http://www.dinofarmgames.com/a-pixel-artist-renounces-pixel-art/

This article is about the author's reasons to move away from pixel art to modern high-def graphics. There are some interesting thoughts about game art with numerous examples.

The comments are worth reading too. The author doesn't mention the visual differences between old and modern display hardware, but someone brings this point up. 

Every singleplayer Quake map played in a continuous marathon-like live stream (by multiple people), excluding the speedmaps (which are reserved for Daz!!). For extra exposure/attention it could even feature donations for some charitable cause. Kind of like the SDA events. OR all played by Daz and the donations used for the then-necessary psychologist sessions - which, of course, would be live-streamed as well! 

yupp http://www.quakeexpo.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=5 

 

http://rickyt23.com/files/gimp-downsampling-looks-like-ass.html

Or am I missing something?

To me I get jaggies and artifacts from the fence on all images except image 5. 

Nice job picking the perfect ugly edge case for resampling. Patterns like that are hard to downsample. I guess PS detects them and blurs before resampling. 

Aren't "Sinc" and bicubic supposed to be the same thing? Guess Photoshop has some funky stuff going on in addition to the regular bicubic resampling to get better results. 

Photoshop does it correctly.

GIMP does it incorrectly.

My understanding is that if you reduced the size of an image like that by a factor of 4 then 16 pixels will become 1 pixel. The colour of that pixel *should* be dictated by the median colour of all 16.

What I see happening in GIMP is that this does not happen. What I see happening in Photoshop is that this does actually happen.

I mean....

Well here is the original image anyway:

http://wilmingtonfencecontractors.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/aluminum_fence_4.jpg 

Well, give it a try. Write that algorithm you described and see what happens. ;) 

Well I have oversimplified bicubic downsampling algorithm, there is another factor to the equation regarding the pixels furthest from the centre having less providence.

But you are also missing something. I mean look at the tree in the background. Everyone looks at the fence, but look at the tree! 

the gimp results are bad. Gimp also has trouble with test patterns like this: http://www.komar.org/faq/camera/auto-focus-test/micro-auto-focus-test-2.gif

I don't have photoshop, but Mac OS X's Preview app can resize that down with no artifacts appearing.

I do love free software and all, and on the bright side, someone motivated can fix it and send in a patch :-/ 

*prominence 

I downloaded the original image and ran a resize operation with the convert tool from ImageMagick. This was the command line:

convert aluminum_fence_4.jpg -resize 300x225 fenceout.jpg

And this is the result:

http://i.imgur.com/wJXnSD3.jpg

It looks similar to the good result from Photoshop to me. Thus, I don't think there are any fancy content-aware algorithms at work here.

I'd recommend adding ImageMagick to your toolbox.

http://imagemagick.com/script/index.php 

playing with it a bit, found this guide which recommends the following:

convert ~/Downloads/aluminum_fence_4.jpg -colorspace RGB -resize 300x225 -colorspace sRGB fenceout.png

result. This is better than photoshop I think? Note the left side of the fence doesn't go to a black blur as much. 

Hm, I thought moire artifacts were normal to expect from resampling if you did not add blurring beforehand.

Checkout graphicsmagick, there rarely is a reason to prefer imagemagick to it. It is much faster and stable. 

I had no idea IM had liquid rescaling though, that looks fun http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/resize/animate_lqr.gif 

That's interesting.

I haven't experimented with Photoshop's other re sampling algorithms. There is also 'Bicubic Sharper' for down-scaling images.

But yes - these is a difference with the images - Photoshop seems to be as smooth as I.M. but it makes the fence uprights and the branches of the tree look thicker than I.M. weird eh?! 

I chose ImageMagick in favor of GraphicsMagick a few years ago because IM had better support than GM for certain SVG features at the time. However, since they are invoked with different commands, you can easily install both on your system, and use whatever works best. Good call, Spirit. 

"I chose ImageMagick in favor of GraphicsMagick a few years ago because IM had better support than GM for certain SVG features at the time. However, since they are invoked with different commands, you can easily install both on your system, and use whatever works best."

Or, you know, use Photoshop. :P 

Photoshop is a bit expensive. :) 

$10 a month if you take the cheapest subscription. But yeah, it's not free. 

More like $120 for a yearly subscription, you can't get $10 for just one month for instance. It's still pretty expensive for any kind of casual use in my opinion, there are lots of good apps you can just buy for less than $120.

I wouldn't pay $10 to resize an image anyways. ;) 

Did they change it? Are you locked in for a year now or something? Lame... 

around �400 per year!