Images generated by RastaConverter

[ivop]

38 minutes ago, GravityWorm said:

The only thing I always do is cropping and reducing the resolution to 320x240.

I always crop to 160x240, and then scale back to 320x240 without any interpolation so each pixel is just doubled, like it is in 160x240 on the Atari.

 

 

Edit: explanation: if you scale to 320x240 with PS/GIMP, it uses an algorithm to determine the color of the resulting pixels. Then fed to RC, it uses yet another algorithm to scale to 160x240. Two algorithms that might introduce rounding errors. My way reduces that to just one algorithm, because RC deals with replicated pixels during scaling, so nothing happens.

Edited October 29, 2021 by ivop

[+Philsan]

@GravityWorm, your images are very nice!

 

They would look better without black side borders.

 

You can crop them to 320x240 or, as suggested by @drpeter to another user, you can just post output.png (renamed) from the RastaConverter folder when the conversion is finished.

[GravityWorm]

57 minutes ago, ivop said:

1 hour ago, GravityWorm said:

 

I always crop to 160x240, and then scale back to 320x240 without any interpolation so each pixel is just doubled, like it is in 160x240 on the Atari.

You can use 160x240. RastaConverter works OK with that. Try it.

[GravityWorm]

9 minutes ago, Philsan said:

 

They would look better without black side borders.

Those borders are from Atari800 emulator. I post screenshots directly from the emulator(all but one), with no changes, not to make any mistakes with switching them for a wrong one...

 

[+Stephen]

2 hours ago, GravityWorm said:

If someone has an 8bit Atari plugged to a CRT TV and can send a photo of their screen, you are welcome.

I'm not getting any good images from the little Trinitron.  They look fantastic on the screen, absolutely awful on the phone's camera.

[Mathy]

Hello guys

 

We need a slide show routine that loads all the different RastConverter picture files automatically.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

 

[+Philsan]

12 minutes ago, Mathy said:

Hello guys

 

We need a slide show routine that loads all the different RastConverter picture files automatically.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

 

Hi Mathy.

 

There is RastaSlide (latest version in post #3496)

[GravityWorm]

GravityWorm_dune01.xex

[GravityWorm]

GravityWorm_moutains01.xex

[GravityWorm]

GravityWorm_bush01.xex

[GravityWorm]

On 10/29/2021 at 9:11 PM, Stephen said:

On 10/29/2021 at 6:35 PM, GravityWorm said:

 

I'm not getting any good images from the little Trinitron.  They look fantastic on the screen, absolutely awful on the phone's camera.

Yep its difficult to make a photo of a CRT screen.
Try this:

https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/21294/whats-the-best-way-to-take-a-picture-of-an-lcd-or-crt-screen

[Gunstar]

On 10/29/2021 at 2:11 PM, Stephen said:

I'm not getting any good images from the little Trinitron.  They look fantastic on the screen, absolutely awful on the phone's camera.

That's the problem I always have showing a pic of one of my real screens, CRT or not. The phone camera (or digital camera I have too) always screws up the colors.

[Gunstar]

On 11/2/2021 at 12:43 PM, GravityWorm said:

Yep its difficult to make a photo of a CRT screen.
Try this:

https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/21294/whats-the-best-way-to-take-a-picture-of-an-lcd-or-crt-screen

I just read through most of that link, some good pointers there for some people I guess, but none of it helps in correcting false/different colors that the camera picture displays. that's the only issue I have, I'm well aware, being a trained artist and photographer of the rest of the "pointers." The camera's never translate the true colors I see on screen with my eyes to the photo.

[drpeter]

14 minutes ago, Gunstar said:

The camera's never translate the true colors I see on screen with my eyes to the photo.

Try to turn off auto white balance, if possible, and stick with natural white balance.  In computer images one hue or set of hues often predominates and in digital cameras auto-white balance algorithms attempt to 'compensate' for that by adjusting hues across the image so that they are more evenly distributed.  You may have already tried this, though...

[Gunstar]

19 hours ago, drpeter said:

Try to turn off auto white balance, if possible, and stick with natural white balance.  In computer images one hue or set of hues often predominates and in digital cameras auto-white balance algorithms attempt to 'compensate' for that by adjusting hues across the image so that they are more evenly distributed.  You may have already tried this, though...

