Is there a way to generate dither patterns?

[Herbert123]

I am trying to clone this workflow in Photoline:
http://danfessler.com/blog/hd-index-pai ... -photoshop

However, the one thing I am struggling with is generating custom dithering patterns. I can convert a filled layer to a monochrome one, and select a dither algorithm, but I was just wondering if there is a more elegant approach?

I would love to see an adjustment layer that works like the save for web function, and would allow us to choose the dithering method and number of colours for a layer. In short, an "indexed colour" adjustment layer, with full control over the indexed palette.

[Hoogo]

you could use a vector layer filled with a texture instead. There are already some textures with 2 colors in the list, though I don't think that it's really necessary to restrict to 2 colors here. Double-click on a texture to open the texture editor.

[Herbert123]

Yes, I tried that as well. It sort-of works, but the patterns have to be made in advance, and cannot be non-destructive (at least, not for dithering).

Thinking more about it, it would be excellent to have an adjustment layer that creates a reduced (indexed) version of a layer - because even the technique described on the earlier mentioned page is limited to only one gradient. It would also be extremely useful for web designer/developers to see how their work will look like before exporting. And great for game art creators.

[Hoogo]

The texture of a vector layer can still be changed later. Select the dither layer and double-click on the fill color.

[bkh]

Yes, I tried that as well. It sort-of works, but the patterns have to be made in advance, and cannot be non-destructive (at least, not for dithering).

I'd just create one master dithering layer and use virtual copies of it elsewhere. In that way, you can change all dithering patterns at once.

Btw., if you want to create "smooth" transitions via dithering, you'll have to use dithering patterns with various grey levels – if your dithering pattern is monochrome, you'll only have one dithered step between the solid colours. Noise-like textures seem to work well, but I guess it's hard to produce more "regular" textures suitable for dithering automatically.

Cheers

Burkhard.

[photoken]

Just my opinion about the end result: If one wants a "dirty" brush (meaning that one can paint with colours mixed together), then that person's technique seems awkward, old-fashioned and kludgy.

Far more elegant and direct is the method used by Corel's PaintShopPro. It requires a special "Art Media" layer type, and a colour Mixer Palette.

Here's the Mixer Palette with a blue and a yellow colour mixed together:

PSP Mixer Palette.png

And here's the resulting image: The colour was sampled from one of the mixed areas of the Mixer Palette; the "Oil Paint" brush was used on the left, and the "Water Color" brush was used on the right:

PSP Art Media Layer.jpg

I think PL has a great opportunity to add functionality that is the best available anywhere, and not limit itself to only attempting to copy Photoshop, especially if PS doesn't have certain capabilities....

[Herbert123]

Just my opinion about the end result: If one wants a "dirty" brush (meaning that one can paint with colours mixed together), then that person's technique seems awkward, old-fashioned and kludgy.

No, no, you misunderstand - the whole point of the technique as described in that link is to emulate a hand-pixeled pixel-art look.

Examples are:
http://fool.deviantart.com/gallery/
http://www.armyoftrolls.co.uk/website/h ... folio.html

This is to achieve a retro look in artwork for games. His technique converts higher fidelity painted artwork into a kind of simulated low-fidelity dithered retro game art. The author is aiming for a very particular look with this technique.

I think PL has a great opportunity to add functionality that is the best available anywhere, and not limit itself to only attempting to copy Photoshop, especially if PS doesn't have certain capabilities....

That is why I was suggesting an adjustment layer that allows us to non-destructively convert any layer/layer group/layer mask to a version with indexed colours, and a choice of dithering methods (same as the ones available in the reduction method for web export). It would allow web designers to more easily preview and prepare web graphics as well. I know of no other applications that offers such an option.

[photoken]

No, no, you misunderstand - the whole point of the technique as described in that link is to emulate a hand-pixeled pixel-art look.

Oh yeah, I freely admit that I don't understand that at all! Thanks for the links to the examples, but I still don't get it. What does "hand-pixeled pixel-art" mean?

This is to achieve a retro look in artwork for games. His technique converts higher fidelity painted artwork into a kind of simulated low-fidelity dithered retro game art. The author is aiming for a very particular look with this technique.

Yep, there are a million "looks" out there. Can't say that I give a <expletive deleted> about low-fidelity, dithering, or retro game art, but that's just me....

That is why I was suggesting an adjustment layer that allows us to non-destructively convert any layer/layer group/layer mask to a version with indexed colours, and a choice of dithering methods (same as the ones available in the reduction method for web export). It would allow web designers to more easily preview and prepare web graphics as well. I know of no other applications that offers such an option.

