Four common file quality problems found in comics are artifacting, pixelation, aliasing, and excessive white space.
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
To avoid artifacting:
- Use high-quality JPEG files for your individual pages if importing individual pages into Kindle Create.
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
To avoid pixelation:
- Make sure your images are not upscaled larger than their actual size.
- Don’t down-sample your images to a lower resolution (below 300 dpi).
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
To avoid aliasing:
- Use high-quality JPEG files for your individual pages if importing individual pages into Kindle Create.
- Ensure you have checked the box labeled ‘anti-aliasing’ when exporting your lettering file
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.
To avoid this issue the individual page dimensions need to be resized to be the trim size of the comic. Here are some examples of standard comic sizes:
Standard comic page (6.625” x 10.25”)
- 300dpi – 1988px x 3075px
- 600dpi – 3976px x 6150px
Standard manga page (5.04” x 7.17”)
- 300dpi – 1512px x 2151px
- 450dpi – 2268px x 3227
- 600dpi – 3024px x 4302px
Following these guidelines will ensure that your publication looks good in Guided View and on HD devices!