Thanks, no I haven't tried that yet. 

[GravityWorm]

GravityWorm_bird01.xex

[GravityWorm]

GravityWorm_fox01.xex

[GravityWorm]

GravityWorm_bike01.xex

[+MrFish]

@GravityWorm

Nice set of images.

 

[Beeblebrox]

3 hours ago, GravityWorm said:

GravityWorm_fox01.xex 22.08 kB · 1 download

@GravityWorm Loving the colours on this one. (Kingfisher too). How long did you run it for just out of interest? Wonder how they'd look without dithering. I reckon you could also try running this one on a horizontally flipped version of the source image. See this excellent example of the benefits of doing so my DrPeter:

 

 

 

Edited November 7, 2021 by Beeblebrox
adding more info

[GravityWorm]

33 minutes ago, Beeblebrox said:

 Loving the colours on this one. (Kingfisher too). How long did you run it for just out of interest?

Thx. I run it as long as there are no changes. Sometimes it takes 3-5 hours, sometimes much more up to 15-20h. Also if not satisfied with results I try to change something and try again.

Edited November 7, 2021 by GravityWorm
added some more info

[GravityWorm]

31 minutes ago, MrFish said:

@GravityWorm

Nice set of images.

 

Thx.

[Beeblebrox]

8 minutes ago, GravityWorm said:

Thx. I run it as long as there are no changes. Sometimes it takes 3-5 hours, sometimes much more up to 15-20h. Also if not satisfied with results I try to change something and try again.

@GravityWorm  Sure, that's a really good approach. Yup I run mine generally around a minimum of 15hrs on but on average probably 20-25hrs, (unless it's a realy simple image - where I've been known to do rare ones that ran for 2hrs or less). One of the longer ones I ran a week if I recall and IMHO it really benefitted from it.

 

I nearly always run Ciede as the colour distance and usually Atari800winplus as the pallete to give it the rich colours. (Sometimes Altirra pallete).  10,000 solutions nearly always, and very rarely use dither as I generally don't like it's effect. (It has it's uses of course).

 

I always do a lot of pre-processing editing of the image, (usually in Irfanview), reducing colour depth, size, cranking up the contrast and saturation and sometimes tweaking individual RGB levels. Then whenever possible in the Rastaconverter GUI I'd further tweak the contrast, gamma and sometime brightness where needed again. The contract nearly always goes up here as personally I don't like to see grays in the conversions if they weren't there before in the source image. (Of course sometimes it works with greys).

 

I've not been running a lot of conversions of late as been sidetracked with the hardware side of things, fixing various A8s. I am just getting back into it again. In spring and summer this year I got totally obesssed and was running up to 12 x conversions at once, each running on 9 threads, with my laptop running 24hrs a day for weeks at a time. (I've since calmed down a bit heh heh). Juggling the saving of 12 x simultaneously processing images at once is a real challenge I can tell you! These days I am focusing on one at a time but will probably crank it up to 3.

 

The result was I have a lot of saved progress incomplete images I'll now pick up on to finish and post over the coming days and weeks. A lot of which I may have discounted earlier this year. It is very easy to get too self critical and having some time away and revisiting some of my incomplete/unposted images I realise they actually aren't too bad IMHO.

 

There are some veteran Rastaconverters here on this thread who really know their stuff. It's definitely worth looking back on the previous posts as there are some gems and good advice. (It's been going for a looooooong time). I still have a lot to learn, especially regarding pre-processing of the image before it even goes into Rasterconverter. I recall there is an excellent video tutorial on Atarionline.pl but unfortunately all in Polish if I'm not mistaken.

 

Personally I certainly couldn't do without the GUI for ease of use and also because I hit the the pre-process preview button a huge number of times to perfect the "ideal" destination image before starting a conversion. On average I may tweak and preview and tweak again over 30 times before I finally hit go.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[GravityWorm]

3 hours ago, Beeblebrox said:

Juggling the saving of 12 x simultaneously processing images at once is a real challenge I can tell you

I run only one process, I mentioned before that I use command line version, running one process works better for me. So note that those processing times I wrote about are when one process is running. I run it till the Norm. Dist stops going down and I'm also satisfied.

