Saving and formatting files for upload

Recently, I've been frustrated with recaptioned comics images where the lettering looked great in Paint Shop Pro at full size... but after resizing (to about 40-45%) for display on TGCaps and saving as a JPG file, the lettering could become distorted. The technical name for that escapes me, but it happened quite a bit with my "Jill Trent, She-Sir Science Sleuth" story on this page, for example, where Daisy first uses the word "Femavium."

I was getting the same results with my latest "My Jet Dream Romance" story... but then I figured out that saving the JPG with a lower "Compression Factor" helped a lot - changing that number from 20 to 10 pretty much eliminated the problem.

I think the technical term you're looking for is "aliasing". It's countered using the techniques of (what else?) "anti-aliasing" (more info on Wikipedia).

Sue: I've found that working fonts into a large image then drastically reducing the size of the finished product effects the font far more than the graphics. So I resize the image first, then match font sizing/coloring so that it's easily readable, with no risk of distortion. Don't know how well that strategy will work into your creative process though.

BTW: I use GIMP since I'm too lazy to learn Adobe Photoshop (which I have), and too cheap to buy/learn another product like Paint Shop (yeah, I know it's available for free, but not the full-featured versions).

nothing wrong with GIMP
I use it all the time.
if you know where to look and how to find it I haven't found a single thing Photshop can do that GIMP can't.

Yes generally for any work the rule of thumb is start big and go small.
but as you go small you will loose detail in the smaller and thiner points of your picks,

JPEG is a losie format and will blur your color edges to get a more smooth look and to save space, but this will kill tiny text. The higher the compression the smaller the file but the lower the picture quality because of the data lost in the compression method used. which will create a edge blur or aliasing.

Try GIF if the picture doesn't have to many colors or gradients. (Works better for sketches and gray scale, not photos)
Or PNG for full photo quality, but be warned png will be a little bigger in file size but will keep sharp edges and better detail than JPG.
Not as much as a raw image or tiff though.
but there way to big to easily post online.

I briefly tried out GIMP, but found its organization too confusing and distracting for my purposes. Paint Shop Pro seems to work best for me - I like its organization and interface, and while it costs money, it's a lot cheaper than Photoshop (which I've never actually tried.)

"Resize first" doesn't seem to work well for the purposes of comic book lettering, or at least not with my setup and fonts. I'd have to shrink the font itself to "unnatural" size, which just tends to cause the same problem earlier.

I'll probably try PNG for my next project. Might be worth springing for one of Blambot's non-free fonts for dialogue too, perhaps....

There is a learning curve with GIMP, but once you learn you can rearrange it to to suit you it gets easier.
the only thing that frustrated me for the longest is the tools on top of the picture.
and that just took learning that as long as the pic is selected you can put the tools in the background by pressing Tab. Now I have my whole screen for the pic and I just have to press tab to pick a new tool or change a setting.