After creating a scene then rendering and saving it in one of the availible formats. I use photoshop or similar programs touch it up.

My problem is the quality of the picture is terible. It looses it smooth look when i zoom in all i see are the quares that make up the picture.

My question is how do i get a better picture or quality of picure to export into other programs that looks like the smooth render in poser

P. S. Thanks for past help new to this but with the groups help i have made it this far.

Always export your render as a bitmap (bmp file). Don't convert it to a jpg until you have finished your postwork. If the bitmap isn't giving you enough detail, render to a larger size.

What format do you initially save your picture in, before editing in Photoshop? Choose tif or BMP instead of for instance jpg or png which are compressed formats. If you choose bmp you will get exactely the same quality as in Poser it self.

WLC, First, it is easiest to squeeze detail out of an image when you scale down the size or compress it. It is impossible to adaquately replace that data when you enlarge an image, although PhotoShop will try to guess at what the intermediate pixels should have been. However, a guess is a guess, and some machine's idea of average isn't anything like the chaos of the real world. Render and work in a resolution larger than your finished image. (Set the "units" in PhotoShop, or whatever paint programs you use, to pixels rather than inches or cms.) For example, suppose that you want your final image to be 600 by 800 pixels. Work at 900 X 1200 or even 1200 X 1600 or whatever resolution your machine can handle. Good high quality texture maps will be larger than this! After you have finished tweaking the image, you can always shrink it down to final size... saving under a new name! You may want to go back and change something later, so having the full-size full-detail image stored safely away will save you grief and much gnashing of teeth. Always work and render and paint in a non-lossy, non-compressed format. I prefer tifs with alpha channels and masks and lots of layers so that I can play with the seperate elements. Others prefer bmps. I used to work in pcx format because it was the easiest to translate to all the other formats including cross-platform stuff like sgi. If you are working as part of a team, find a format which is acceptable to all of you and the compiling software. Do not work in jpgs. Period. That is an excellent final format for those times when you need quick loading of an image (an ebay auction or thumbnail to a gallery or a contest entry here). However, it gets its speed by analyzing the range of values in your image and shmushing the colors to retain the relative brightness data. If you need to have a jpg image, always save your real image off in another format and another name first. Once that data is gone, you can never get it back. Well, almost never. PhotoShop has backstepping. :) Another tip... machines do corrupt data. Computers crash and hang by their toes during the final render. People overwrite a file when they are tired and under deadline. It happens. I save in a 3-name rotation while working on a project (each save is under the next name in the cycle). Back in 1990, an Amiga ate an animation which had taken me 3 days... despite my saving every 10-15 minutes... under the one name. ::grrrr:: Nice machine, but I've never forgotten how it felt to lose those 3 days. Besides the rotation, I'll save out various versions at key moments or steps (use logical names), and these key versions usually get on a Zip disk. Back in '95 I had a hard drive go belly-up, and had to watch the techs try to retrieve my data. I had backed-up on tape, but the PC had been corrupting the data for some time. So, save often, save under non-lossy formats, save under different names, and occasionally save on something outside the computer. Carolly

When ashed why he worked with a 810 inc. negative to produce a 11.5 inc. print, the great photographer, Yousuf Karsh is said to have replied: " You see, Sir, that way when I make the print, I reduce my errors". Carolly and Karsh seem to be cut from the same cloth. You couldn't get better advice. Q

Thanks for the info about jpeg's too! I'd heard others gripe about jpegs in the past, but reasons were never as clear as Carolly's explanation. And the rotating name thing is a good idea too. I do something similar, but simply put numbers behind the name ("object1.jpg", "object2.jpg", etc...) to follow the order of progression as I work on a piece. Often times, I find it easier to go back and rework from picture 3 or 4 than to keep tweeking picture 6.

jpgs are nasty evil things. :P avoid them. Besides - if you export from poser as a tif it makes this handy little alpha channel that will just pop your figure out of the bkg in photoshop. Very nice feature that :) I agree with everyone - always work too big - always save multiple copies - save onto multiple media formats if possible - and never, ever work when upset/tired/drunk/??? - a 100 meg file is not too big! :)

While Carolly is 100% correct, I must admit I mostly save my stuff as 100% JPEGs, as I just do so many test renders that I'd fill up the drives otherwise. However, I plan on reducing the image by at least 25% for a throw away, and 100% for anything serious. I find it a lot easier to smudge out the Poser bad elbows and knees on a double size version too.

