Poor red conversion with BRIGHT?

[AH_DarkWolf]

Hi all, I posted over at the UBI forums about this, and someone suggested I try here, so here it goes.

I've been doing some skinning recently with some .PSD templates, but I'm finding often that when I convert them with BRIGHT for use in the game, certain red areas get kinda distorted. I'm wondering if this is typical, or if I'm not doing something right. Here are a couple of examples.





Sorry that the images are a little small. On the left is the image before BRIGHT conversion, on the right the image after. You can see the kind of distorted look in the center of the roundel, maple leaves and one of the tail flashes. Is there a way I can stop this happening?

I use Corel Photo-Paint to manipulate the .PSDs, then export the image as a .BMP. After trimming the image (if needed), I use BRIGHTER 2.2 (the version of BRIGHT with the windows interface) to convert the image to 8-bit.

DW

[Snake]

Try for shits and giggles the older version of Bright.

Charlie

[Serval]

Brighter is just an interface around Bright.
First: Save your BMP-file from Corel in 24 bit. That is very important. If you make it less, you lose colors there allready, which might disturb the results in Bright.

Now, when you go from 24 bit to 8 bit, you loose colors for a fact. So the quality will be less. Bright only gives better results then other methods.
Now what you see is that the quality in complex skins (read, lots of dirt and weathering), which have many colorshades, Bright has more difficulties to get good results. There are just too many colors to pick from. So, the color distances between the pixels become so big that they become visible to the eye. I assume that Bright also gives preference to the shades that are used most in the skin. Which is obvious not the red in your example, and many skins. On top of that Red is a pretty bright color, so that problems in that range jumps more to the eye then problems in the camo colors.

I hope this helps to understand the sometimes disappointing results.
A trick that might help you: Export your skin from Corel to 256 color GIF without transperancy.
Open the GIF and save that as 8-bit BMP where you use the exact the same pallette. This trick also gives much better color results then just safing as 8-bit BMP from Corel or Photoshop etc.

[Friendly_flyer]

Serval is right, this is a question about area. Colours covering large area get more shades than colours covering only small areas. I did a very quick red Hurricane just to illustrate the point:



Notice how the green and blue now have very few shades and looks a bit pixelated, while the red is beautifully shaded.

[adlabs6]

Yes, this is a long known issue. And no color converter can avoid this effect, since all of them must reduce the number of colors during the conversion.

From what I've seen, BRIGHT is quite successful in military skins because they frequently have a limited color range. Also that color range is most of the time a muted set of colors with limited shading.

Where conversion errors are worst, is when there is a wider range of basic colors in a skin, especially with shading effects. In these situations you often see 'banding' artifacts, or rougher transitions between colors, as is shown in these example images.

Going from my experience with BRIGHT, it looks like those samples are actually pretty good color conversions. I've seen much worse.

[AH_DarkWolf]

Ok, I think I do understand better how BRIGHT works. I just was'nt sure if it was something you have to live with, or if it was something I was not doing or not doing right.

I'll give your suggestions a try and see if I can't get a little better balance.

Thanks for your help and information guys, I appreciate it.

DW