Ok, I use paint tool sai just because of the line layer since I suck a lot at drawing free. Use to be able to draw Fido Dido pretty good lol

What I'm asking is, has anyone used the built in texture tool in Sai? I use it on an image and it sent the file size went right up.
post #313045
When I didn't use the texture on this image it's about 1MB at the same res.

I can't speak for SAI specifically but this should be the same for all programs anyway.
You choose a texture -> filesize/used RAM go up.
For the RAM it is pretty clear, it is a graphic that needs to placed somewhere for use so it will allocate some space, depending on the resolution and quality of said texture this will also be a bit more than a couple Mb.
For the filesize, it is a problem with compression, a flat color can (in .jpg) be compressed very efficiently because you only need to save what color and in what space, if you add a texture to said color, you break this single piece of color down into hundreds or thousands single, slightly differently colored spaces. This will cause quite some issues with the compression, forcing the algorithm to also save hundreds of differently colored spaces instead of a single big one.

So, I dunno what else to say expect, "Yup, that sounds about right".

Yup. I notice you saved that file as a PNG too, which isn't helping the filesize. PNG compression is lossless, so it introduces no degradation at all, but if you've got more than a few colours, textures or gradients, the filesize will be huge.

JPEG would be better for that kind of pic. It's lossy, so there will be some degradation and artifacts introduced, but the filesize will be massively smaller, and in a photo or illustration that already has texture, the artifacts can be almost unnoticeable. A good editing program will let you adjust the compression level to let you tune the quality/filesize tradeoff for your needs.

If I do something like this again would save it in jpg next time.

Falord said:
If I do something like this again would save it in jpg next time.

Or you can open the old png or bmp (those are lossless images, except that png has compression and bmp doesn't) and save it as jpg