resolutions

[Richard Fox]

hi
i have a question about floaters and patterns, which is, if you create a
floater or pattern in a low resolution, does it perform well in
higher resolutions??

well?

just curious,
rfox

[Jinny Brown]

Richard,

That's a pretty vague question and to give you a good answer, we'd need
more details. The short answer is, it depends on a lot of variables.

1. Since you use the term Floater, are you using Painter 5.5 or earlier,
and if so which version?

2. If you're using Painter 7 and paint with the Liquid Ink brushes then
rescale the image up to a higher resoltion, the Liquid Ink will retain
crisp, anti-aliased edges. This is not true for most brush variants or
other work. However, a Water Color painting can be rescaled up to a
higher resolution, then the Canvas lifted to a Water Color and Wet
Entire Water Color applied. Depending on the currently active Water
Color brush variant and current Paper, the result can be to disperse
(and hide) pixelated edges and make the painting look nice again. In
earlier versions of Painter, neither of these options were available as
neither of these new brush technologies, Painter 7 Liquid Ink and Water
Color were available.

3. The entire image, not just a Floater or Layer is given a Resolution
(or ppi, pixels per inch) by the user when using File > New to open a
new Canvas is opened. The user can later change the Resolution using
Canvas > Resize. Depending on the original Canvas' Resolution, the
results will vary. What Resolution did you begin your new Canvas with,
and what dimensions in pixels. For instance, 800 x 800 pixels at 72 ppi
(low Resolution, good for the Web) or 1200 x 1200 pixels at 300 ppi
(high enough for printing a 4 x 4 inch image with good quality).

4. If an image that's 300 ppi is opened, then we use Art Materials >
Patterns > Capture Pattern and later use the Patterns menu option Check
Out Pattern to open the Pattern as an image, then use Canvas > Resize,
we'll see in the Resize dialog box that the Resolution of the captured
Pattern is 72 ppi.

5. What's the nature of your image? Is it areas of solid color only? Is
it a painting with hopefully smooth color transitions? Does it include
gradient fills? In other words, these conditions will affect whether or
not your image will appear noticeably pixelated (jagged edges along
curves and angled edges) and whether or not color transitions will
remain smooth. When Painter rescales an image to a higher resolution
(higher ppi, or more pixels per inch) after the fact of its creation,
Painter has to "guess" what colors to use for the extra/added pixels and
this can result in the image not having such nice color transitions..
the image can even look blurred.

Try describing in detail the specifics of your Painter version and your
project and maybe we can give you better answers.

Jinny Brown

PixelAlley Section Links Page at:
http://www.pixelalley.com/pixelalley-sections-pages.html
Painter Can forum at In Depth Discussions:
http://www.critical-depth.com/cgi-bin/idd/
______________________________________

[DLFrost]

>i have a question about floaters and patterns, which is, if you create a
>floater or pattern in a low resolution, does it perform well in
>higher resolutions??

In most cases, no, but there are a couple of special exceptions as Jin pointed
out. You should create all of your resources at larger sizes. Then if you
want smaller versions (to conserve memory, etc.) they are easy to make.
Painter will always allow you to downsize paper textures to match whatever
you're working on via. the scaling slider as well.

Floaters match the resolution of the document (canvas) as a whole. So if you
want higher resolution/quality you must start out your document larger at the
outset. (Some artists will start out smaller to sketch and then upsize before
starting detailed work.)

Doug Frost