Tutorial: Posting your comic edits on tumblr
Once you have finished your edit you think you’re done right? Well as we all know tumblr is a tricky site and nothing is easy.
Here some 101 advices i can give you:
The default size for all original content is 540px width (👉!!!IMPORTANT LINK!!!👈), the height doesn’t matter at all. If you post something lower than 540px it will look lq while if it’s 541-1280px it will look blurry and ugly. If it’s more than 1280px tumblr automatically resizes it to 1280.
What if tumblr changes the dimensions again? Once upon a time the default size was 500px and when that changed everyone freaked out. You can do two things: either post a higher quality edit (550-700px is a safe choice imho) or post the regular 540px and always save a high quality copy. I have some copies as big as 4000px…
The most common comic edits are 3-10 panels with 16x9 (aka 540x304px) ratio each (example), avoid using this if you have 1 or 2 panels because it will look incomplete. Square edits, 540x540px (example). Another common one is 540x800px (example). These are just advices but don’t limit yourself, you can always use your own dimensions.
More helpful dimensions 👉HERE👈.
Now once you have decided the size of your graphic you have to remember one thing: save your panel as a .png file! I can’t emphasize this enough! Jpg files are the devil!!!!
It doesn’t matter how good your graphic is. If you don’t use the proper tags there 90% chance your edit will fail.
The most important part of tagging are the first 5 tags because they always appear on tracked tags and inform everyone about it.
Always use the comicedit tag.
Other useful tags are: publisher + edit as one word (eg dce/dit, marv/eledit etc), character + edit (eg wond/erwomanedit), if you post an indie graphic you can use the title of the comic in a similar fashion (eg sag/aedit), some popular blogs are also useful (eg dcm/ultiverse, dailyi/ndiecomics, lgbti/ncomics etc). All the examples without the slashes of course 😉
Never use more than 10 tags. If you use more than 10 tags your post usually doesn’t show up in any of the tags, with some rare exceptions. Tumblr is very weird about it, in the past i have posted graphics with 6 or 7 tags and they didn’t show up until i reduced them to 5.
For that reason always check the tags.
Usually it takes a couple of minutes for your edit to show up in the tags, so don’t freak out if it doesn’t appear 0.2 seconds after you post it…
You can always add more tags later (i do it at least a week after i originally post it) but even then don’t use more than 20 tags because the post might disappear from your blog. It took me 2 years to find one of my first graphics because of that…
If you use many personal tags like i do, you can add some of them in one of your reblogs.
I have noticed that when i post my stuff from a sideblog they show up even when i use 10-19 tags, but maybe that’s just me.
More about tumblr tagging system: 👉HERE👈
Finally: timezones are weird. Don’t be afraid to reblog your edit once or twice in less than 24 hours. No one will care or think it’s annoying or weird, just don’t overdo it…
My old tutorial about comic editing HERE (it looks better on mobile).
jacobvanloon
izzy806
dededos
kianamaiart
stormborns
pixelskylines
