I think I made a topic a long time ago about problems with gradiants I was having on the Xbox. I skin all my emulators and I made a image with a gradiant background to it. It looked good on the PC but when I looked at it on the xbox and my TV it was horrid. The gradiant was color banding VERY bad and I could see lines and rings (quite large ones to) where colors transitioned. It took me the longest time to figure out why it was doing this. Anyways it seems as if the xbox is displaying all the images in 16bit rather then 24/32bit as it should be. The end result of this is a image that looks ok PROVIDED you dont have any gradiants in it. For example the below image I made as part of a skin for a PCSxbox. The first image is how it should look in 24/32bit. The second is how it looks in 16bit. As you can see the 16bit image is very poor on the background. Anyway I dont think I make the xbox display the images any better. They look 16 bit when on emulators and even when just viewed from the XBMC dashbaord. So, does anyone know of a way to preserve my gradiants without such bad loss. Trust me, as bad as the 16bit looks on a PC monitor its 10x worse at 640x480 on a SDTV.
It's probably not a problem with Xbox hardware, rather the software using 16-bits texture, or anything less than 8-bit per component, because, really, 32-bits might be too expensive. Anyway, most image manipulation tools should be able to change the color depth of an image and apply dithering / error diffusion to reduce the effect you're mentionning.
I think it has to do with what software you use to compiles the image into the format you want it to be. I hear that you should stay away from MS Paint.... Other factors include how you got the logo/girl. If they were off the internet and standard jpeg, then it will not come out right. Logic shows that you can't go from jpg to raw and expect a gain in detail in the image. If they came from lossless format, then you should look into the format you save it as. Keep it as bmp or png if the program supports them.
LOL..... not funny madhatter..... I used Photoshop to do that (photoshop 7 mind you) Can anyone take the first image and make it 16bit without loss for me and see if they can do it? I suppose the xbox could also be indexing the color?
Obviously the gradient in the background is the biggest problem. I don't think it's possible to convert it losslessly, but you might be able to make it look a little bit better if you decrease the contrast of the gradient or change it to another color that 16-bit can handle better. If you gave me a file with just the background in it, I could fiddle around with it and see what I can do.
Why not compile your image as 16-bit. That way all functions applied to your image (like gradiants) get drawn using 16-bit colors and not sampled down from 24?
somehow I was able to index the image to 8bit with very little quality loss. Here have a look... 8-bit Indexed (dont know how the Xbox will respond to this type of image yet as I havent tried it)
Slightly off topic, but that picture, pretty though it is, doesn't really make sense. If she was resting her high heels on her shin like that it would dig into her leg and it would hurt like crap. I don't know if you drew that or not, but maybe it would make more sense if the raised leg was crossed over her knee. Just a thought.
Just tested it once and it looks great so far!! Im so glad I got it to look right on the xbox Indexed 8bit Dithered FTW~
Glad someone else on here saw the image and thought 'What?' as I thought it was pretty bizarre. Shame really as the overall idea of the image was pretty good, just poorly concieved.
Yeah Anti, it suprises the heck outta me. The xbox seems to display it no-prob! I tried the same technique on another image with a grade in the backgound. It worked out almost as well but there was a light blur to the colors so it seems it will take tweaking for each image but hey, I dont use gradiants that much and at least its a fix
Noone recognizes the chick in the picture? It's one awesome game. I've tried messing with this picture for wallpapers and stuff, I guess it's a pretty popular pic.
lol yeah I know who it is. The skin is a Parasite Eve theme and thats a the main title screen for the emulator. If anyone is interested I can post up the rest of what I have done for the emulator. And if anyone wants that image of Aya with the Background extracted I can post that to. It was a LOT of work and its not quite perfect but a few touch ups around the outline and it would be great.
I think the 8-bits refers to 8-bit per color channel (so a total of 24 bits)... otherwise there would be a total of 256 colors the image could use.. and I think that image uses more =) Glad you got it working
Yeah, I know you know who it is, I meant it didn't seem like anyone else did. If you do have her without the background, I'd like that!
