Posted By
MMS
on 2019-01-05
14:07:29
 |  Re: LUMYDCTT - RenderGFX - Need some help
Hi! a really nice idea! 
Thank you for mentioning me Actually I should say technically speaking I am more a user, but certainly happy to share my past experience.
(Larry even programmed his own tool, Chronos is more deeply involved in demo and game developments, and recently there are some new tools arised, Csabo and Luca are in everything )
Actually Csabo and gerliczer gave really useful technical details on the matter.
Let me share my view on the gfx creation process.
There are different approaches.
First, the dithering. Some people who creates gfxs, prefer zero dithering (George), Chronos is very good at nice dithering pics, while I try to keep it low, but the zero dithering is usually not enough for me. Larry even adds some noise to the original pictures because it works best with his converter's dithering routines, as the interlace routine seems to count special "off" colored pixels for the better color mix (and the final result is better).
Modes:
At the early years I preferred (multicolor) FLI (now we can call DFLI, as due to badline, really cannot 100% simulate the C64's FLI mode).
I had some initial slideshows with mixed modes (and mixed results ), tried to tinker with the different modes, including interlaced ones. Like the Conan slideshow (with uncompressed IHFLI pictures, huge. LOL)
I always felt, that with the 160x200 resolution (despite more available colors) we usually loose too much of the details, even in DFLI mode. It was evident when some fine details I wanted to keep, but was not possible with DFLI-
So in the few years I only made HFLI/DHFLI pictures with 320x200 resolution (or with IstvanV's routine, a little more vertical res than 200).
I think my first DHFLI one I really spent a lot of time to adjust the pictures, was the VDC Challenge.
Still, all those pictures are just converted pictures and the converted Plus/4 picture was NOT edited, just the original picture modified/finetuned several times in PC gfx editor to get a better end result (less bad pixels).
My method and tools (as you could read above, everyone uses his own method and settings)
-Basic picture editing, cropping tool for proper 1.6 aspect ratio: Irfanview
As a first step I usually reduce color depth to 128 or 64. I usually do not add Plus/4 palette, I select pictures look OKish with Plus/4 colors (green, blue, and golden colored pictures, also black/white are great. Red, orange colored pictures, and skin colors does not look too great with our palette)
Usually I add a median filter to prevent bad pixels popping up here and there. For this one in the past I used the Irfanview, but recently I changed to Paint.Net.
In Paint.Net I usually eliminate remaining orphan pixels and off colored areas. (if after conversion there are a lot of off colored dots, then I know that the color is NOK for the Plussy, Usually then I play with Gamma, or I recolor the area in Paint.Net to something better for the Plus/4. )
I use Plus4emu's gfx conversion tool with the GUI. The preview is a little too small to be really useful (so you continuoulsy need the YAPE or Plus4emu to doublecheck results. The source-code can be checked, but as I mentioned, I am just a happy user of the tool
Lot of great dithering methods, lot of settings for gamma, color saturation, etc. Really good.
Especially the X-shift is a great one if some areas are just not OKish. (but recently I had to stop using it)
After I see that the picture is >90-95% OKish, in the past I stopped here, saved e raw HFLI picture with maximum compression (it is lossless, so really great 9-10KB size even with the extra big attribute map), and IstvanV's slideshow routine made the rest.
In the last one year I started to use Abcug's Pixelshop to further edit the HFLI pictures. For that you need to save it into P4S format, and when I finished the job (eliminate of bad color zones, correct bad or orphan pixels, etc) IstvanV1's Plus4emu P4sconv will convert to the more you need (in my case: first check in PRG format, how it really would look on a Plus/4 (Pixelshop had a palette really does not work really well, so you need some level of imagination of the colors during editing).
There are soem setting ofn the meuat9ors worth to check.
While I really like Plus/4emu's picture, I found it a little overdithered. It means that in Quality 3 setting the gfx looks much better, than in reality. (and few years back I though my slideshows were better, than the reality 
YAPE's CRT emulation is just great.
Without CRT emulation the picture look too sharp, and you will never see such a picture on a CRT monitor, or even LCD TV.
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