Noseart, shrinking and resolution

[tomaz]

I'm trying to add custom noseart to a custom skin. I've found some great war period pinups and can create the basic design which looks good. However, when I shrink them down to fit on the aircraft skin a lot of detail is lost and the resolution of the noseart is quite blurry.
Is there a way of re-sizing an image and maintaining it's "sharpness" and detail?

Thanks.
Tomaz

[BLOWHARD]

Not really The only way to keep as much detail as possible is to size it on your aircraft and then go back to the original art and use the <image size> window to make your nose art the correct size. It will be a little sharper than if you drag the art on to your plane and resize the object that way.
The other way is to make new simplified art and reduce it...but that's a lot of work.
You can also try the sharpen tool but you'll only want a small amount of sharpening so right after using the filter, fad the filter by a percentage, 30-40% maybe.
That's as much as I know, any other tricks guys?

[adlabs6]

I recall a few cases where I had this problem. I redrew the noseart by hand to get something that had what 'looked' like better detail.

[Serval]

Only thing you can try is apply the "Unsharp mask" filter to the layer with the noseart.
Play with the sliders. Best results are often with one slider almost to the left and the other more to the right.
Like the first one somewhere between 50 and 150 and the second one around 0.3 (that's a typical trick to improve sharpness of photos made with some type of digital cameras).
Don't overdo, and play with the preview option to judge the result
But still due to the small image the result may be disappointing.

[turnipkiller]

I remember someone mentioning this problem in Ubi. I took a quick look to see if I could find the thread but I couldn't, so I'll see if I can recount it from memory.

Open the image you want to resize in Internet Explorer. From what I remember, resize the IE window and the picture will resize itself to fit in the window in the same proportion as a full screen window, then copy it from the IE window.

I have no idea if this actually works, I didn't try it, but I think some people had success with it. I hope this helps.

[tomaz]

Thanks gents;
appreciate the feedback. I'll try these suggestions.
cheers,
Tomaz