Hey! So I decided to finally begin art (after almost 4 years on here) and am having a bit of trouble with sizing. Below is my first (and thus far only) manip:

#1. When creating this, the pixel size reached 7360x4912, taking up 1.2-1.7GB of space. Is there someway to avoid letting it become this big WITHOUT sacrificing quality? I ended up reducing it to 500x334 (GIMP wouldn't allow it to be 500x500), but it took a huge quality hit.

#2. If there is no way to stop it from beoming that large, how do you reduce it without losing quality?

Also, are there any good hair painting tutorials? I only found one, but there was no talking during the video. Oh, and any other directions on what to change/improve on, as well as direction on how to change/improve. Thanks in advance!

You're not going to be able to reduce an image x14 without losing a bunch of quality. Most people I've seen tend to work on a 1k image, then scale that down. I use whatever quality the stock images are, and scale down from there.

I would suggest cropping the image when you can, rather than resizing it.

There are a lot of tutorials in this forum section, just comb through them for a while. Fox Haven Farm's videos are very helpful.