Adobe Photoshop

dragonbait · Post by **dragonbait** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 6:48 am

I had always used just the basic paint program (microsoft paint) for all the wall textures + such, but I recently was able to work a bit with Adobe Photoshop. It really has allot of cool things that you can make some really interesting material with. I was going to use a picture of a portal that I pieced together from various pictures from the web. But iv'e since gotten rid of it and decided to design my own portal. This is some really fun stuff!

Here's my portal to the other side.

chaney · Post by **chaney** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 9:21 am

Pretty awesome looking. Don't get too lost in the details, and forget the path grasshopper.

dragonbait · Post by **dragonbait** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 4:26 pm

I hear ya Obi-Wan. Its easy to get sidetracked. But worth it in the long run.

chaney · Post by **chaney** » Fri Oct 26, 2007 2:54 am

You are wise for one so young, grasshopper.

dragonbait · Post by **dragonbait** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 8:58 pm

I want to say something about the picture conversion quality of files. There is a significant degradation of quality when transfering files from one format to another. Here is what I have seen in picture quality transfering.

.psd files > .png > .jpg > .gif > .bmp

Also taking files from a computer, and putting it onto the web, then copying the image from the web to another computer seems to degrade the quality as well. I'm wondering if taking a file and emailing it, might degrade the quality as well?? what about if you .zip the image file first? any suggestions is welcome. Here you can see the slightly degraded picture of my portal to the other side, in effect with the first script for Xoram's Tower.

The image quality has degraded since I have originally taken the picture as a .psd file then converted it to .png then uploaded it to the web, copied the image from the web to another computer, then had to convert the file again to .jpg in order to run the picmake program, put into the DW game taken a screenshot and saved as a .png file again. (I also tried saving as a .jpg file, but the image result was so poor that it wasn't worth showing - it was so bad)

You can compare the 2 pictures one above in the previous post and the current post for comparison.

Any suggestions?

dragonbait · Post by **dragonbait** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 5:47 am

OK I've figured out how to convert .psd files straight to .jpg files without loss of quality. Now to repeat the process with the rest of the pictures/textures and maybe this time zip them up in a file and send them to my home computer. Then put them through picmake or texmake respectively. Will see what happens.

chaney · Post by **chaney** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 7:18 am

Work it!!

dragonbait · Post by **dragonbait** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 1:56 pm

OK. Well I was wrong. It's not too many conversions making it grainy. It is the picmake program that is making the image grainy and less clear. That really bites cause theres nothing I can do about it since all pics need to go through the picmake to generate usable DW pics. Oh well. We'll just have to pretend that it looks better than it does.

dragonbait · Post by **dragonbait** » Mon Oct 29, 2007 3:49 pm

Still...., ...the pics after zip'ing them and extracting, don't look as good as they could....

so,

In a last ditch effort I will send myself the DW tools to the computer that has my original psd files so that I can convert the images to DW pics without the need to transfer them prior to converting to .pict files. I kinda have the feeling its not gonna make any difference but i'm willing to try it anyway.

chaney · Post by **chaney** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 2:56 am

Don't be discouraged. DW was never about the latest and greatest in graphics. Your textures and pics are better than what they used anyways.

Rickstavern · Post by **Rickstavern** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 7:39 am

Check the quality settings for you jpg files. A setting of 95 will result in very little loss of quality. The default is usually around 85.

There will always be a slight quality loss when the texture is displayed in the game. Remeber that the texture is onyl 256 pixels and the display window is scaling that up to fit.

dragonbait · Post by **dragonbait** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 2:51 pm

All the images that I had are at 96.

Well while they did lose a little quality, they still ended up good, so will just have to go on as is.

Here's a bit of what I've been up to lately.

chaney · Post by **chaney** » Wed Oct 31, 2007 2:58 am

Neat looking room!

Growler · Post by **Growler** » Sat Dec 01, 2007 5:18 pm

Your graphics are tres neato--cool effects!

take this with a grain of NaCl since Growler's nada x-spurt:

some graphic formats are lossy (like jpeg--lose details due to compression, etc) & others are lossless (png & gifs--generally retain details even when compressed), so try to do all your editing in the original (preferably lossless format such as psd) prior to any format converting

jpg is great for most photo-esque images, but not so good for retaining fine lines (such as text); while png is good for both compression & retaining sharp lines..