeple establishes how big that ...tentacle thing... is.

edited 11th Jun '14 7:52:12 PM by Madrugada

A decent crop, but artifacting is significantly higher in your version than in mine. The difference is that mine is 185 KB, and your is 33 KB. Compressing it to be that small ruins the quality. As I said before, when you have to go JPG, (which is a last resort) maximize the file size, so lossy compression is minimized.

Then wouldn't it be better to save the file as .png and later compressing them using tinypng or something?

I'm running a very old computer. I will never object to someone making a cleaner copy of an image I put up as a suggestion. Especially if it's a suggestion as to cropping.

edited 11th Jun '14 10:47:32 PM by Madrugada

Here is a version that is cropped a little differently (further out, for that Window Into Our Dimension look... the speech bubble is regrettable but worth getting more space on the left I think), and not so enormous (350 tall instead of 350 wide):

edited 12th Jun '14 2:22:46 AM by rodneyAnonymous

I like that version best, for the size perspective if nothing else.

Though I can't say I like how there's a cut narrative box on the background...