I do sometimes some heavy preprocessing... I do several things like changing palette, even painting a image based on a photo (I did some crazy stuff with the image I'm now workin' on), using Atari palette in GIMP, many many more (to many to write about).
I love dithering (You don't like it i know ), I sometimes use heavy dithering with dither_val=1.5+ (with dither_rand=0.8+). But sometimes I set very low dither values or none dithering at all. I try imagine that my images are for an real Atari hooked up to a CRT TV.  :) I use  Atari800 emulator.

My command line for an image I'm workin' on now:

rastaconverter /i=input.png /pal=altirra.act /dither=jarvis /dither_val=1.3 /dither_rand=0.8 /s=10000 /threads=4 /seed=0 /save=10000000 /continue
I always set 10 000 solutions. I set smaller value only for previews.
I always use altirra.act palette (I did get only this one withe the RC), not sure that it's the right palette..

 

I'm mostly satisfied with all my new images posted here (I'm satisfied mostly with the bird01 and bike01). All but one. Somehow I did not see this artifact. I don't know why, possibly my eyes got tired... I hate artifacts like that.. Fffffff. ?
But as a perfectionist I try not to worry about such things...


Yep I know there is that Polish video tutorial, they posted also an PDF (RastaConverter-warsztaty.pdf), understandable without knowing Polish, here:
https://atarionline.pl/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=1914&page=17
 

Edited November 7, 2021 by GravityWorm
Posted that PDF here... :)

[Beeblebrox]

43 minutes ago, GravityWorm said:

I run only one process, I mentioned before that I use command line version, running one process works better for me. So note that those processing times I wrote about are when one process is running. I run it till the Norm. Dist stops going down and I'm also satisfied.

I do sometimes some heavy preprocessing... I do several things like changing palette, even painting a image based on a photo (I did some crazy stuff with the image I'm now workin' on), using Atari palette in GIMP, many many more (to many to write about).
I love dithering (You don't like it i know ), I sometimes use heavy dithering with dither_val=1.5+ (with dither_rand=0.8+). But sometimes I set very low dither values or none dithering at all. I try imagine that my images are for an real Atari hooked up to a CRT TV.  :) I use  Atari800 emulator.

My command line for an image I'm workin' on now:

rastaconverter /i=input.png /pal=altirra.act /dither=jarvis /dither_val=1.3 /dither_rand=0.8 /s=10000 /threads=4 /seed=0 /save=10000000 /continue
I always set 10 000 solutions. I set smaller value only for previews.
I always use altirra.act palette (I did get only this one withe the RC), not sure that it's the right palette..

 

I'm mostly satisfied with all my new images posted here (I'm satisfied mostly with the bird01 and bike01). All but one. Somehow I did not see this artifact. I don't know why, possibly my eyes got tired... I hate artifacts like that.. Fffffff. ?
But as a perfectionist I try not to worry about such things...


Yep I know there is that Polish video tutorial, they posted also an PDF (RastaConverter-warsztaty.pdf), understandable without knowing Polish, here:
https://atarionline.pl/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=1914&page=17
 

Ah the artefact is a very well known issue to do with the player repositioning bug. They can be individually manually stripped from the output XEX. @drpeter has kindly done this for me a few times and had created a tutorial mentioned here.

 

You mention you use Altirra. You can set it up to mimic the display and quirks of crts and real A8 output. Have a tinker with Altirra's various display and output settings. It's very clever.

 

I only ran so many instances of the converter because I was trying to get through a lot of images. I know techically if I'd ran half as many they would have processessed faster. However it often allowed me to see how some were doing and stop them if I didn't think they were going in the right direction.

 

Dithering works for some images - as you say personal taste. I just think sometime it's muddies the image. I'd sometimes run two version of an image, one with a low dither, one without. Nearly always the non dithered one looked better IMHO.

 

Altirra pallete is a good one. You can download and use the others from somewhere on this thread. I;ll see if I can post them for you. There are around 8-10 of them. Atari800winplus tends to be more vibrant - although can be too much sometimes.

 

Thanks for the PDF link btw

Edited November 7, 2021 by Beeblebrox