The NEW Build Your Own Arcade Controls
Main => Artwork => Topic started by: Smalkmus on July 03, 2018, 12:18:33 am
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I have what may seem like a silly question. I am a beginner and have next to no idea what I am doing. I’m working on creating some graphics for an arcade cabinet kit. I want the theme to be Mega Man. I noticed whenever I bring images into photoshop and transform them into larger sizes they get pixelated or leave some artifacts behind. I don’t know enough to say exactly why that happens but I think the original images just aren’t good enough quality and by enlarging them their imperfections show up (or something). So I had this idea if I made pixel art in photoshop by zooming in to like 3200% and using the 1 pixel pencil tool and “drawing” the pixels from an image like the one attached, I end up with this tiny image but it can be transformed to a much larger size and doesn’t seem to pixelate or show any artifacts.
So my question as an artistically retarded person, is this something that people do? Is it crazy? It takes a good bit of time but I searched all over and couldn’t find good quality sprites that I could blow up without degraded quality. Is there a place where I could find good quality mega man character images? If not would people be interested in the ones I’ve created? Is there a place that I should upload them to share with others so they don’t have to go through the same exercise that I am now?
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Don’t use the transform tool.
Under the Image dropdown menu, select Image size. There are resampling options, choose “Nearest Neighbor”. This will keep all the pixels sharp when scaling them up.
I think the transform tool uses bilinear sampling by default to interpolate the pixels. They will definitely be blurry from that sampling method because it tries to approximate details by averaging pixels.
My bet is your source images are good enough. You just need to use the right scaling method.
Using nearest neighbor on low res sprites should be crisp when you scale them up.
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Adding on to what opt2not said, for best results scale it by a whole number. Nearest neighbor will keep your colors intact but proportions can get weird.
For example, if you take one pixel, which is a 1x1 square, and you want to make it bigger you can make it a 2x2 square, which will be four pixel, or a 3x3 square, which will be nine pixels, and so on, but you can't make it a 1.5x1.5 square. So if you scale by 200%, 300%, etc. every pixel will be perfectly reproduced whereas if you scale it by say 275% you will get wonkiness as new pixels have to be generated, altering the fidelity of the artwork.
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Thanks, guys. I appreciate the suggestions! I'll give that a shot. I had played with the nearest neighbor option on the transform but I never tried to resize them using the image size menu. Also, the whole number thing makes perfect sense so I will do that as much as possible and see if that helps avoid the funky artifacts.
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One more thing -- When working on the images always save them in a lossless format (ie. raw, bmp,psd,png) - each time you save in a lossy format like .jpg etc that compresses the image it will introduce compression errors since it worries about file size more than file accuracy and then reopening and making changes and saving again will compound these errors - so always save in a lossless format when possible and use sources that are in a lossless format when sourcing if possible since those formats have not already lost original image data.
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Thanks, JDFan! I appreciate the tip!
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I think the transform tool uses bilinear sampling by default to interpolate the pixels.
By default it does, but you can change it to nearest neighbor as well.
PNG is the best balance between lossless and file size (IMO), excluding vector formats of course.
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I think the transform tool uses bilinear sampling by default to interpolate the pixels.
By default it does, but you can change it to nearest neighbor as well.
PNG is the best balance between lossless and file size (IMO), excluding vector formats of course.
Thanks for the suggestion! With your guys help, I do see that a good quality PNG will transform well using nearest neighbor and keeping the percentages to multiples of 100. Since dumping any source JPG file, using nearest neighbor and keeping to multiples of 100, my images are looking crisp and clean.
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Cool, will you post the final result?
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I actually abandoned this theme and changed to a mashup of fighting games for my theme. I also found an artist on deviant art to make my art for me. See this thread:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,158124.0.html (http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,158124.0.html)
I have all my art done now and I’m starting to put it all together but I’m super slow in general and I also have real limited time due to having a 2 year old to take care of so I’m just taking my time with it to make sure everything is done right. I will post something once I get it all together!