[Loki]

Danny's image was made for print - a poster. This requires especially high resolutions.
For film things are similar - a finished frame's resolution (before it's being recorded onto film) is usually 2048x1556. That doesn't mean though that you paint in that res. I prefer to work in (usually) double the resolution - that gives room for some tricks (fake camera move, etc) and also gives it the necessary sharpness.

The reason for choosing a high resolution for my personal paintingsa is to keep them versatile and the paintstrokes become more, don't know how else to describe it, "high quality".

phew

------------------
--
DigitalIllustrationOutpost - http://www.vigilante.net/~loki

[Danny]

Phire,

your question makes perfect sense. The reason for my images being so sharp has for a large part to do with the fact that my way of painting has evolved from pixeling back in the old days. Everything was setup and drawn using 'bare' pixels. No fancy anti-alias functions, or smudgy brushes. So basically your picture really started out as sharp as possible and you had to go back in the detail to anti-alias out the jaggies trying to leave in as much detail as possible.
What I'm trying to say is that with Software as powerfull as PhotoShop, digital artists these days (especially people new to the medium) tend to be somewhat 'spoiled' by tools such as smudge, dodge/burn, blur etc. I've read several posts to this forum where people recommend eachother not to use the smudge. Personally I use smudge a lot. It's just that these tools can be VERY powerfull but need to be controlled carefully to avoid that dreaded blur look.
I almost always work in the final resolution. I find that upscaling and then having to add more detail later is too time consuming. Downscaling? Never.

Phire, you were wondering how I managed with that Ppro200. Well, the answer is barely. The machine was topping out constantly. I think I burned up the Harddrive due to all the swapfile activity going on. As you say, the airbrush can't keep up. So I had to resort to using less CPU intensive tools. Mainly the paintbrush.
A nice trick is to use the marquee tool to select just the area you're working on. Speeds things up somewhat.

Loki's is right about hires adding quality to your paintstrokes. It is hard to explain, more of a feeling really..

Hope this helps...

Danny


------------------
[email protected]

[Phire]

Recently i read that post from Danny Geurtsen and i noticed he was working on a PPro 200 with 256mb of ram.. Then I noticed he was working in some resoultion like 10000x1000 i think? (Not sure i forgot). Ok now the deal with High resoultion is so that you can resize it down to have a sharper image right? (Im expecting an answer please :P) and the higher it is then the sharper the outcome will be. Well most of Danny's pics are really really sharp and i was wondering how it was possible to draw in that resoultion on just a PPro 200, i have a 433 with a excellent 2d card and 128mb of ram and it can barely keep up with the airbrush in photoshop in such high resoultions, and using the smudge tool, well forget about that :P. Craig mullins said he uses a Mac so i can understand that.

[Affected]

Actually, if you resize an image downwards a lot, there will be blurriness too. That's why it's best to do the resizing in a few steps: resize little by little and run unsharp mask at, say, 500% and a radius of 0,2. Of course, if you have fine details, say pixel-level, when you resize a pic 10000 pizels wide to one 1000 pixels wide, the detail will be lost no matter what you do. And besides, you can get sharp images in lower resolutions as well. No need to resize at all, actually.

------------------
Affected
http://affected.xs.mw