PixelOver

Art to Pixel Art · By Deakcor

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Focus on turning art into pixel art

A topic by GValiente created Sep 14, 2021 Views: 572 Replies: 8

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GValiente2 years ago

Hi, new paid user here :)

I love PixelOver for what it offers since the first releases: turning high resolution images into nice pixel art.

Although I'm thankful that you keep adding new features to PixelOver, I think they are not too related to that initial goal, so it would be nice for me at least if you could keep the focus on that initial goal for some of the new features added in the future.

I have never used any new feature added after 0.3, if that helps :)

Anyway, thanks a lot for this great piece of software.

Deakcor2 years ago(+1)

Hi, thank you ! Yes true, I would like to implement all this animation system as it's a big advantage thanks to the pixelation (like keeping the lines perfect when moving object, animate the colors etc).

For art to pixel art related feature, I would like to add highmap/normalmap support for internal lines and also the support of 3D models.

Also improvements of current features like adding more dithering, add maching palette etc ...

But if you have some missing features you want to be added, I will be interested to know :)

GValiente2 years ago(+1)

I can't think of any missing feature right now, but if it helps, my current workflow is the following:

Open a high resolution input image with Gimp to add an alpha channel, remove the background, improve the edges of the target shape, etc.
Let PixelOver do its job with the image :) . As I said, I usually only use old features.
Do some final touches with an image editor like Aseprite.

Thinking about it, maybe an interactive background remover would be nice :)

Deakcor2 years ago(+1)

Yes should be nice to add this kind of tools, I will add for future release. Btw, there is an aseprite export now, in case of you need multi layers.

Karlstens2 years ago

Yah, I'm all for any art tools that can provide workflows that assist with creating 1990's dos games art portraits from real photographs. Classic example from Dune II below - can't help but wonder how they put this together 30 years ago...

Download Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty | DOS Games Archive

GValiente2 years ago(+1)

Yeah, I use PixelOver mostly for turning real photos and drawings into pixel art, so I'm in for more and better tools that help with that.

ubu2 years ago (1 edit) (+2)

I second this; focus on turning art into pixel art. I have tried 5-6 similar programs to yours and they all struggle with producing great results, especially when downscaling photos and/or downscaling to small sized sprites (64x64 pixels or less) which often end up as a blurry or pixelated mess. Vector graphics gives reasonable good results. It's not without reason that image downscaling is one of the most classical problems in computer vision ...

I would therefore suggest adding several different downscaling algorithms (preferably as many as possible):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scaling#Algorithms

You might want to take a closer look at the following methods as they seem to provide great results when downscaling to small sized pixel art:
1. Content-Adaptive Image Downscaling:
https://johanneskopf.de/publications/downscaling/
2. Pixelated Image Abstraction (Gerstner et al. 2012):
https://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Gerstner_2012_PIA/index.php
3. (and maybe) Subsampling and Bicubic sharpened.

Here is a comparison of all 3 methods:
https://johanneskopf.de/publications/downscaling/supplementary/pixel_art/index.h...
https://johanneskopf.de/publications/downscaling/supplementary/html/gerstner_com...

Having adjustable parameters for some of the algorithms would also be nice so that the downscaling can be fine-tuned.

Another interesting idea would be to add a cel shader to the program. This can be used to "flatten" the image (especially on photos) or smooth out blurriness to get a more vector-like image which again might produce better downscaling results.

Deakcor2 years ago(+1)

Hi, thank you very much for the nice ressources. I will definitively check to implement these with best results, Content-Adaptive Image Downscaling seems to give really promising results.

Btw I recently implemented Sharp bilinear which give better result for low rez (less blurry) , I will check to implement the sharper to see :

Thanks again for the links !

ubu2 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Great!

Content-Adaptive Image Downscaling is especially interesting, but Pixelated Image Abstraction (Gerstner et al. 2012) seems to give good results on photos (especially if one wants a pixelated result).

There are some code examples on github if that would be helpful:

-Content-Adaptive Image Downscaling (Matlab):
https://github.com/AyushRai09/Content-Adaptive-Image-Downsampling
and pseudocode:
https://johanneskopf.de/publications/downscaling/paper/pseudocode.pdf

-Pixelated Image Abstraction (Gerstner et al. 2012) (Python):
https://github.com/gskaggs/Pyxeled

Just be aware that the Content-Adaptive Image Downscaling algorithm is not designed for palette reduced results on natural images:
https://johanneskopf.de/publications/downscaling/supplementary/html/gerstner_com...

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PixelOver

Focus on turning art into pixel art