[digitalism]

Hi all again. I'm trying to do some stuff pixel-by-pixel and some can't seems to understand how anti-aliasing works. When I try to anti-alias it, it turns out pretty weird but sometimes looks good. Can someone explain it to me please or point to a tutorial or something? Thanks!

[hew]

I used to have the same problem a lot, in most of the tools set the feather and anti-aliasing to zero, and also all anti-aliasing turns off in anything other than RGB mode, the pencil doesnt anti-alias .. use that


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What doesn't kill me, only postpones the inevitable.

[seas]

hey! for example in bryce theres a 'fast' antialiasing feature you can use. if only someone would do that as a plugin for photoshop. then you could draw pixel by pixel and just use the antialiasingfilter afterwards

[digitalism]

no no no... thats not what I meant. I mean i'm trying to draw a picture, and some parts of the pic I have to zoom in and do it pixel-by-pixel, which also means that I have to anti-alias manually and I don't know how to. So I need a tutorial or something.

[Frost]

Hi Digitalism,

Antialising is simply a technique to adapt infinite detail images to a grid of pixels. To understand antialising, open up an image in photoshop, and aply FILTERS/PIXELATE/MOSAIC with a cell size of, say, 8. What this does is that it combines and takes the average RGB values of an area of the image and creates a block of uniform color from those. Now, imagine that the image you started off with was something out of real life, and that each uniform RGB blocks after the filter application were pixels...

Antialising is done by taking into account fractions of colors of the neighbouring pixels, or fractions of colors of what you're trying to represent. If an object thinner than a pixel (for example, hair), then you must blend the hair RGB color with the percentage of space it takes inside that pixel volume. Oblique lines, shapes, or curves need antialising, you should try to keep vertical and horizontal lines clean without adding half-tone values between edges to keep things clean and hard looking (unless you specifically want to do otherwise).

To get the color value of a pixel in antialising, you need to estimate how much of each color is being represented inside one pixel, and averaging their RGBs. For instance, if you have a red circle (RGB 255,0,0) on a cyan (RGB 0,255,255) background, the antialiasing colors will go from red to cyan, crossing thru pure grey ((RGB 255,0,0) + (RGB 0,255,255)) / 2 = (RGB 128,128,128). It may seem odd to have pure grey in such bright colors, but those are the correct values, and it is right.

I hope this helped... I need to get back to work...

frost.