Avoïding pixelization ?

[burgzaza]

Hello again
I understand your concern over file sizes for web viewing but should that really be the primary controlling factor, dictating how and what you want to paint? (Unless of course it’s part of a brief as a commission?)
I would suggest you paint your paintings at a sufficient size that will give you the line quality that you want.
99% of people will look at your work and think “WOW, I like this. This person has some talent” But no one is going to look at your work and their first thought be “WOW, nice file size”!

I'm doing a drawing for a little contest right now. The theme is a mix between two video games, Chivalry and Terraria. I'm enjoying it
I get what you say about doing it on a big size, that will for sure enchance quality, eliminate the pixelization and add possibilities for printing.
My concerns with this are that oddly, I moslty if not only like to look at my work at 100% scale. I also like a lot more the results of a tool when it's looked at 100% zoom.
I almost never resize paintings because I lose all the details, textures, subtile things here and there that I did. That's also why I'm concerned to how people will look at my paintings, I'd like them to have the same thing as I had when painting; because watching an image at diferent scales changes it, a lot.
Posting a 4000x4000 image guarantees that people will see the image at different scales, destroying the intent of the painting, because people have different screens, and websites will display it at different sizes.
The only way to be sure that everybody has the same result is to post an image little enough, nowadays I'd say something like 1600x1000.
I'd be happy to try to take the habit of big images, but the problem remains, how will it be displayed by people ? At what zoom should I draw and paint on Artrage, to see the same thing they'll do ? No way to be sure, so no way to know at what zoom work on details and sutch
That's a pretty existential question isn't it, maybe only for people like me that like to detail everything. I don't know if it's the same feeling for real life paintings that are displayed on magazines for example, but I assume it is the same problem.

“My second question would be how, if it's only possible, can I make this tiny image looks sharper without modifying it's total size ?”
And I would counter with; “Why dose it have to be that small?” “What is dictating the size of 258x234pix?”
But if you insist, then maybe you could try using something like an ‘Unsharp Mask’ filter in a photo editing app. That might, despite it’s name, crisp things up a bit.

Thanks I'll try that ( but I think it's that felt tip pen that is a bit pixelized, I'll try to mess with the settings of the tool a bit ), and you know better my obsession in expecting people to see what I see

Algorithms have no ascetic judgment so don’t ask too much of them!
I think you would be better off doing your painting at a larger size (did I mention that already?) and then downscale to the dimensions you need. Digital files tend to be more amenable to this type of treatment as all an algorithm (mostly) has to do is throw out pixels.

Very right ^^

And so to Image Compression!
Some file types compress their data better than others, jpeg giving one of the smaller sizes but perhaps is the more aggressive in throwing away data.
But is possibly still a good match for web needs as you can set, when saving a jpeg, how aggressively the compression should be applied.
There is also one more “trick” you might want to try in reducing the overall data size of an image and that is third party image compression apps. Some are free others paid.
Note these algorithms are not trying to change the number pixels but rather reduce the overall data contained within an image file. Although it is true image quality can suffer if they are too zealous in the pursuit of their work!
Here’s a link to a free web based service where you can upload jpeg, png and pdf files for compression, which I’ve found to give reasonable results for my occasional needs: http://compresspng.com

Thanks again Markw, I'll keep all that in mind, super useful !