Well i'm new at skinning, i've made a few skins but yesterday i was talking to some guys about my newer skin and how when you convert it to JPG for upload to lfs server it looses quality, the decals and logos looks crappy now:arge: so i was sad to see all my work turned to crap, and even more since lfs resizes the skin to 512 for others to upload.:doh:

I know this has been discussed before and maybe you skinners out there already know this (but i didn't and i just want to share it).
I use paint shop pro, and i work at 2048, when the skin is done i resize it to 1024 and then save it as JPG.
What i did was, go to "save as" choose JPG and then in "options" set compression factor to "1", by default this was on "20" so the final JPG size was 132k, now with this set to "1" the JPG size is 360k (still under 400k requierement by LFS for upload) and the skin looks so much better, it doesn't look as good as it does when on 2048 of course but it really does look better.

Again, i'm a skinner noob :noob: but i did a search on the forums to find answers about the skin loose quality issue and i didn't find anything, so here you go, if you didn't know about this now you do, and if you already did why didn't you tell me? :chairs:

And for photo shop users i'm sure you have a similar option there on the "save as" window.

Hope that helped

Eh, I guess thats quite commonly known, but nevertheless.

Quote from AndroidXP :

Eh, I guess thats quite commonly known, but nevertheless.

Yea i figured somebody was gonna say that but nobody told me that the 1000 times i asked and couldn't find anything on the forums either, oh well, at least is posted now

Welcome to the forums, Art! You never asked me, so... Check out this site if you want to get into skinning http://skinnerz.proboards26.com/index.cgi. Lots of really good stuff there. There are 2048x2048 skin templates with wireframes and each part of the car on different layers, really nice. You can see tons of great work from awesome skinners there as well.

C-ya on the servers .

Hey, its much better to post up stuff like this you find useful as there will always be other people about who can benefit from the info. If everyone was worried about posting stuff in case they were told it was obvious/old news/posted 97 times before, the forums would be a quiet lonely place, filled only with the echos of the cold desert winds and the occasional tumbleweed rolling past the burnt out shell of a dilapidated XFR. Brrrrr.......

Quote from al heeley :

Hey, its much better to post up stuff like this you find useful as there will always be other people about who can benefit from the info. If everyone was worried about posting stuff in case they were told it was obvious/old news/posted 97 times before, the forums would be a quiet lonely place, filled only with the echos of the cold desert winds and the occasional tumbleweed rolling past the burnt out shell of a dilapidated XFR. Brrrrr.......

lol amen.

And yea i've checked that site before thx . I made my own layered skin file tho, works for me

yeah i use fotoshop for my skins, altho got anooyed with my skins so ust deleted aload i was workin on but nvm, anyway thats gettin off topic.
On fotoshop wen save as jpeg just gives sliding option 1 - 12 of quality, i fond 12 is always inder size limit soo all good

Actually that surprises me, if I do a 1024 skin and save as max (12) quality in photoshop it's always over 450k, normally about 650k. I reduce to 10, no real big quality loss and it squeezes under the 450k bar.

There's a correlation between the complexity of the image and the size of the resulting .jpg....more decals, colours, details etc bigger file. Some of mine have been over 400kb when saved at max quality some haven't, depends how much effort you've made with the skin

Quote from Smax :

There's a correlation between the complexity of the image and the size of the resulting .jpg....more decals, colours, details etc bigger file. Some of mine have been over 400kb when saved at max quality some haven't, depends how much effort you've made with the skin

Yeah tru, but wen i started skinnin i skined mine at 512 x 512 saved it as jpeg, n lost the photoshop thing, wen founf out needed 1024 for online i jsut increased jpeg size and no problems like that.

I did this skin http://www.lfsforum.net/attach ... tid=5043&d=1137084655 at 1024 and didnt have ne trouble. Not reli that detailed but it was replica so didnt want to add what wasnt there all ready

And for any GIMP users, by previewing the image when your exporting to JPEG, the file size is shown. By playing with tha advanced options you can easily get to just under 400kb to preserve the quality.

Another note to mention about quality vs. file size. If you use a template that was made with a black mask layer which hides all the unskinnable stuff, such as the Pro templates by Bunta I mentioned up there ^^, the mask will make your file size smaller (since the mask is black and black would create the smallest file size) so you can save with better quality while achieving below 400k.

Quote from al heeley :

Actually that surprises me, if I do a 1024 skin and save as max (12) quality in photoshop it's always over 450k, normally about 650k. I reduce to 10, no real big quality loss and it squeezes under the 450k bar.

Just to clarify. It is a 400K limit before the car images will be compress by LFS.

Quote from mrodgers :

Another note to mention about quality vs. file size. If you use a template that was made with a black mask layer which hides all the unskinnable stuff, such as the Pro templates by Bunta I mentioned up there ^^, the mask will make your file size smaller (since the mask is black and black would create the smallest file size) so you can save with better quality while achieving below 400k.

That's not entirely true... In fact, painting wide surfaces of the image with the exact same color code makes the image smaller, and it doesn't matter if it's black, white, pink or something else... It's just that you can save one colour code for many pixels...

yep; as i showed back in RSC about that layer that hides the unnecesary 'stuff' which will decrease your filesize.. now black isnt always the answer, the more you have of that specific color is the best way to do it; so if your car is green.. then make that hiding layer .. green using the droplet to get the most used color and just start trying different colors to get the lowest amount of space

Also, if you have the file as a png, then open up that and resize and save as a jpg that results in a smaller file size.

Hard to tell from such a small screenshot.

Looks like you have enabled half texture res or something like this.
Or, your GFX card has set some high mipmap bias in the control panel.
Can you try to collect some data and post that here?

its a setting in the the ATI Catalyst Control Center. IIRC it was Mipmap Detail Level (set it all the way to the right for quality) that corrected the problem for me.

oh, and photoshop users, use "save for web" instead of "save as". the graphics are further optimized over "save as", and result in smaller file sizes with the same or better quality.

instead of using the arbitrary scale of 1-12, it uses 1-100, with 70-90 quality being the sweet spot of quality/filesize, depending on the complexity of the image. and going over 95 is not recommended as it does not offer any significant quality increase, but dramatically increases filesize.

oh, and lfs world accepts car skins at 512x512 or at 1024x1024. and for use on your own machine, you can use skins as large as 2048x2048.

helmet skins are an exception and must be 512x512 on lfs world.

Quote from PSR_Diablo :

Yea i figured somebody was gonna say that but nobody told me that the 1000 times i asked and couldn't find anything on the forums either, oh well, at least is posted now

Confucious say, "He who ask a question is fool for 5 minutes, he who never ask question is fool for ever"