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Images generated by RastaConverter


Philsan

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http://www.atariage.com/forums/gallery_ips/gallery/album_587/gallery_3306_587_39207.jpg

Now we just need some POKEY renditions of Vince Guaraldi!

Here's the second AMS song I ever downloaded at whopping 300 baud (1st was Van Halen's I'll Wait). File is played back via Antic music Processor 2 (I think - been a long time). UnZIP it.

PEANUTS.zip

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I have one of these I did myself, but didn't post it because I wasn't happy with it. Great job! Here is the image I was going to post with it, once I had a good Cygnus-1 image.

 

Max. 46 colors.

 

A model on display, I am not sure if it is authentic, or life size or any of that.

MAX1.xex

post-149-0-06073100-1508112095.png

Edited by Gunstar
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Those greens and brown redish walkway are amazing.

Can you please post the original? Thats because of the clouds that has the dark dark gray to light that is too much compared to other grays. It seems a luminance 2 or 4 (if is like Altirra pallete I'd say it is 4). Couldn't it be less darker like luminance 6 then maybe last one, the lightest one, that here seems a luminance A maybe would turn into a C but that would look good, I think.

Also that lighlest pink pixels on clouds doesn't make much sense.

Yeah the greens are amazing but there is the clouds that I'd say destroy a bit the amazing picture Rasta Converter.

Edited by José Pereira
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I love the clouds the way they are. The pink/orange in the clouds is sunlight from a setting sun, and I think it looks great, or I wouldn't have posted it as-is. The image is what it is. It's an evening image, not broad daylight. In my opinion making it "brighter" would not be as good. The picture needs a high contrast to get the detail.

 

If I brighten things up, then you will lose the greens and reds in it you are so fond of. The image I posted is my 13th attempt to get it a good image as I like it. As the old saying goes, if you want something done "right," then do it yourself. Take the original I posted here and do it however you want. But for me, it is "right" as it is now.

 

Just out of curiosity, have you even looked at it on a real Atari? The picture is lighter on the real thing than the image posted. Of course it depends on how you have your TV/monitor's color, bright and contrast adjusted I guess, nobody is seeing the exact same thing. I do the images so that they look good to me on a real Atari with the setup I have (as in signature below) and how I have the monitors adjusted to my liking. I don't care if the .png images look good, or if the image looks good on an emulator, I redo them until I am satisfied with the results I get on my 1200XL.

post-149-0-47740700-1508250052.png

Edited by Gunstar
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That turned out really well. Normally sky with so much detail would come out a mess but in this case the clouds didn't lose much at all. You can see the clearly defined sky transitions but since there's so much cloud it's much less noticable.

The landscape also copes well since there's a lot of detail but not a lot of colours needed.

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That turned out really well. Normally sky with so much detail would come out a mess but in this case the clouds didn't lose much at all. You can see the clearly defined sky transitions but since there's so much cloud it's much less noticable.

The landscape also copes well since there's a lot of detail but not a lot of colours needed.

Yes, I wish the sky transitions were less drastic, but I prefer it to dithering, which to me, just doesn't look good for large areas due to the low resolution pixels, large dithered areas become to "flat" looking and shatter what little illusion there is of depth. It works in small areas in small amounts. I don't think dithering looks good until the resolution is at least as high as 640x480, if you are dealing with a palette of 256 or less.

 

If I brightened things up some, I could get rid of those transitions, or make them less noticeable, but again, it's a trade off with the rest of the picture and where I think the detail is more important. A patch of sky will always take lowest priority for me. And in this case, I think the angles of the sky transitions helps give the picture more depth too, overall.

 

The Mountain Flowers image above has the same sky transition issue too.

 

The only thing I'm not happy about with the clouds are the spots here and there of the "false" greens where it should be gray. But that's just something with RastaConverter and the false colors you get with Black and white (gray shades) images or images with areas of gray shades like clouds. These 'false" colors are only seen when viewing on a real Atari.

Edited by Gunstar
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Yes, I wish the sky transitions were less drastic, but I prefer it to dithering, which to me, just doesn't look good for large areas due to the low resolution pixels, large dithered areas become to "flat" looking and shatter what little illusion there is of depth. It works in small areas in small amounts. I don't think dithering looks good until the resolution is at least as high as 640x480, if you are dealing with a palette of 256 or less.

 

If I brightened things up some, I could get rid of those transitions, or make them less noticeable, but again, it's a trade off with the rest of the picture and where I think the detail is more important. A patch of sky will always take lowest priority for me. And in this case, I think the angles of the sky transitions helps give the picture more depth too, overall.

 

The Mountain Flowers image above has the same sky transition issue too.

 

The only thing I'm not happy about with the clouds are the spots here and there of the "false" greens where it should be gray. But that's just something with RastaConverter and the false colors you get with Black and white (gray shades) images or images with areas of gray shades like clouds. These 'false" colors are only seen when viewing on a real Atari.

I've seen the false colors on most of my conversion attempts but I'm not seeing it on your picture. I realize I'm using the wrong video format (NTSC vs PAL) but there is no adjustment that makes any of the shades of gray change to green. The bright regions change from yellowish color to a pinkish color but the grays remain gray.

