hello and help

[Buckaroo]

Hi there,

Nice little site you guys have here, I really enjoyed the tutorials section and the colour swatches are great.

I've been having a little trouble with blotchy spots in my final product and I'm not quite sure what I'm doing to cause this. I'm using PSP8 and then bright to reduce the image. Any ideas on how to remedy this would be greatly appreciated.

[Serval]

Can you show a that piece of the BMP file itself? (Don't use much JPG comression pls)
And with what settings do you save it in PSP?

It might be result of Bright itself but as well a combination of factors. But it's a bit hard to judge from this screenshot.

[BLOWHARD]

It looks like you've over-saturated areas. I don't know PSP but the same thing happens in Photoshop when you've gone too far. I think those areas will be spiked if you viewed the levels in Photoshop. AFAIK it's a visual form of distortion like that found when recording audio at too high a record level.
The smaller the file, the bigger the blotches will look. In larger sized files it is almost welcome as a form of noise to break up flat space.
This file is 512x or 1024x? Looks like 512.
Is the blotching on your base color layer, if you have one, or is it on one of the other layers?

[Hunhunter]

Do a before BRIGHT shot and after BRIGHT shot and compare the two. It shouldn't look anywhere near as bad as that if BRIGHT is working properly. My guess is that BRIGHT aint doing its thing

[Buckaroo]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the responses. The ingame bmp is a 1024 size, the blotching doesn't appear in the PSP template. To make sure I'm saving it properly for use with bright, let me run you through how I've been doing it.

Once I'm ready to try it out ingame and while it's still in "pspimage" form, I click save as "Corsairtest.bmp" so it saves as a single 24 bit layer in my bright folder. I then run bright with a batch file with the following command line in it: "Bright *.bmp -bmp -o"

I'll try a with and without bright run and see if that works (hadn't thought of that yet!)

I've also attached a copy of the full .bmp file as well as a close up of (one of) the trouble some areas!

Thanks again for all the assistance!

[Buckaroo]

Here's the With and Without Bright attempts, as you can see the one that went through bright is less "dotty" but both of them still have those lovely blotches

[adlabs6]

I've seen instances where a skins color palette exceeds what bright can output into 256 colors without having some obvious banding. But your skin is very narrow in color range so I am pretty sure that this is not the problem.

Something that might be an issue here could be the fact that the shading on your skin is using very subtle tones... so subtle that they perhaps cannot be accurately represented in 256 colors.

It's like when a digital photo of an open blue sky has very obvious blue banding. The gradient is so very fine that there aren't enough colors to show it properly. You can simulate this in your paint program very easily, with a big very feathered brush. Even in 24 bit color you can create bands when a large area is covered by a very narrow palette.

Possible solutions (if this is what's happening) are to increase the strenght of the surface effects layers so they have more contrast for bright to work with (thus shrinking the banding size down to a reasonable level). Alternately, you might try a layer of fine noise to break up the pattern and help the dither work more smoothly.

Hope this sounds helpful, if not post and I'll try to explain it better.

[Freelancer]

I've seen instances where a skins color palette exceeds what bright can output into 256 colors without having some obvious banding. But your skin is very narrow in color range so I am pretty sure that this is not the problem.

Something that might be an issue here could be the fact that the shading on your skin is using very subtle tones... so subtle that they perhaps cannot be accurately represented in 256 colors.

It's like when a digital photo of an open blue sky has very obvious blue banding. The gradient is so very fine that there aren't enough colors to show it properly. You can simulate this in your paint program very easily, with a big very feathered brush. Even in 24 bit color you can create bands when a large area is covered by a very narrow palette.

Possible solutions (if this is what's happening) are to increase the strenght of the surface effects layers so they have more contrast for bright to work with (thus shrinking the banding size down to a reasonable level). Alternately, you might try a layer of fine noise to break up the pattern and help the dither work more smoothly.

Hope this sounds helpful, if not post and I'll try to explain it better.

Adlabs6, these were my thoughts as well. One question that I would like to ask is.

Is the banding dynamic or static. In other words do these bands undulate as the plane is moving?

This effect looks really familiar but I can't put my finger on it right now.

Bukaroo, I'm not sure if it's bad forum ettiquette to ask this, but would it be possible to send me a copy of the .bmp before running it through bright. 24 bit would be fine.

Freelancer

[BLOWHARD]

Ah, if you will see here,

You'll notice your blotchy patches are on your art but not as noticeable.
In your post-Bright, you can see it has some compression artifacts on the skin but the blotches are noticeable in the pre-Bright version just as much.
After seeing your flat art and in game screens, I'm reasonably sure what is more noticeable in your screens is caused by video setting and/or game rendering, different gamma etc. Do you have any other way to view it? What I think we are seeing is a more contrasty version of your art.
Still, your original is blotchy, not bad looking in flat format, but blotchy. Those blotches are almost certainly a product over-saturation or "visual" distortion, the colors have been changed, modified, messed with too much. Was this by any chance a blue Corsair that you've changed to OD? This kind of thing is easy to get when changing one color to another.
How is your file set up? If in layers, selectively turn the layers off until you don't see any sign of blotchies or until you get to your base layer. Chances are, you'll be able to smooth it out but either way, you can see where the blotchies are coming from.

[BLOWHARD]

Oho, more post came in while I was typing away and messing with your images 256 colors? That's a good enough reason to see that blotchy stuff in your screens for sure