I am trying to make a few simple textures for a building that will be in the background of an animation. When rendering the textures side by side, I see a faint line where the texture edges are not black which represent a window frame. I remember that there is a way to make them sharp, but I cannot remember where or how to do this. Is this aliasing, and if so where do I turn off that option for this job?

Thanks
vkirchner

From the looks of it you may have an anti-aliasing problem indeed. After selecting your selection tool (be it the rectangular marquee tool or lasso or whatever) you can check anti-aliased on the top of your screen, right next to where you can set the feather. Also, if you want to fill a selected area, don't use the Paint Bucket Tool, it leaves edges like yours. In stead select the fill collor u desire, choose Edit- Fill... and set Fill color to foreground (or choose black or white or grey if that's what you want) and press ok. Hope this helps, Greetz

Coming soon

I used the correct fill tool, but I did not pay any attention to the anti-aliasing at the top of the screen. I will correct that and see if I can make them look better. Thank you for the help? Vince

It's almost certainly the anti-aliasing option to blame (it's on by default). The rectangular (and single line/column) selection tools don't support anti-aliasing (since they select aligned on a pixel boundary), but the lasso tools (and the shape tool in "Fill pixels" mode) do.

I found a few problems that had to be corrected. The first was the anti-aliasing check box as we suspected. The second one was the pixel averaging that is done when saving the JPG file. I corrected all of the PSD files, saved them, and then saved a JPG file for the texturing. The JPG file was saved with an 8 quality setting, which still allowed some averaging, the 10 or maximum setting did not allow the pixels to change. Possibly I should look at another format for saving the textures, any thoughts?

Use a format that supports losssless compression (or don't compress at all) good alternatives would be TIF (for compression) or possibly plain old BMP (if supported)

I agree with lundqvist, go with tiff...

Coming soon

A Tiffing I will go, a Tiffing I will go, high ho a merry ho, a Tiffing I will go. :-)

lol

Coming soon

Ouch, 427K Tiff with compression to the 46K JPG. The Tiff without compression is 983K while the BMP came in at 631K for a 24 bit image. A TGA file was 422K in size for 24 bit, while a Gif came if at 49K but had some loss in the pixels. Food for thought.

JPG achieves its impressive compression ratio at the expense of image quality. It was originally designed for continuous tone imagery where the compression artifacts were not likely to be noticed. TIF/LZW or TIF/ZIP won't match the file sizes of JPG, but also won't degrade the content (well, TIF/JPG will, but let's assume you avoid that subformat). GIF will sometimes work ok but only if your image has 256 colors or less (or the palette reduction isn't a problem which depends very much ont he source graphic, etc.) TIF (and to a limited extent GIF) support alpha channels too, although that probably isn't a consideration for this case.