Ehh.... All that leaves me cold, to be honest. I always want to keep moving forward to higher quality. If PL offered the kind of mixed colour painting I showed with PSP, couldn't the high quality image from that always be degraded later to achieve that "look"?

[Herbert123]

No, no, you misunderstand - the whole point of the technique as described in that link is to emulate a hand-pixeled pixel-art look.

Oh yeah, I freely admit that I don't understand that at all! Thanks for the links to the examples, but I still don't get it. What does "hand-pixeled pixel-art" mean?

When computers were only able to display a limited colour palette, and resolutions were also limited (for example, 320x256@32 colours on the Amiga) game graphics were created by painstakingly adding pixels one at a time for the best look and visual control. Here is a nice WIP that shows how that works:
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/origi ... 599d18.jpg

Nowadays groups of artists still work this way. For fun, for handheld devices, or even for stylized images on the cover of magazines. For example, "Army of Trolls" creates cover images for magazines.

This is to achieve a retro look in artwork for games. His technique converts higher fidelity painted artwork into a kind of simulated low-fidelity dithered retro game art. The author is aiming for a very particular look with this technique.

Yep, there are a million "looks" out there. Can't say that I give a <expletive deleted> about low-fidelity, dithering, or retro game art, but that's just me....

It's a very distinctive style of artwork. The concept(s) behind it was only made possible by the limitations of earlier graphic chips forcing graphic artists to be as efficient as they could. Pixel art is enjoyed and appreciated by (tens of) millions of people world-wide in 2d games on smaller devices, and as a retro-style look in many extremely popular indie games (see example: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e ... meplay.png). It has become a specific art style in graphic design as well (with grown-ups harbouring nostalgic feelings toward the old computer games they used to play when they were kids). It's now an entirely accepted "visual language".

Of course, as with any visual style, some people just do not care about art, colour, design, the Mona Lisa, the Night Watch, Van Gogh, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, and so on. It depends on the person. You may not care, but for many others pixel art is a respected "art" form.

That is why I was suggesting an adjustment layer that allows us to non-destructively convert any layer/layer group/layer mask to a version with indexed colours, and a choice of dithering methods (same as the ones available in the reduction method for web export). It would allow web designers to more easily preview and prepare web graphics as well. I know of no other applications that offers such an option.

Ehh.... All that leaves me cold, to be honest. I always want to keep moving forward to higher quality. If PL offered the kind of mixed colour painting I showed with PSP, couldn't the high quality image from that always be degraded later to achieve that "look"?

Who is to say pixel art can not be of an extreme high quality visually? Merely a different approach. Looking at those examples I gave you, I would say those are quite beautiful illustrations. It is also important to note here that most pixel art must be hand-crafted, and cannot be reproduced by merely degrading it automatically. The author of that article mentions this as well, saying his method works with some graphics, and saves hours of time - but that only a subset of subjects can be worked with in this manner.

For me such an adjustment layer is exactly what would be needed to move forward with web graphics creation in Photoline. It would allow the web designer to convert layers to what we would be seeing as a final version in the web browser - without the hassle of going through the old-fashioned web export dialog. And each could then be immediately exported with the layer export function, saving a lot of time. I personally (and a lot of other web devs) would welcome such a tremendously useful feature.

Aside from that it could also be used for all sorts of interesting pixel effects - which would make Photoline that much more interesting for pixel work. At least, I am not aware of any other application with an option like that.

[photoken]

When computers were only able to display a limited colour palette, and resolutions were also limited (for example, 320x256@32 colours on the Amiga) game graphics were created by painstakingly adding pixels one at a time for the best look and visual control.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

I still couldn't care less about the boringly crude graphics done in ancient times, but differences of opinion about art are fun to discuss....

I don't think that creating such a complicated-sounding adjustment layer would be worth the effort, especially since quickly exporting the image for the Web (and viewing that exported image in a browser) already provides the functionality.

[Hoogo]

Too late, Herbert already posted...

Oh yeah, I freely admit that I don't understand that at all! Thanks for the links to the examples, but I still don't get it. What does "hand-pixeled pixel-art" mean?

Let's imagine that you want to paint a picture and restrict yourself to 16 colors.
You could paint (or take a photo) in 24Bit and then reduce colors, but that will always result in a lot of garbage, especially visible in low resolutions.
Or you could paint already restricted to the 16 colors. The look is quite different, but you also loose a lot of tools.

"some" Commodore64-pictures. There's a lot of crap in it, but sometimes you could easily tell if a picture was "painted" or "wired", that means just transfered from PC.

I wouls also like an adjustment layer for color reduction. I once had another purpose for it I already forgot about.

