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Description

............ of the water.

This is a gift to of his one of a kind purple haired fox lady, Niti. Told him I'll draw her again months ago, and finally came around doing it. For reference, he showed me a picture of her in swimsuit, and well.... I sticked to the swimsuit, because it's one of the best pieces of potential clothing to show off a body, that will make the Pacific Ocean boil. Also, because I am a fan of simple poses, which serve the very same purpose, I basically copied the pose from his picture. Yes, not the most unique way to go, but this motive never was about originality, but about appeal. Mission accomplished.

Technical background for who cares to know:

This picture is made with single colored layers in Photoshop, where lines and forms consist of masks. Also since I wanted to try out a different workflow, I was not working with smooth brushes, but with fully pixelated content. But in order to still get a lovely smooth image when finished, I used a ridiculous resolution of 12,000x20,000 pixels - that's 240 megapixels for you. So, since everything consists of mask data and not a load of color and alpha information, the file should have been rather small, right? Well, surprisingly not. The PSD file was around 1.4GB big and would take around a minute for saving. Why the hell does Photoshop save such a big file? Seems like the program does reserve a possible maximum of information mask layers could carry, because whatever details I would draw into the layer masks, the fiel size stayed the same. But, that's where it's really handy, that I started packing my PSD files into WinRar archives. Because WinRare is really good at compressing, and supposedly it recognizes all the useless data Photoshop puts into it's files. So when I put this 1.4GB PSD files into a WinRar archive, less than 80MB remain. That's a compression of over 94%! WinRar can make basically any PSD file quite a bit smaller, in this case it's especially efficient, because just for that, I am using mask layers. For better color transitions for the lighting effects here, I used 16 bit color instead of the base 8 bits. So instead of saving 56 bits (16 bits per color channel in RGB plus 8 bits of alpha channel) for every pixel and layer, it's only 16 bits per pixel and layer, because the mask works in black and white. Additionally, WinRar seems to recognize areas without any change in color or bit structure, where there is lots of when working with many flat colors in Anime style like me. This can also easily get compressed away. So what WinRar basically needs to save is the few areas of black and white detail, a few KB of information of layers and their colors, and that's basically it. So when you are somebody who keeps PSD files, put them into compressed archives, because PSD is not meant at all for efficient saving.

Moral of the story: Working with masks will give you a small final PSD file, if you compress it, but for actual workflow, it doesn't help at all, because not working with smoothed out lines (not much of alpha information to deal with) doesn't cause Photoshop to work with any less effort. It seemingly is all about resolution. Next time, I will use a smaller (but still large) resolution again, but with my usual smooth workflow.

Image created July 2021

Description

............ of the water.

This is a gift to of his one of a kind purple haired fox lady, Niti. Told him I'll draw her again months ago, and finally came around doing it. For reference, he showed me a picture of her in swimsuit, and well.... I sticked to the swimsuit, because it's one of the best pieces of potential clothing to show off a body, that will make the Pacific Ocean boil. Also, because I am a fan of simple poses, which serve the very same purpose, I basically copied the pose from his picture. Yes, not the most unique way to go, but this motive never was about originality, but about appeal. Mission accomplished.

Technical background for who cares to know:

This picture is made with single colored layers in Photoshop, where lines and forms consist of masks. Also since I wanted to try out a different workflow, I was not working with smooth brushes, but with fully pixelated content. But in order to still get a lovely smooth image when finished, I used a ridiculous resolution of 12,000x20,000 pixels - that's 240 megapixels for you. So, since everything consists of mask data and not a load of color and alpha information, the file should have been rather small, right? Well, surprisingly not. The PSD file was around 1.4GB big and would take around a minute for saving. Why the hell does Photoshop save such a big file? Seems like the program does reserve a possible maximum of information mask layers could carry, because whatever details I would draw into the layer masks, the fiel size stayed the same. But, that's where it's really handy, that I started packing my PSD files into WinRar archives. Because WinRare is really good at compressing, and supposedly it recognizes all the useless data Photoshop puts into it's files. So when I put this 1.4GB PSD files into a WinRar archive, less than 80MB remain. That's a compression of over 94%! WinRar can make basically any PSD file quite a bit smaller, in this case it's especially efficient, because just for that, I am using mask layers. For better color transitions for the lighting effects here, I used 16 bit color instead of the base 8 bits. So instead of saving 56 bits (16 bits per color channel in RGB plus 8 bits of alpha channel) for every pixel and layer, it's only 16 bits per pixel and layer, because the mask works in black and white. Additionally, WinRar seems to recognize areas without any change in color or bit structure, where there is lots of when working with many flat colors in Anime style like me. This can also easily get compressed away. So what WinRar basically needs to save is the few areas of black and white detail, a few KB of information of layers and their colors, and that's basically it. So when you are somebody who keeps PSD files, put them into compressed archives, because PSD is not meant at all for efficient saving.

Moral of the story: Working with masks will give you a small final PSD file, if you compress it, but for actual workflow, it doesn't help at all, because not working with smoothed out lines (not much of alpha information to deal with) doesn't cause Photoshop to work with any less effort. It seemingly is all about resolution. Next time, I will use a smaller (but still large) resolution again, but with my usual smooth workflow.

Image created July 2021