Photoshop 7 issue...

[Garry2009]

Hi again all:

In Photoshop 7...if I rotate an object to ANY angle other than true vertical or horizontal, I get what I call "The Jaggies"; sawtooth junk along the edges. Am I missing some kind of resolution setting in P/7? Or is this maybe some kind of PC resolution issue? Screen resolution is set at 1024x768; I've set it higher, but it doesn't seem to make any difference. If it will help, I can paste an example on a web page and attach the link here.

If someone can shed a little light on this, it would be greatly appreciated...seems like there should be some better way (other than one pixel at a time) to clean up the dirty edges of an image (which doesn't work all that great, anyway).

FYI: I'm not using TINY images: Most are in the several- hundred-pixels range.

Thanks in advance,
Garry

 

[apepp]

...what is the image interpolation method set to in the preferences?




andrew

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http://www.apepp.info

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[Garry2009]

Hi Andrew:

Well, that's a new one for me, but I found it: It set to Bicubic (Better). Other options are "Nearest Neighbor" and "Bilinear".

Again, I have a good example of what the issue looks like...if you think it will help, let me know and I'll stick onto a web-page. Looks like you can't just attach an image right here.

Thanks,
Garry

 

[apepp]

...send a screenshot link with the image at 100% magnification in photoshop...


andrew

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http://www.apepp.info

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[Garry2009]

Hi again, Andrew...please know that I very much appreciate you taking the time to bother with this.

Okay, let me give you some background so you have a good understanding of what's going on here. First off, I own a "virtual airline" that uses Microsoft Flight Simulator. I design the instruments (and instrument panels) for our aircraft using Photoshop 7. The way it works is this: You do the graphics for the panel itself and whatever stuff might go on it (think of a car dashboard). The "windshield" area has to be black (0,0,0) in Photohsop, which Flight Simulator sees as invisible. On an average panel, obviously there are many parts that are curved, angular, round, and so on...these are the problems. With the round gauges (instruments) I overcome the problem by "cheating" and placing them into a recessed circle with shading. In truth, the outside of most of my round gauges would look awful otherwise. Angular cuts are bad, curves are worse, and round is a nightmare to clean up even reasonably well.

You said to "send a screenshot", but I'm not clear on how to do that with this forum, and I'd surely make a mess of it. So I took a screenshot of the instrument panel I created for our Cessna 337 and stuck it on a web page on the airline website. This shows you everything: Embedded round gauges, the ragged vertical strut in the windshield, the top-curved edge of the dashboard (which, by the way, was a total mess when I first shaped it...I spent hours and hours getting it even THAT good by cleaning the junk away one pixell at a time).

As I said above: Gauges I can most often "cheat" by hiding them in a shaded cavity that's somewhat larger than the gauge-image, as you'll see. But I can't get away with that with anything that's in the "windshield" view...any gunk on the edges shows up like a broken nose.

Anyway...the link for that web page is:

http://www.lewisaire.com/Graphics.html

(I'll put it in attachments also; hopefully you'll get it okay).

Again...many, many thanks.
Garry

 

[apepp]

...if your drawing elements and then resizing them too much you will lose quality with every resize, especially when going from small to large...

...the exception to this is with editable text, shape layers (using the vector shape tools) or in photoshop CS2 or higher the use of smart objects...

...when typing text, ensure you have the anti-aliasing method set to something other than "None", and ensure your text is fully editable so it can be resized if needed...

...generally in photoshop you can get away with making elements bigger and then reducing in size, but the ideal is to have elements drawn to size, manipulating elements too much degrades the quality...

...personally for something like your doing I would use Illustrator for the most part and then use photoshop to add depth later. Failing that I would use Photoshops vector shape tools for the most part to make editing easier in the workflow...




andrew

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http://www.apepp.info

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[cebebe]

Hi Garry,
for sure, the best way for this kind of image is to use Illustrator who use vector instead of pixels, as said by apepp. That said, you can still use Photoshop BUT with a much greater resolution. Your image is set for a 1280 pixel-wide screen at 72 dpi, and that is correct for the final image, not to generate it. You should use at least 300 dpi or even 600 dpi to work with the image. In such a situation, I use 10240 pixel-wide (1280*8). OK, this generates a 260 MB file, but you will be able to rotate it without jaggies. When your image is what you want, you could resize it to the final 1280 pixel-wide with a good visual appearance. The bad news is you cannot expand your existing image, but do a new one at the high resolution first. That will be for the next time !

 

[Garry2009]

Thanks to both of you folks for the advice. I've done all of our aircraft instrument panels (22 of 'em) using just Photoshop but, as I said, it has been like trying to kill an elephant with a feather!

So...I'm on the hunt for Illustrator. I hate to spend the $$$, and I dread even more having to learn a new program, but I guess the phrase "right tool for the job" was created for a reason.

Question: If either of you have used both (Photoshop and Illustrator)...can you tell me if I should expect to go through a nightmare learning curve, or are they at least somewhat similar in functionality?

Thanks again, folks; the advice is much appreciated.
Garry

 

[cebebe]

Hi Garry, the vector approach is very different, so you will have to learn the bases, it's very important to reach a good result. Two things are positive : 1. you will be amaze by what you'll can do easily (hum or rather easily) and 2. the "palettes" are different from Photoshop but works near the same way, thanks to Adobe for that.
ps. if you are using the pen tool to make some selections in Photoshop, you are already used one vector tool !

 

[blueark]

Just thought I'd add another perspective here.

I'm not familiar with the way Flight Simulator works, but you mentioned that black areas are rendered invisible. If FS only removes pixels that are exactly 0,0,0, then it's quite likely that you'll continue having problems, regardless of what tool you use.

The issue could be to do with anti-aliasing. Usually, this is a good thing. If the edge of the windshield is brown, and it's against a black background, the appearance of the jaggies is reduced by filling in the edge pixels with a color somewhere in between black and brown, thus smoothing out the edge. Photoshop takes care of this automatically.

However, if you take away the black afterwards, then some of these half-black/half brown pixels will remain. It's also likely that they will end rather abruptly, which will re-introduce the jaggies again.

In this case, perhaps it may be more beneficial to work without anti-aliasing, at least around the windshield. Off the top of my head, I don't know what the easiest way of doing it would be (perhaps the pencil tool, maybe in conjuncion with path strokes, or even just working in Index Color mode for that part and convert it back to RGB later).