Anti-Aliasing

[Stoney74]

Can Photoshop or other programs not create straight anti-aliased lines?  I've seen quite a few skins with the jagged lines and was just curious as to why?  I know GIMP can do them easily with the Path tool, but I was wondering about Photoshop and the like...

[JeepinAZ]

I notice when I change from .psd to .bmp 8bit files is when i lose my nice crisp lines. It drives me nuts too. I lose a lot of detail also when I convert from RGB to indexed color as well. My nice blends become choppy muddled messes sometimes. As for the choppy lines, I'd love to know how to fix it because my weathering suffers the most when I convert the file. I'd be willing to bet I'm creating the .psd file with the wrong techniques. I use a lot of opacity/fill changes to get my textures I want. Some day I should really read up on the tutorials on building skins. I've used photoshop for doing ads & the like, but I've never drawn/painted with it (usually use Illustrator).

[oboe]

Check out a plugin for Photoshop called "Bright" - it does a much better job of converting the RGB to a .bmp file than Photoshop does natively.

To get an anti-alias line, you can draw a straight horizontal or vertical line segment and then rotate it some number of degrees - that will anti-alias for you, even if you then rotate it back to the original angle.

[moot]

Raster based programs like Photoshop will always be less sharp than vector based programs like Paint Shop Pro or Illustrator.

[RTHolmes]

sry moot thats just not true. your generating bitmaps for screen display so you need antialiasing whether you save from photoshop or export from illustrator, traditionally PS has had the best antialiasing quality of any app. Cant remember where, but you can set the hardness of the AA in PS for text and other vectors.

Jeepin - looks like you're having a problem with colour palettes if your graduations and antialiasing looks bad after conversion to .bmp. Your converting from millions of colours and an 8-bit alpha channel to a 256 colour image with a 1-bit alpha channel (ie 1 transparent colour.) dont have any image apps at work, but I think you just need to set the conversion to something like "adaptive" palette (it may be defaulted to web-safe or something else.) I always check colour palettes in GraphicConverter (Mac only though.)

[moot]

Show some evidence for it... Every vector based graphics I've seen is much crisper than the raster method.

[RTHolmes]

remember were dealing with bitmaps for screen display here - not printing to a postscript printer. draw a box in photoshop, fill and stroke it, save as a bmp. you just created a vector, which PS rasterised when it created a bmp. exactly the same process happens in illustrator when you export as bmp.

Illustrator has 2 levels of AA, Photoshop has 4 because its designed for creating bitmaps. To my eyes the AA in photoshop is superior, plus you can also tweak individual pixels to get it just so - try doing that in a vector app. If you've seen bad bitmaps created from photoshop it wasnt the app that was faulty

[moot]

The sort of textures on which I've seen vector made graphics beat raster were minimum-compression jpgs.  The edge of shapes (and gradients obviously) were much clearer.

Anyway, regarding the OP question about jagged lines, PS has path tools too, most people who put out jaggies are either too lazy/impatient, or don't know about them.

[JeepinAZ]

Originally posted by moot
Raster based programs like Photoshop will always be less sharp than vector based programs like Paint Shop Pro or Illustrator.

I think I may try my next skin in Illustrator for giggles to see how it comes out. As far as not knowing the path tools in PS, Like I said before, I've only done photo work in PS & the only drawing I've done with it has been on the skins..

I'll also try the other suggestions you guys have made. Thanks for your guys' advice.

Your presenter of mediocre skins,
JeepinAZ

[moot]

I've never used any vector stuff myself, so I can't give you any sort of advice on that.
The vector tools in PS are very useful.  I wouldn't know where to start  The simplest way to see what they could or couldn't do for you is to try em out..

[Major Biggles]

Originally posted by Stoney74
Can Photoshop or other programs not create straight anti-aliased lines?  I've seen quite a few skins with the jagged lines and was just curious as to why?  I know GIMP can do them easily with the Path tool, but I was wondering about Photoshop and the like...

because some guys are muppets and don't know about it, or feel that the staircaise look is better...

one thing that drives me crazy, as someone who does these art screenie thingies, is having a really nice skin with staircases all over it lol.