Dungeon Master Forum

So here's the thing. I'm using Photoshop 6.0 to put DM graphics together. The problem is that photoshop, by default, will fuzz up the edges of selections etc. meaning that when I convert to bitmap with the obligatory 255000255 background, it leads to a purple fuzz around the edges of my graphic in-game. I can fix it by opening the bitmap in MS Paint and going around the edges by hand, but I was wondering if those with more experience in this sort of thing could pass on some tips. Is there an easy/easier way to do this?

first of all, forget using ms paint : you have a pen tool and eraser with pen mode in photoshop.

supposing you have a flat (no more layers) image with the pink background and the ugly fuzzy edges around your bitmap, here's my method (there must be a better one) : select the pink zone with magic wand + high tolerance (try around 200) + uncheck adjacent pixels. using pink as background color do CTRL-Backspace to fill it.
you wil probably have some lonely pink pixels while testing in game, locate them and delete them with the eraser (in pen mode !)

There's loads of better ways of doing this in Photoshop, but I'm at work and don't have time to write them all here. Here's a couple though:

A simple solution would be to not use soft edges on your brushes -- i.e. set all brushes to hardness=100% or use pencil instead of brush. That way you'll never be painting extra semi-transparent pixels.

Alternatively, select all and copy merged everything -- paste into a new layer. Experiment with the Threshold command to remove antialiasing and create a pure black/white image; then use that as a mask for your original full colour fuzzy image over the pink background. You'll need to experiment, but this might help.

Cow's has some other ways of doing this too.

By the way, if you're creating graphics for the original 16 colour DM, soft brushes aren't a good idea anyway: the palette is so limited you're better off 'pixel pushing' with a hard pencil tool.

when doing RTC graphics I used the pencil for masking.. there is no antialiasing in it. The other thing was using things like the polygon lasso tool with antialiasing turned off.

Other than that I painted everything as I always do and painted it at a size around double what I wanted it to be to make sure little errors vanished when I shrunk it. Then once it was it's normal size.. *THEN* I masked it and saved that as the final version. (though you should save a few versions just incase you need to go back a few steps)

moo

cowsmanaut wrote:The other thing was using things like the polygon lasso tool with antialiasing turned off.

Ah, cunning. That'll probably be the thing for me. I'm creating images elsewhere, bringing them into Photoshop, editing them, and getting stuck at that point, so i imagine the lasso will be the thing to go for.

Thanks for all the good advice, guys. I was really stuck and banging my head against the wall. I've been happily doing big, inprecise photoshop images for years and not having to worry about this sort of thing, so I was dismayed to be unable to find an elegant solution when doing small, precise, fussy stuff.

cowsmanaut wrote:moo

Quite so.

Have roughly the same problem like Someone Else's Problem!
hopefully I can tackle it with the advice given here!

Of course, if you're creating graphics for RTC or DSB, you can just keep the soft edges intact and save an alpha channel with the image...

I will look alpha channel up, don't know what that really is -transparency? still a bmp?
sounds like the way to go to get rid of that pink...

Right. It's a transparency value encoded for each pixel in the image. You don't need the pink any more because you simply set a pixel to be 100% transparent.