File Quality FAQ
Four common reasons a submission will be rejected are artifacting, pixelation, aliasing, and excessive white space.
What is artifacting?
Artifacting happens when two colors meet and average together, forming a grainy haze with scattered colors. It's most visible around lettering or line art and can be more easily seen in red and yellow colors. It's caused by over-compressing image files.
Top: Artifacting
Bottom: No artifacting
How do I fix it?
To avoid artifacting:
- Use TIFF files as your source images
- Create your PDF using lossless or no compression
- Follow “Creating a PDF” steps in our PDF FAQ
What is pixelation?
Pixelation looks like visible squares or 'steps' in line art or color. This occurs when low-resolution or small images are made larger. Soft pixelation looks blurry. Below is an example of soft pixelation on both images and lettering.
Top: Pixelation
Bottom: No pixelation
How do I fix it?
To avoid pixelation:
- Make sure source images are not upscaled larger than their actual size.
- Don’t down-sample your images to a lower resolution (below 300 dpi).
- Follow the “Creating a PDF” steps in our PDF FAQ
What is aliasing?
Aliasing is when the lineart or lettering on a digital image appears chunky and not smooth. This is caused by over-compressing image files.
Top: Aliased lineart, lettering, and word balloons
Bottom: Non-aliased lineart, lettering, and word balloons
How do I fix it?
To avoid aliasing:
- Select "Lossless", "No Compression" or a similar high-quality setting when creating your PDF file
- Ensure you have checked the box labeled ‘anti-aliasing’ when exporting your lettering file
- Follow the “Creating a PDF” steps in our PDF FAQ
What is excessive white space?
Excessive white space is commonly caused by using an 8.5” x 11” document to compile your comic. The result produces a white border that will appear on the pages that we cannot remove with our processing script.
How do I fix it?
To avoid this issue the PDF dimensions need to be resized to be the trim size of the comic. See our Page Formatting Guidelines for suggested dimensions.
Following these guidelines will ensure that your submission looks good in Guided View and on HD devices!