 

Yes, sky seems to be a tradeoff, ugly dither or ugly bands of solid color. I'll take cloudy sky if I have the choice. When I need blue sky I think I prefer dithered transitions to hard edges but I can never seem to achieve what I want. Sometimes I edit rastaconverter's destination picture, paint over some of the dithering, and feed the new picture to now be converted with no more dithering but most times these attempts stall in the conversion process.

 

I wish there was a way to tell rastaconverter that a whole region of sky is one hue. I find too difficult to edit sky regions without ruining the picture.

Edited by a8isa1
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Which colour distance model do you use?

YUV. I use this color distance about 80% of the time. Ciede was used a lot more in my early image conversions, but that was before I realized that the destination image will have more color than is shown in the preview image under YUV. YUV is most often chosen, as long as things look good, for speed and time reasons, Ceide can take 4-5 times as long to convert an image. I do check in with them all, and all the palettes too, if I can't get it right with the usual settings. But about 80% of my pictures are Altirra palette and YUV color distance. In the color correction the setting changed the most drastically from the source image is contrast, everything else is very slight adjustments in comparison. High contrast is what helps Rasta Converter in picking proper (proper for what the Atari is capable of) colors and shades when down-converting to so few color choices, from my experience.

Edited by Gunstar
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I've seen the false colors on most of my conversion attempts but I'm not seeing it on your picture. I realize I'm using the wrong video format (NTSC vs PAL) but there is no adjustment that makes any of the shades of gray change to green. The bright regions change from yellowish color to a pinkish color but the grays remain gray.

 

Maybe it's only a PAL issue. I'm glad to know they aren't in NTSC. I'll have NTSC again one day soon. I'm not sure it's a matter of tint adjustment anyway, I think it has to do with the Atari PAL color itself, like some reason some gray shades assigned in the .xex for some reason are assigned green palette locations when the .xex is run on a PAL Atari, or something like that (laymens way of describing a programming issue with Rasta?). It's only something I have made a fuss about, of late, when Emkay mentioned the false colors on B/W Rasta images. Until then, I wasn't sure if it was just my computer doing it, after all, it is a Frankenstein and converted from NTSC to PAL, etc. And then I have my 1200XL version of the SV 2.1 video upgrade, and then up-converted to 480p VGA, etc.

 

I usually have my monitor set with a 45 brightness and 75 contrast. For this screen shot I took below, I adjusted them both to 50. If you look closely to the left of the tree and above to the left you can see green "line segments" and pixels that should be dark gray. This is not the Rasta line error thing. click on image for extreme close-up.

post-149-0-36410000-1508271348_thumb.jpg

Edited by Gunstar
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That "greenacres" picture looks like done for the A8 ...

 

Here a version with dither.

 

 

attachicon.gifemkay_gadither.png

 

attachicon.gifemkay_gadither.xex

This the kind of picture I like to try editing. I would pull output.png-dst.png into gimp (or whatever photo editor). One third of the way down on the right, where the sky is conspicuously dithered, I'd paint over some of the dither with the solid sky color from above. Not all the dithering just a couple of rows leaving a ragged edge of dither, so to speak. Feed the edited picture back into rastaconverter with /dither=none (I just type that in my commandline so that I can see I'm using no dither). Also if you used gamma, brightness, or contrast options in the first run don't use them again here.

 

The method doesn't always work. The conversion stalls.

 

Anyway, my 2 cents. Spend it if you wish. :P

 

p.s. That one spot in the sky is the only place that dithering bothers me with your conversion.

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Green Acres. 56 colors.

 

That "greenacres" picture looks like done for the A8 ...

 

Here a version with dither.

 

Yes, this is a real gem of a photo selection for rasta.

 

I just started a slightly preprocessed one (about half an hour ago) where I put a little dither in Photoshop too.

 

I'll post the results later tonight or tomorrow (east coast time).

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OK dither Emkay's has what I said that is the clouds darker gray less one luminance so they all decreases step by ster one luminance value but then KO in the grass.

Yes, maybe the only solution would be somehow the possibility to divide the picture and have top, the clouds, using Emkay's dither and bottom Gunstar's method for the grass.

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IMO dither not needed for the grass, possibly not for the clouds either.

But unsure how it would go doing pre-process dithering elsewhere. The strength of dither is that it helps to make up for not having sufficient time to do colour changes and also lack of luma graduations. A pre-process dither shouldn't increase demand on either of those things once the pic is plugged into RC.

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OK I edited out about 2 rows of the dither pattern that stuck out like the proverbial "sore thumb" and ran the pic back through rastaconverter. Perhaps the picture is a little better. I'm sure the editing could be a little better.

 

I didn't know which color space or palette emkay used. I used YUV and laoo.act.

 

I only ran 25 million evals so the pixels aren't close to 1:1. Emkay's picture is on the left. My output.png is on the right. I only edited pixels of the blue sky in Emkay's picture. Hopefully my idea gets demonstrated well.

 

post-9154-0-84949900-1508290827.pngpost-9154-0-66319700-1508290686.png

 

[EDIT]

Because I didn't do many evaluations there are quite a few pixels in the dithered region that are different from Emkay's output. I didn't touch that area. As I described in my earlier post I took the solid blue color and painted over the top two rows (roughly) of the dithered sky region. It's a subtle change but I think it looks better.

emkay_green_acres_edit.xex

Edited by a8isa1
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