Could you feed us some Photoshop tips, DexX? I'm trying to save the fuzzy bear and doctor pix so that Brad can include them if he wants to, but I'm having trouble with jaggy edges. I tried selecting as a border and doing a controlled blur, but when I saved as a transp. gif the jaggies came back. How do I get the smooth edge to stay?

I thought such any tips you provide might be generally useful.

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

Rub some vaseline on your monitor.

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100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

Smear some around your ass, while you're at it. Tobor will be by around 5.

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100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

Seriously, though. I haven't used Photoshop much. Just JASC Paintshop Pro. And you can also output .jpg and .gif files from Flash. I know Flash uses vector images rather than bitmapped ones, so the lines will always be sharp. If you have the option of anti-aliasing objects, text, etc. then do it.

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100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

Great. Now my pink little sphincter is gonna have the jaggies.

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

Sad fact number one - character without thick black borders don't work well.

I wrote up a set of instructions about this a few months back, but it has sunk without trace into the depths of the forum-topics-no-longer-on-the-first-page. The main trick is to turn off antialiasing and crank up the tolerance threshold when you pour in the flat background colour. I hope that makes sense. If not, email them to me and I will have a go at it.

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Thanks. I'll try it on my own first.

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

Here is how I do it...

Draw a picture on white paper, making sure the outlines are nice and thick, then scan it in.

Fiddle with the tone balance so the white paper is really white and the black is very black, leaving a fairly sharp graduation between.

Save it!

Copy the whole image into the clipboard.

Colour it in, ignoring the fact that a lot of flood-fills and area selections partially obliterate the black lines.

Once the colouring is finished, paste the original black-and-white image back over the top, and use some kind of layer effect so that thew white is ignored, and only the thick black lines are superimposed over your coloured image. (I use either "If Darker" or "Texturise", whichever works best for each image.)

While still in 24-bit colour mode, reduce the image to the correct size (practical maximum 125 wide by 200 high, but try to keep it down to 110x175 or so).

Convert the image to paletted 256-colour, making sure you use an optimised palette. The standard VGA palette is shitty! You are unlikely to need more than 32 colours, and most of mine have either 16 or 24.

Very important - TURN OFF ANTIALIASING, just for this next step.

Flood-fill the white background with a bright colour not present elsewhere in your image, with antialiasing turned off and the tolerance turned up really high (around 60-80%). You will almost certainly get the bright colour leaking into your character in at least one spot, so zoom in on the leaky area and look for holes in the black outline. When you find them, undo the flood-fill and manually draw in a few black pixels to plug the leak. Fill the background again and see if you get more leaks. Repeat the process until you are doing the flood-fill with at least 60% (but preferably 75% or higher) tolerance and no leaks.

Test the quality of the bordering by editing the palette manually. Find the background colour you are going to make transparent and change it to #FFFFFF - pure white. If that looks okay, change it to #000000 - pure black. If both of them look okay, change it again to an inoffensive colour that contrasts with the character.

Save the image as a GIF and set the background colour to be transparent.

The whole process is harder with any kind of image without black borders.

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Here's Descolada. I emailed them to him for approval, and ig he likes them I will send them on to JohnnyBrad.

He's lucky - he got a beer. :)

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Three new characters (well, two characters and a prop) that I scribbled up tonight. None of them are even close to being finished - these are just the drawn-inked-and-scanned images waiting to be coloured and optimised. Opinions?

I wanted to add a kangaroo (I know, I am a sucker for punishment) but my first sketch of her had such a nasty expression on her face, I just had to add the gun. That is not a steaming cowpat on the left, either, but a pile of smoking ashes. I will probably do two versions - one as you see it, and another with just the top of the pile showing, for characters without visible feet. The guy in the middle was done on the spur of the moment. The strip creator needs more insects. :)

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BEEEER!!!!! And I'm THIN! Kick ass! :)

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"Fascist Clay was my most favorite totalitarian boxer!" - Indie Rock Pete from Diesel Sweeties

And there is my problem. Being a total mope I can't draw so I'm scanning ancient images (you may remember some of the Fuzzy Bear photoshop comics). Well, Fuzzy and Santa don't have black borders. In fact fuzzy has gray-near-white borders.

Brad said he might use them so I'm interested in getting it done but I'm not having much luck yet. I'll take a closer look at these direction and try some more.

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

quote:

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Here's Descolada. I emailed them to him for approval, and ig he likes them I will send them on to JohnnyBrad.

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You also look like you're about to rip some lady's cloths off with your teeth. Go get 'em tiger.

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

And there is my problem. Being a total mope I can't draw so I'm scanning ancient images (you may remember some of the Fuzzy Bear photoshop comics). Well, Fuzzy and Santa don't have black borders. In fact fuzzy has gray-near-white borders.

This might work:

Paste the image onto a black background. Then select it again using the "smart edge" (or equivalent) selection tool-- but set the tool to "feather" the selection a couple of pixels. Cut, and there's your black outline. I would also toggle antialias on the selection tool.

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What others say about boorite!

Is it me or does that look like a fly protecting a pile of dung from an armed Kangaroo...

That is to say I like this and hope to see them in the database soon.

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

the fly needs a quirk

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Who knows what fear lurks in the hearts of men? MIKE BOBSICO KNOWS! And if you give him a decent tip when he delivers your mail , he might tell you.

Or a quirt.

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I am a delicate fucking flower. https://beacons.ai/jesskent

Can you make one of me, Dexx?

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I am a delicate fucking flower. https://beacons.ai/jesskent

It would be cool if DexX made a character for all of us.

I'm sure if there was a crabby character he would be featured in all of drexle's comics.

well the little kid suffices for those

but i wanna see a piccie of me

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Who knows what fear lurks in the hearts of men? MIKE BOBSICO KNOWS! And if you give him a decent tip when he delivers your mail , he might tell you.

I have been both busy and lazy (Desco sent me his pic to be drawn up in March, as I recall) but I strive to provide a character for every forum regular who wants one. There are some rules to follow, and if you stick to them I will not have to injure you:

1 - Find a good clear pic of yourself. Colour is best, but you can send a B&W one if you tell me the colour of your hair and complexion.

2 - Make sure the file is no bigger than 80K, though I would prefer sub-20K pics if possible. I'm still stuck with a bloody 33.6Kb/s modem here... *sigh*

3 - Email me a pic to dexx@ihug.com.au .

4 - In your email, tell me what you want your caricature to be wearing (including colours), and what pose you want them in (arms folded, hands in pockets, holding a rubber chicken, whatever).

5 - Don't be too upset when you see how monstrous my interpretation of you looks.

For the sake of a constant look, all of them will be half-body (from the fly upwards, basically) so don't ask for a pose that will make that impossible. Please don't make your request here on the forum, as I want to have an email that I can keep handy and read while offline.

If you can't get hold of a photo of yourself (or don't like the ones you have, or don't want to send any) you can send me a _very_ detailed description. This method is a pain in the arse, but I have done it before (Johnny's one). If you have sent me a pic or description before and I have never drawn you, please send again. I have now done all of the ones I have in my email (except Gabe's and NeoVid's, which I promise I will do soon...).

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quote:

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It would be cool if DexX made a character for all of us.

I'm sure if there was a crabby character he would be featured in all of drexle's comics.

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