stevethepocket

You know how there are programs that you can use to pose CGI people models for reference? Are there any that let you paint onto them? I've been thinking it would be handy for keeping the fur patterns on some of my characters consistent from one shot to the next as the camera angle and pose changes.

So, after concluding after my last journal that the site has, indeed, been retoactively re-compressing all JPEG-formatted images for God knows what reason, I decided to look for ways to get in touch with the staff about it.

There aren't any.

Their entire help desk/support system has been completely wiped, and replaced with some third party garbage that directs all complaints to a "contact us" link that, when clicked, just crashes the tab. I know this site has been going downhill with its support for years now, but the Wix buyout seems to be the point where they just fired everyone and put up a brick wall between the users and the few humans still in charge of things.

So, I'm not sure what to do at this point. I don't want to shut down my account in protest, because I've always been committed to keeping my content available somewhere, but it's not even my content anymore; it's been run through an ugly compression system and spat out looking like garbage.

The internet as I know it is dead. Most people I know just post exclusively on Twitter, an even worse site for maintaining an art gallery than this one. Forums for having friendly discussions have been replaced with social media sites that turn everything into a contest to see who can be the biggest jerk. Human staffers have been replaced with algorithms, and even the users are being replaced with Russian bots. Nazis are trying to take over all the governments and the only people who care enough to stop them are busy having arguments on the aforementioned social media sites or beating up random people on the street. Everything sucks forever. The jobs are all gone and the hobbies are no longer fun. Why even live.

Has anyone else had this happen? I was looking at one of my recent pictures, and discovered that the version that shows up on the deviation page is way more artifacted than the copy on my computer. If I click the Download button I get the way it's supposed to look. It's not scaling it down or anything, so why would it be converting it to a smaller file?

Lately I've noticed that a lot of thumbnails won't load anymore, almost as if the servers they're hosted on have stopped working and never been replaced. It's really weird that a site this big and this... significant? ...would be letting something like that happen, and weirder that I haven't heard anyone else talking about it. But it's been like this for months now, and with the recent news that Twitter is struggling to stay in business and has shut down Vine as a cost-cutting measure, it's a possibility worth considering.

I've long thought that we're in for a second dot-com bubble burst one of these days, with so much of the Internet relying on ad revenue in a time when advertising online is becoming less and less profitable (caught in a vicious cycle of making ads more obnoxious and desperate in response to people using ad blockers, driving more people to use ad blockers in response, and so on). And my concern is less for content creators having nowhere else to go (a lot of serious artists have fled to Tumblr, which admittedly has a host of problems of its own, and if DA goes down for real, I'm sure some clone will spring up that isn't a complete mess) than for a decade and a half worth of artwork vanishing forever or, more likely, continuing to float around the Web with no attribution. (As an aside, if you ever find that some site has stolen your artwork, put it on a t-shirt, etc., THE ABSOLUTE LAST THING YOU WANT TO DO is take down the original, the only public record that you created it. Really, this is a good argument for never deleting anything from DA or Tumblr period, just in case.)

Anyway, I'd love if someone could get to the bottom of this. It's one thing for, say, the Internet Archive to start letting hard drives fail without backups because they're a non-profit operating on a shoestring budget, but the expectation that things will be handled in a professional manner is kind of one of the perks of using a for-profit service in the first place.

Holy crap. How long has this been here and I didn't know about it?



Clipping Groups, known in Photoshop as Clipping Masks and accessible from the layer's right click menu, allows you to just use an existing layer's per-pixel opacity as a mask for layers sitting on top of it. So you can do your flats on one layer, then create a layer above it set to Multiply and do your shading, instead of having to mask the whole folder or constantly mess around with the magic wand. This would be really useful if you're trying to do a no-outlines picture. And unlike folder masks, which used to be my go-to method for this, it doesn't add a ridiculous amount of data to your file size, and allows you to go all the way to the edges with SAI's fancier brushes (which you're not allowed to use on masks for some stupid reason).

I'll be putting together a proper tutorial on all the ways this can be useful, but I hope this post was enough to give you a basic idea how it works.