Preserved Topic: How to up the quality of blown up images?

I work with sprites and video game images a lot. I seen some pic on the internet of of enlarged sprites that are modified to apear less jaggy . instead of a steping ladder the lines are smooth. Some emulators like zsnes do that through a filter called eagle engine.
Is there a way for photoshop to do that?

mhmmmmm are you looking for something like this???
unfortunately www.phong.com is down at the moment because he had a ass kickin' tutorial there
maybe you should use a blur filter

-THE SPACE-

From what I've seen, the eagle engine does something very similar to the median filter in photoshop (filters>noise>median). A blur would give a soft edge, eagle gives a sharp smooth edge. There are lots of ways to smooth out jaggies, but they all depend on what exactly you are trying to smooth. Upscaling is never going to produce anything particularly impressive though.. but that's a book's worth of discussion all to itself.


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Is probably circling back for another try.

The anti-aliasing done by the eagle engine probably uses a proprietary algorithm to smooth out the jaggies. The best you can do is try gaussian blur and then try the sharpen or unsharp mask filter.

If you've seen the eagle engine's output... it looks very much like the median filter. It doesn't do what like blin flitering in openGL does where it samples out the textures... it tends to blend them into solid smooth shapes. That's why I was saying that blurring wouldn't produce the same effect because it would create a fuzzy edge. Eagle creates somthing more akin to cellshaded objects. Large pieces of flat color with sharp clean edges. I'm sure it IS proprietary, but nothing is unreproducable


Whatever doesn't kill us...
Is probably circling back for another try.

the median seams to help, but I have a noob problem here, how do I turn off the anti aliasing when the image is blown up?

Turn OFF anti-aliasing... uuhhhh... why would you want to do that?? I don't think you CAN turn off anti-aliasing during scale operations... What Photoshop (and basically any raster application) does when it upscales an image is called interpolation. It interpolates the data that isn't there that it has to create. Basically when you scale up, you have to add pixels that didn't exist, so the interpolation engine "guesses" and puts pixels in that it thinks should be there. Kind of an average "guess" between the surrounding pixels as they space apart. I don't know the exact algorithms or specific proprietary methodology that Photoshop uses to do this.. but it's inherant to the nature of what you're doing.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish... maybe if you posted some examples of what you're doing we could offer some more concrete advice as to how to achieve it.


Whatever doesn't kill us...
Is probably circling back for another try.

If you don't want to get the anti-aliasing effect when you do the scaling up, you can choose to resample the images with 'nearest neighbor' instead of 'bicubic' which is the default.

However, I can't see how that would help you, since you want the images to appear less jaggy...

Ah.. yeah, good point Zox. Having never WANTED to turn off anti-aliasing.. I forgot about those settings. The interpolation engine is still going to have to build average pixels when it upscales, but that will definately change the way it looks.


Whatever doesn't kill us...
Is probably circling back for another try.

Well my beef with anti aliasing is that when I blow up a image of gambit from x-men vs street fighter the anti aliasing makes him look out of focus
and when you use median on that it comes out like the supereagle picture but keeps the blurriness of the original enlarged picture.
My goal is to blow up the sprite and "super eagle" it so it still looks sharp, thus giving it a "LOOK"

I don't have any web space to put my pic up here right now, but if you want to get the idea just get a sprite from a fighting game enlarge it and median it and it looks like what I have .

Well, give turning down the interpolation settings a shot. Also, try changing the order of operations. Try taking the original picture, apply some unsharp then median, THEN upscale.. or median and unsharp then upscale, etc. Sometimes you'll get the results you want if you mix and match your operations.


Whatever doesn't kill us...
Is probably circling back for another try.