BMP files are supposed to be an ancient file format. JPG files are what we need to use for online galleries, etc. So they can't be so evil. JPGs are our final destination. I usually render and save as "psd" (PhotoShop native format). Then I do whatever is necessary to prepare the image, and then I "save to web" at the highest image quality. I always keep the original file. I always name my images: "image, image2, image3," etc. One thing to remember when recommending file formats: some of them consume ungodly amounts of hard drive space. If someone has limited free space, they could be surprised very quickly when there is suddenly no more space for saving files. I strongly recommend a backup strategy where you save your treasured art onto CDs. If I have an intricate render, I'll save it as a pz3 file, then render. I save the pz3 files. You can zip the files to save space. Once your art is finished, you may not need to keep it on the hard drive. Just back it up to CD's and remove from the hard drive. Ron

"My problem is the quality of the picture is terible. It looses it smooth look when i zoom in all i see are the quares that make up the picture." Those little squares make up all bitmaps (non-vector) images no matter how high the quality. If you have Photoshop, it explains everything about image size and quality, the difference between vector and bitmap graphics, and more near the front of the manual. In my version of the manual it's at the beginning of Chapter 2. It's well explained and illustrated and should give you a good understanding of the subject.

Render at double the inted resolution of the final image, import it into a paint package, then sharpen the image and cut it to half the size. This will give you a decent picture. If you save as a jpeg, remember that even at 99% quality you'll still be able to compress the file down very well. I usually 95% if I'm converting to jpeg as the gains are better size wise. later jb

Are you rendering in the Poser window and saving the image, or rendering to a new window? Depending on how big your document window is in Poser, that could be the reason you can't get a very good zoom before pixellation occurs. For a final picture, render to a new window at a larger size than your document window and then save as a tiff or psd file, do your postwork then resize down to your required final size.

I like to render to .tif on a black background then use the alpha channels to isolate the figures.

Ron

To clarify, BMP files are actually native the native Windows format, so they are always supported on Windows software. Applications more or less have to convert any import file format into a BMP in order to display it in a window. They are, as pointed out, not usually compressed (although there is a rarely used, or supported 8 bit loss free compression version). The latest version of the BMP file format (Windows XP, NT5 etc) supports alpha channels and jpeg encoding, but probably very few apps support this at the moment.

JPG files are probably the best format for distributing final images, due to their high compression, but they are lossy, so its a bad idea to save the original work in this format.

GIF and TIFF files both provide loss free compression, although the file size will be bigger that JPGs. Both are also proprietry, so support for them, now or in the future, is always questionable.

PNG also supports alpha channels and loss free compression, which is better than GIF, but maybe not as good as TIFF. It's non-proprietry so, although its fairly new, we should expect to see it become more widely supported in the future. Obviously Curious Labs jumped on the PNG bandwagon with ProPack, so it may be a good idea to consider this format for Poser exports.

Ron wrote: JPGs are our final destination.<< Only if the web or your computer is your final destination for your image. For those of us that print our artwork, TIF is the final destination. Work at the highest resolution your computer can handle, and the largest size. It's always easier to shrink then to make larger. Make at least one backup copy of not only your final exported image but also of your Poser file too. >>Ron wrote:BMP files are supposed to be an ancient file format.<< As has already been pointed out, not only is it Poser's native format, but also Bryce's, so it is far from being an ancient file format. I can't really add anything more...Carolly has given excellent advice and I sure can't top that. Pendy

Thanks for the help tried the suggestion and everything works great.

Glad that things are looking more like you imagined them and that you can put detail into your models again. When you have more questions, just post a query.... Carolly