I am using a photo for a background in Poser 4. On screen it renders well in the small screen, but when it renders in new window it is pixelated. If I send the larger saved render to Photoshop, it is still pixelated, but if I reduce the image by half it looks almost normal. I would like to find out to get the photo to look correctly in Poser. If not in Poser, I have been told that you can render it to a black or white background and save it. Then save to a png file, then copy and past it to the photo in Photoshop. But I do not know how to make that work. Does anyone have any suggestion? I will appreciate all help. Thank you and have a wonderful weekend.

In P4 it is better to load a Flat/One sided square and apply the photo to that as a material. To match the Photo size, increase the Square's X/Y scale. eg. 600W x 800H = X 600% x Y 800%. Then increase the Main scale if you need to. This won't pixelate as bad as applying the photo to the background. Now if it is a small photo, your going to have this problem no matter what, just not high rez enough.

beryld's suggestion does work best in P4. The problem in just importing a background image is that it gets resampled to your current display window size, and this downsampled image (not the original image file) is then used for the render even if you Render to a New Window.

Just in case you want to try it, you can save the render as a .psd file and then load it in photoshop. There, you can duplicate the background layer, delete the original background, load as selection the channel "alpha 1" (at least i think it's called so), invert the selection, select you new layer and delete. At this point you'll have a layer with only the main figure of your render: just open your background photo, copy and paste it in your render and place the new layer below the main one. This should work. Uh... i hope this is not too confused :)

Thank you all so much for the suggestions! I will give them a try. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

Remember and switch off cast shadows in the squares properties, so that you dont get unwanted shadow effects.

You will probably achive the best quality using an image format that uses an alpha channel (TIF, PNG, PSD), as sugested by GRiMAge in post #4. If you do paste the image into a square prop as sugested by beryld in post #2, it's usually best to set the Object and Highlight colors to balck, and the Ambient color to white. This makes the square prop indipendant of the lighting and shadows in in the document window. The technique of of pasting a background image into a square prop does have some advantages, you can for example tweak the apparent perspective by tilting the square.