Cobblestone Pixilation

Hey guys, I’ve got a problem with one of my maps; when I export it in high resolution everything comes crystal clear, except for the cobblestone titles. It comes out pixilated beyond use. At first I thought it was the fill bitmaps in general, but I realized the first part of my map, dark flagstone, came out fine. Alittle pixilated but nothing you wouldn’t expect.

Have I committed a newbie blunder, or is the Cobblestone fill unsuited for high resolution? (Looking at printing it out with each grid 1 inch by 1 inch)

Comments

  • The bitmap PNG images should have four resolution versions - VH (very high), HI (high), LO (low) and VL (very low), and CC3 usually picks the appropriate one depending on zoom. There should be a little hourglass button on the left side next to the Sheets and Effects button. Click on that to get the Display Speed Settings dialog box, then click on Fixed Bitmap Quality and either High or Very high. See if that makes a difference.
  • Looks like it's already set on very high, so I set the fill style resolution on Very High to 200.00 and it fixed the problem (while doubling the file size, heh) Many thanks! Curious though, what do you guys generally set your fill style resolution to?
  • I usually leave Automatic Bitmap Quality selected and haven't run into a problem yet - I like to export my work from PNG using File -> Save As and then selecting Rectangular Section PNG from the Save As Type pull down. Since the PNGs generated by CC3 are a little weird and not everyone can see them when you post them online, I open the PNG exported from CC3 in Fireworks and export that as a PNG from Fireworks which fixes the problem. You could use another image program like GIMP (which is free) if you don't have Fireworks.

    You also might want to try exporting as BMP or PNG (rather than JPG) from CC3, then converting to other image formats (PNG, JPG, GIF) in an another program like Fireworks or GIMP to see if that improves your results.
  • To reduce file size I sometimes do this in Irfanview:

    1) Import bmp, png, etc. into Irvanview.

    2) select Image Menu -> Decrease color depth

    3) in Custom I type in 202 for number of colors. Click Okay.

    4) save as or save the file. I usualy get a file reduction size. Sometimes it doesn't work.

    I chose 202 as the minimum number to avoid speckles, crud, etc. in the resulting file. Using less than 200 didn't work for me. Well, it did with bmps and pngs i created in CC2. I incremented it by 1 color until it looked good again for CC3 graphic files. What you come up with for color numbers might vary from what I came up with.

    I find this works best on png files, but works most of the time on bmps.

    [Channeling a certain someone] Don't put lossy jpgs on your web sites.
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