Why are comic book files so HUGE.

[iridius]

I am trying to make a collection of comics, but I am finding that most of them are huge. I mean a comic with 300 pages is the same size a full length movie or bigger in some cases. I assume it is mostly due to the comics' images' high resolution, but why are they so big? Is there really that much of a difference on most screens? I ask, because I want to archive files after I've read them in a more compact way. Any suggestions? I have cbr/cbz and pdf comics at this time. Thanks.

[iridius]

Any idea if there is a better place for me to ask this question? Or maybe it's a dumb question and that's what's wrong, if that's the case please let me know so I can stop looking so dumb

[dickloraine]

A comic with 300 pages are 300 images in comic pages dimensions. Depending on the resolution, the size can differ vastly, but even if each image has only 1mb, we speak about 300mb here.

If you want to reduce the size, you have to extract the images and change the resolution and/or the compression rate. You have to experiment, what is acceptable for you. The biggest problem will be the readability of the text.

One free app to do batch conversions of images is IrfanView. If you can write batch scrpits, you could maybe write a little one, that extracts a cbz, resizes the images and rezipps them. But you will lose some quality.

[Freeshadow]

Your answers are:
jpegoptim http://encode.ru/threads/1587-jpegop...ll=1#post33541 for jpegs.

Pngout + advpng with zopfli algorithm for png.

And advzip for the cbz.
that's for lossless recompression and cleaning.

That's the 1st I'd try. If it's not enough then one can always start small steps on the lossy road.

[radius]

If you read on a tablet or something smaller there is a lot of extra detail you will never see. And even the comics creators likely don't draw on anything larger than a 4 or 5k display up to low thirty inches. But with high resolution and large size displays becoming more common and more affordable you need to think hard about whether you want to reduce the quality of your comic images.

You didn't give any absolute sizes, but consider a 90 minute movie is typically around 1.5GB compressed to a watchable but not super crisp video quality. Are you saying that your comic is in that range? I would expect somewhere in the neighbourhood of 0.5 to 2MB per page, giving 150-600MB for a 300 page book. 1.5GB is around 2.5 times that, which is high end but maybe not crazy.

Edit: oops, didn't realize this is a necro-thread.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by radius

If you read on a tablet or something smaller there is a lot of extra detail you will never see. And even the comics creators likely don't draw on anything larger than a 4 or 5k display up to low thirty inches. But with high resolution and large size displays becoming more common and more affordable you need to think hard about whether you want to reduce the quality of your comic images.

You didn't give any absolute sizes, but consider a 90 minute movie is typically around 1.5GB compressed to a watchable but not super crisp video quality. Are you saying that your comic is in that range? I would expect somewhere in the neighbourhood of 0.5 to 2MB per page, giving 150-600MB for a 300 page book. 1.5GB is around 2.5 times that, which is high end but maybe not crazy.

Edit: oops, didn't realize this is a necro-thread.

Necro-thread or not it is still an interesting question. Of course you need a good sized HD in a tablet or regular computer to have many on hand I would think. Something like the Kindle for example with a couple big files would be filled in no time.