Graphic rendering for Tile Molester

[gprice07]

The menu logos you did don't look very crisp, this probably has to do with not optimizing the logos and pallet(s) before you imported them leaving TM to do the majority of the rendering. Basically the BGR values in the logo are different from the values in the particular pallets.

I have a method for doing them that ensures getting the best aesthetic result possible. I'd be happy to share it with you if you want.

Is the method you use brief enough to respond to in a thread Clockwise?

It seems like when I have imported graphics for player cards, sometimes they hold up pretty well, other times not. The pictures that have greater initial contrast, and contrast between the face or body and the background seem to look best in TM. I haven't tried to do any refining in Photoshop other than just cropping images down to 48x48. Do you know of any methods that could be used within Photoshop to sharpen in image and preserve its quality better in TM?

My menu and ice logos have looked ok...I suppose they could be better. The problem I encounter most is with player cards.

[clockwise]

Is the method you use brief enough to respond to in a thread Clockwise?

It seems like when I have imported graphics for player cards, sometimes they hold up pretty well, other times not. The pictures that have greater initial contrast, and contrast between the face or body and the background seem to look best in TM. I haven't tried to do any refining in Photoshop other than just cropping images down to 48x48. Do you know of any methods that could be used within Photoshop to sharpen in image and preserve its quality better in TM?

There's a myriad of different ways to accomplish a desired effect with everything Photoshop, and fortunately there's keyboard shortcuts for everything that can really accelerate the process..But the fastest and easiest way would be to use the curves adjustment, and smart sharpen for the player cards.

Here's the "system" (if you could even call it that) I used when I did the 500+ for my 91 edit, time being the main focus.

1st. and most obvious you need to get the still of the player your looking for. legendsofhockey.net is a great resource and has a picture for pretty much every player who ever played the game.

2nd. Once you find your man open Photoshop and take a print screen of your player instead of saving the image to your HD. You save time not having to import it into PS.

3rd. Open a new canvas (CTRL+N) 48x48 set to grayscale and paste (CTRL+V) your pic into there. Then free transform (CTRL+T) hold shift and drag on the upper left corner of the image to scale it down until you get the pic to fit how you like and hit enter to apply.

4th. If you image is flat or lacking contrast use a curves adjustment (CTRL+M) and adjust the the line on the grid making points (click on the image if there is a certain area you would like to lighten/darken and you will see a phantom mark for where you should adjust) and dragging them until you see what you like. Enter to apply.

5th. The image may still not be very sharp so you can apply a sharpen filter (Filter> Sharpen> Sharpen). If it's not giving you the detail you want hit it again (CTRL+F) until you think you've got it.

6th. Now you can save for web (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+S). Personally I find saving as .png usually gives the best result for me.

Since your not going to be optimizing the palette here you can save with 256 color.

Don't close the file in PS until it's imported it into TM, this way if the image didn't render well you can apply some more sharpen/curves and overwrite the file until you get what you like.

Using this method along with the keyboard shortcuts can enable you to bang out a pic and get it into TM in under 30 seconds once you get the hang of it.

Regarding the logos: I should have sometime next week to make a detailed tutorial if you can hold out.

[gprice07]

This is basically what I've been doing, so it's good to know I'm on the right track. I've been using the sharpen filter, sharpening until I get a better looking graphic. I find that it helps to bring out the contrasts in the image and cause more clear breaks in the colors, which looks a lot better in TM, instead of a more smooth transition which gives a blurry graphic in TM. I've not experimented with changing the brightness, but I've considered doing that if a graphic I needed to use was too dark.

What I was wondering, and I haven't been able to find information on a filter like this for photoshop online, was if there was a principal component analysis in photoshop. This is something that can be done to raster images in Erdas Imagine, where it basically brings out differences in multispectral images. For example, if you have a grayscale raster with color values that range from like 90 to 145 in a 0-255 system, then you can run PCA to stretch the values out to maybe like 40 to 210. I was just curious if there was something like that for PS.

Thanks for the help. Sharpening seems to do the trick and maybe I'll try the Curves adjustment, it sounds like it might act like PCA.

[Inklings]

Regarding the logos: I should have sometime next week to make a detailed tutorial if you can hold out.

hows that tutorial coming?

[clockwise]

Not sure when I'll get the time for it right now but I will get around to it eventually.