Question about black bars, again. . . .

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iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

tokumaru wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 4:24 am
iNCEPTIONAL wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 4:02 am If I draw a SNES game at 256x224 in Photoshop (which has square pixels), what size [in pixels] should I stretch the image horizontally to in order to get a decent representation of what the visuals would look like proportionally when stretched to a 4:3 display aspect ratio?
If the pixel aspect ratio is 8:7, you just need to scale the image horizontally by that much: 256 * (8 / 7) = 292.5714

So 293x224 should be the new dimensions of the image. However, due to scaling interpolation, the result will look very blurry. To get a sharper image, it's usually better to scale the image up by an integer amount, and then stretch it horizontally according to the 8:7 PAR. In Photoshop, this means scaling the image up to, say, 400% in both axes, without interpolation (i.e. nearest neighbor), and then scaling only the horizontal axis by 114% (8 / 7 * 100), using linear interpolation.
OK, thanks.

It's honestly a real shame I can't just change the pixel aspect ratio directly in Photoshop. Well, maybe you can in recent versions or something, but I'm using ancient Photoshop 7.0, and that doesn't appear to have the option. And there's no way I'm paying a never-ending subscription fee to [not actually] own the newer version. I could try some other package for creating the assets (one that allows changing the pixel aspect ratio), but it took me so long to get comfortable with Photoshop 7.0, which I do really like now, and I'm so slow at learning new things. It's all a bit of a convoluted pain in the ass really. But I guess that's just PAR for the course (pun intended) with making new games for these old consoles. Well, certainly with the SNES at least.
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tokumaru
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by tokumaru »

Does Photoshop 7 really not have this feature?
par.jpg
It's definitely there in CS6, which should be fairly easy to... uh... obtain.

GIMP, which is free, appears to support custom pixel aspect ratios too, and while it's definitely inferior to Photoshop when it comes to photo editing, it's a fantastic tool for pixel art (maybe even better than Photoshop).
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

tokumaru wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 5:32 am Does Photoshop 7 really not have this feature?

par.jpg

It's definitely there in CS6, which should be fairly easy to... uh... obtain.

GIMP, which is free, appears to support custom pixel aspect ratios too, and while it's definitely inferior to Photoshop when it comes to photo editing, it's a fantastic tool for pixel art (maybe even better than Photoshop).
I can't see that option in Photoshop 7.0.

And I've tried using GIMP but just can't seem to get to grips with it. So many things seem really strange and clunky and just not conducive to the way I work at all, as I recall. And that's probably more my problem than GIMP's, but I just find it so hard picking up new programs, and kind of find it annoying that I have to go learn something brand new constantly just for one or two features. I guess that's just life though.

I'll have a look at GIMP again....
Last edited by iNCEPTIONAL on Mon Aug 15, 2022 9:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
turboxray
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by turboxray »

I'm pretty sure you can get the latest PS for just $20 a month, which is cheap enough (I do the whole suite bundle subscription tho). One thing I did notice on pixel aspect ratio settings in photoshop, is that if you have layers/project and copy stuff from it to a different aspect ratio project/psd - it'll auto scale that content. It's pretty annoying. I always turn off aspect ratio correction when copying assets into/out of the current psd project.

It would be nice if PS has a "preview" separate window for the aspect ratio part. I actually started writing my own pixel editing features for own gui apps, so I'm less dependent on PS, but it's still a very convenient to use.


Not all companies are "professional". PCE has a 7.16mhz dot clock, and yet uses assets as-is from CPS1 and other arcade systems that have dot clock of 8mhz. At least one PCE game I know of actually fixes it for sprites, but not for BG assets. Pretty sure Saturn ports of arcade games do this too (take the aspect ratio hit and just clip the outside areas) - but I haven't looked too closely.
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tokumaru
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by tokumaru »

turboxray wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 7:52 am I'm pretty sure you can get the latest PS for just $20 a month, which is cheap enough
Depends on where in the world you live and how much money you make... Here in Brazil, US$20 is 1/10 of the monthly minimum wage, or about 5 or 6 regular meals. It's not terribly expensive, but not exactly cheap either. And the current trend of making everything available only through subscriptions is pretty annoying too. Nobody is allowed to own anything anymore.

Regarding GIMP, I agree that coming from Photoshop it isn't exactly intuitive, but everything you need for pixel art is there and it doesn't take that long to get used to where everything is and how some of the tools differ from those in Photoshop.
TrekkiesUnite118
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by TrekkiesUnite118 »

turboxray wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 7:52 am
Not all companies are "professional". PCE has a 7.16mhz dot clock, and yet uses assets as-is from CPS1 and other arcade systems that have dot clock of 8mhz. At least one PCE game I know of actually fixes it for sprites, but not for BG assets. Pretty sure Saturn ports of arcade games do this too (take the aspect ratio hit and just clip the outside areas) - but I haven't looked too closely.
Yeah, on Saturn it's all over the place. Capcom's ports they handled themselves tend to just use the 352x224 resolution mode and just let the 16 pixels on each side get cut off. So you end up with everything looking a tad fatter and if you have both characters move as far away as possible, about 2/3-3/4 of their sprites go off screen. SNK's ports just run in 320x224 mode and have black bars on the side to get to 304x224. Mortal Kombat 3 and Trilogy I believe was just scaled down to work in 320x224?

Capcom when dealing with 256x224 games just pillarboxed them into a 320x224 screen. Konami would sometimes give us an option of either pillarboxing in 320 wide to get the same framing as the arcade, or expanding the horizontal space to take up the entire 320 pixel space, or allow the user to just stretch the roughly 256-288 pixels to 320 pixels. At the same time Konami would turn around and do something like in Symphony of the Night where they just doubled every 4th pixel of all the assets. Then you sometimes see things like Tactics Ogre where they just expand the framing to draw more on the sides than it did on SNES.
tokumaru wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 8:17 am
Regarding GIMP, I agree that coming from Photoshop it isn't exactly intuitive, but everything you need for pixel art is there and it doesn't take that long to get used to where everything is and how some of the tools differ from those in Photoshop.
Yeah, once you're used to it GIMP is pretty easy to use and figure out. I've used it for all my editing for Grandia, Sakura Wars, etc.
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rainwarrior
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by rainwarrior »

I couldn't make heads or tails of GIMP for years, until I saw this video: GIMP Pixel Art Tool Setup Tutorial by Matej Jan.

That showed me the basics of how to use it, and I found once I was over that initial hump I got pretty comfortable with it. Now I use it daily.

Here's a very brief visual guide to setting the pixel aspect ratio in GIMP: twitter video
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

rainwarrior wrote: Mon Aug 15, 2022 12:44 pm I couldn't make heads or tails of GIMP for years, until I saw this video: GIMP Pixel Art Tool Setup Tutorial by Matej Jan.

That showed me the basics of how to use it, and I found once I was over that initial hump I got pretty comfortable with it. Now I use it daily.

Here's a very brief visual guide to setting the pixel aspect ratio in GIMP: twitter video
Cheers for those videos. I'll check them out.
Pokun
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Re: Question about black bars, again. . . .

Post by Pokun »

Yeah I think I too learned to use Gimp for serious pixel art by watching that video, it's very easy to understand.
There are some weirdness with some basic things like drawing rectangles or circles etc that isn't working exactly like you are used to with Photoshop or other classic image editors, but it's very easy to look up these things as Gimp has very good documentation. Besides just googling will answer most questions you have since Gimp is so popular.

I like that you have control over the palette when working with indexed colors in Gimp, and all the usual required things like an 8x8 dot grid is all there if you know where to enable them.
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