can anyone tell me why my rsolution goes to hell when i export a pic from Poser4. They look great in PPoser but when they are in jpg format the look awful. very grainy, distorted adn the lights are not near as vivid either. Do I bump up my res on Poser ? its sitting at 300dpi right now. This is my latest WIP. Meet Dan Ketch, the second host of the Ghost Rider I am trying to get this pic to turn out better so i can Print it off on my laser printer and continue to use as reference for the animation. any help would be greatly appreciated, Thanks

have you used max quality in the jpeg export options? and if you have a higher camera setting it will help in poser. ( a focal length of 100 to 400 gives much better look and the images export out looking the same as in poser )

If you plan on doing Post work om your images I would suggest not using jpeg at all till you have finished with the image. I always use PSD uncompressed format. To be honest I haven't found that the camera angle setting makes any difference to quality. If you are going to use jpeg set to "Max quality100"

The difference in lighting could be because of different gamma settings between Poser and Photoshop. I found that images taken from Poser into Photoshop have a slightly reddish tinge to them, and I corrected that by creating a .ahu file that automatically adjusts the hue and saturation. Also, try using the "save as" function for your render instead of "export as". For some strange reason, it seems to make a difference.

The 300 DPI doesn't mean anything. If you want better resolution the only thing to do is render the picture larger. Especially if you plan to print it. JPGing them loses some quality. How much it loses depends on the settings and what you use to do the jpg.

I generally render mine at 1500x1500, 300 dpi. When I save them, I save as PSD, or bmp. Jpeg'ing it usually ends up with the wonky lines around the form, like what you have in your image up there. The way I do it takes up a hell of a lot of space, huge files and whatnot, but the quality is rather good once I change it back to Jpeg after finishing it up in Photoshop.

The default quality setting for .jpg export in Poser is either 25% or 40%. You can change it to the highest quality. The best format to save images in though is probably .tif or .psd, as another benefit of these formats is you also get an alpha channel.

actualy this character is going to be used in animation. Just wondering why most of my stuff was coming out all pixelated especially around the face

If you are using a Mac you wont have those color variations between programs, unless you've whacked out your colorsync settings. I always export as a TIFF image. If memory serves me correctly Poser doesnt use the LZW compression, but if you see it as an option apply it. The compression is lossles and does save some space. With the TIFF format you can also hold layers and chanels to handle alpha maps, etc. When you export an animation you can either choose some Quicktime settings for compression at render time or render out the Movie with no compression (Compression/None). That way you can use Quicktime to later make several different versions of your movie from one clean source.

I mostly do like Crasher... Mine are usually rendered @ 1200x1200, 300dpi, & saved as a .tif, for the fact that : in Photoshop, doing heavy postwork.... a .tif shows every blemish & flaw in the render. Then, after all the layers in PS, I flatten, crop, resize, & then hit the sharpen filter once, sometimes fading it to 50%-75% depending on the image. Then save the final as a .tif... then as a jpeg for My posting. Might be too much info for the question asked, but, I hope it helps. Thomas