Popular Post Silver_fox 397 Posted March 28, 2014 Popular Post Share Posted March 28, 2014 (edited) Currently, the wiki has the following standart (sort of) for the item stat pictures: Picture width of 450px GIF file format with as small amount of colours as can be without the picture looking very bad Blue color scheme for the Fallen Angel and I&B items, black for the CM ones. To ensure these points, some editing should be made. Read on for the full (and quite excessive) instruction for making good-looking stat pics. Step 1: Taking Screenshots. Of course, before you start editing the picture, you need to take it. There are few things you can do to make the subsequent editing easier and ensure the quality of the outcome: If you're picturing an item from the original game, it's best to return at least part of the old interface. Go to the "Sacred 2 - Fallen Angel\pak" folder, open the "skin.zip" archive and extract the "data\frames" folder to the "pak" directory. You can extract the entirety of the archive and revert all interface to I&B state, but it's not required for making item pics. Launch the game at 1280x1024 (or 1280x800, if that's your display's limit). This ensures that the item stats in tooltips would be dispalyed at suitable scale for turning them into 450px pictures. You can take the screenshots with bigger resolution and then resize them in the graphic editor, but it might make fonts very thin or blurry. Take the screenshots in the clean chest, where no other items are underneath the item tooltip. It would make editing the background out much easier. Step 2: Editing Pictures. I'm a Photoshop user, so I describe the work flow in PS CS2. However, the editing process is simple and can be done in Gimp with equal ease. Maybe the hot keys would be different though. Open the screenshot you've taken and a template background file approptiate for the item. The templates I'm using can be grabbed HERE - included are the files for Fallen Angel and CM items of 1 and 2 square width in the inventory. Select the stats, CNTRL+C, CNTRL+V. You'd get the stats in new layer without other things interfering. Use Magic Wand (Tolerance 10, all other options off) on the empty space. Either hit DELETE, or Inverse Selection + Copy (CNTRL+SHIFT+I, CNTRL+C). In Photoshop "Inverse Selection + Copy" combination gives better result in preservation of font quality, but it might be different in Gimp. Paste or drag the stats to the template. Skip this step for one-square-width items. Align the text with a line I keep as a ruler. Select the text left of the Damage bar and drag it along the ruler line to the left (for about 2 dashes). Deselect. This is because 450px is the in-game width for items with narrow icons but it's better if double-width ones have the same picute size. Move the stats to put the name where the background tells you to. Uncheck the visibility of the Item Name and Ruler layers in the Layer list. Optional. Replace the sockets on the item with the ones from the selection below. It's not mandatory, but sometimes the transparency of in-game windows makes the sockets on the screenshot look pretty checkered and not compress well. If the sockets on your screenshot look good, just skip this step. Select an icon in the original screenshot, drag in into template and fit in the corner. Flatten Image, select and copy the area of your stats. Make new picture (the editor usually automatically sets it the size of clipboard, or select "Clipboard" preset if needed). Paste your stats. Step 3: Saving Pictures. Use "Save for Web" option. Select filetype as GIF. Set GIF options as: Selective palette, No Dither, No Transparency, No Interlace. Surprising, but it gives both the best look and the smallest filesize. Experiment with the number of colours. Set it as the minimum at which the sockets look good and all modifiers are of proper color. usually it's 16 for set bonuses, 32 for jewellery, 64 for socketed items. Some specimens with a lot of differently colored modifiers can require 128. Press save, enter the name and you're done. It all is actually very fast to do. This guide is long only because I tend to over-explain things when I write guides. Though I hope that everybody would be able to understand it even without special knowledge of the graphic editors. Edited March 28, 2014 by Silver_fox 2 Link to comment
mibbs 29 Posted March 28, 2014 Share Posted March 28, 2014 I always save my graphs on wiki as PNG . Well, they are not very huge-sized (about 25 kb). As I understand, GIF file has less weight then the same picture as PNG? Link to comment
Silver_fox 397 Posted March 28, 2014 Author Share Posted March 28, 2014 It depends on the PNG setting. If you save as PNG-8, the result is about the same size as GIF. PNG-24 can have large file size, so the wiki uses it only for small icons. But if your files are about 25kb they are fine. 1 Link to comment
Flix 5,116 Posted March 28, 2014 Share Posted March 28, 2014 Oh my word that is a lot of work just to get stats pictures looking good. I had no idea you did all that. Link to comment
Silver_fox 397 Posted March 28, 2014 Author Share Posted March 28, 2014 Mind you, it's just a lot of words. I was taught to write the instructions in a way so that even the most random man could understand them, that's all. In practice, it's 3 minutes work per pic for me. Uploading them to the wiki actually takes longer. But then again, I'm an accomplished Photoshop user... maybe for other people it really does not look like something simple and fast to do. On other hand, just running the game with old interface and 1280 width takes care of the size for narrow items. Then using Flood Fill on the background to make it uniform. And saving with proper settings. That would pretty much do the trick, not exactly with the same quality, but good enough. I don't like it because Flood fill tends to eat font details and you end up with a framed pic that you then frame again for the wiki page. And GIF compression tends to be slightly worse for such pics. I usually get them down to 6-10 KB, with Flood Fill it's twice the amount. But it's a faster way to get a GIF with uniform BG. 1 Link to comment
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