the best drawing program?

[H3X/AntiStyle]

Paint.NET and GIMP also have that feature, but those use a 1 -10 system than some really weird, arbitrary 1 - 12 system. Srsly? 12? WTF guys.

For most purposes, Paint.NET = The shit.

[Thor Odinson]

12 is nice.

I dunno how the 1-10 goes in the other systems, but 12 in PS is near-PNG-quality stuff. Like the one in my sig.

As far as I can tell, there's only one place where I have a slight issue, and it's because I didn't make the lineart there on the original thick enough.

[H3X/AntiStyle]

Well the thing is, it's exact same compression level (i.e., almost nonexistent), it's just represented by the number 10 instead of 12. Because 10 logically makes more sense than 12.

[eclipse]

Make a layer. Use the brush tool to draw a sketch.

Make another layer. Use the brush tool to draw a more refined sketch over that in another color.

Make a third layer over that. Refine into legit lineart via brush or pen tool (extremely recommended if you only deal with a mouse).

Hide/Delete sketch layers.

Make a (few) new layer(s). Color under lineart layer. Erase bits that go outside the line.

Shade over base color layers.

Done.

That's how it would probably be done in GIMP, too. Unfortunately, I can't draw for beans, so the best I can do is splicing (and that's how I did my splice, which did weird things to the colors, but I couldn't be arsed to find the extra 52 one-off colors).

[Thor Odinson]

Well the thing is, it's exact same compression level (i.e., almost nonexistent), it's just represented by the number 10 instead of 12. Because 10 logically makes more sense than 12.

12 probably allows for more sublevel divisions, then.

In which case gives you more of a choice when you need to down-size the picture.

@Eclipse: Try turning the tolerance level down to 0-2 on the fill bucket tool, de-select contiguous, and it changes all the pixels of one color to the color you want when you click on it. I dunno if Gimp has this save-for-web function, but there is one in Photoshop where it does the condensing for you.