[Herbert123]

Photoken, I think you have to be working in web and mobile development to understand and appreciate the power of a colour reduction adjustment layer. And it would greatly improve the workflow for web designers/devs, app devs, and game devs in Photoline: all with a simple adjustment layer.

Suppose you are working on a web mockup, and many layers must be exported individually for developing a responsive website (meaning one that work well on mobile, tablets, and desktop devices).

In Photoshop Adobe now added "generator": it means the user is forced to write obscure layer name codes to generate the assets.
For example: “400% tuningfork.png, 250×250 tuningfork.jpg 40%” generates two versions of the layer for export.

Now, just imagine an adjustment layer that allows you to do this, with color reduction, dithering options, and file format options when you export selected layers! Formats would have to include png, jpg, gif, and svg. The respective options found in the web export should also be available for this adjustment layer.

It would save a tremendous amount of time, AND give us a direct preview of said assets in the mockup. A much better solution than Photoshop offers its users.

Because currently I am forced to:
1) select a layer
2) copy it in a new file
3) open the web export
4) change settings
5) preview until it looks right
6) export

Do this for every asset, and repeat for changes

The new workflow would go like this:
1) select a layer and add the colour reduction adjustment layer
2) select a format
3) change settings
4) preview in the main design view

The adjustment layer can be turned off and on if required. Then continue working on all the other assets.
5) export all the assets in one go by selecting them and export all the layers. Done!

Then just imagine the use of virtual layers to copy the colour reduction adjustment layers to any asset requiring the same settings! Wow!

One last thing that would be the icing on the cake is some kind of sprite sheet generator that ties into this adjustment layer. Perhaps a group of layers, with this colour reduction adjustment layer added, could be automatically converted in a nice sprite sheet. Perhaps an option "sprite sheet with number of columns and rows" could be added as well.

One can dream!

[photoken]

...it would greatly improve the workflow for web designers/devs, app devs, and game devs in Photoline: all with a simple adjustment layer.

That's the whole point of my criticism -- all those requests sound like arcane features used by very few people. Photoshop can afford to add "layer generation" functions because it's pretty much exhausted all the functionality of image editing. You're certainly welcome to wish for such features to be added to PL; I'm just saying that I'd rather have the image editing feature requests implemented, and PL expand its image editing capabilities to the ultimate.

IOW, I don't think PL should concentrate on becoming a Web design app -- there are already plenty of those around.

[Herbert123]

...it would greatly improve the workflow for web designers/devs, app devs, and game devs in Photoline: all with a simple adjustment layer.

That's the whole point of my criticism -- all those requests sound like arcane features used by very few people. Photoshop can afford to add "layer generation" functions because it's pretty much exhausted all the functionality of image editing. You're certainly welcome to wish for such features to be added to PL; I'm just saying that I'd rather have the image editing feature requests implemented, and PL expand its image editing capabilities to the ultimate.

IOW, I don't think PL should concentrate on becoming a Web design app -- there are already plenty of those around.

I never said PL should become a web design app (and btw, no, there is currently no great web graphics editor on the market since the demise of Fireworks), merely that the relatively simple addition of a colour reduction adjustment layer would propel Photoline's web functionality it already has into the modern age, AND offer all sorts of interesting visual effects and uses for other users as well.

Besides, no image editor is complete without good web export functionality - like it or not, most graphics nowadays are prepared for online and screen use. This is NOT an arcane feature request at all. Most of us at some point need to prepare images for online and screen use, whether we are photographers, graphic designers, illustrators, game designers, web designers and developers, digital painters, and so on, and so forth.

Photoline's web export is held back by the old "web export dialog" paradigm, as are other applications. The addition of such a colour reduction adjustment layer would improve Photoline's workflow for every user that requires his/her work to be output for screen use, not just web developers. Of course, this is my opinion: in my line of work I do Illustration, web design and development, game design and development, a lot of image and photo editing and compositing, 3d work and viz, digital painting. And more.

[photoken]

... AND offer all sorts of interesting visual effects and uses for other users as well.

Who won't use those arcane features, I'm guessing.

Besides, no image editor is complete without good web export functionality - like it or not, most graphics nowadays are prepared for online and screen use.

So save the image as PNG or JPG. Can be done now, as is....

Back to my original point: Right now PL is far better than its competitors -- Corel's PaintShopPro and Adobe's Photoshop Elements. However, each of those programs has a good image editing feature or two that would be more appropriate for PL to accommodate than specialized tools useful only for limited purposes.

I'll let you have the last word, but I'm unconvinced that niche tools should be developed at the expense of not having more general-purpose functions.