Images generated by RastaConverter

[+Atari8man2004]

1 hour ago, Philsan said:

Wow, that image enters my best images folder!

 

It would be nice if the upper left line could be removed:

 

That one got past  me. Here is an earlier save.   

Atari8man-Creepy_Clown.xex

Edited October 27, 2023 by Atari8man2004

[patjomki]

People use to say that skin tones on ATARI are difficult. Well, I find that this conversion is ok, don't you think? Please be kind, its my first attempt with RastaConverter.

 

PAL, 11 billion iterations, 40.000 solutions.

 

blonde.xex

Edited October 27, 2023 by patjomki

[Beeblebrox]

I'd probably try without dithering as I am not sure it adds anything to the conversion. Nice image.

[+Philsan]

@patjomki if you would replace background color with a color from Atari palette you would avoid dithering.

[patjomki]

1 hour ago, Philsan said:

@patjomki if you would replace background color with a color from Atari palette you would avoid dithering.

Actually I do not understand. How can I find out what color is in the Atari palette?

[Beeblebrox]

2 hours ago, Beeblebrox said:

I'd probably try without dithering as I am not sure it adds anything to the conversion. Nice image.

Also, if you avoid enabling dithering and also use a mask, you'll get a much better result all round. 

[ivop]

1 hour ago, Philsan said:

@patjomki if you would replace background color with a color from Atari palette you would avoid dithering.

And mirror the image to have the head at the right side of the screen where there's more CPU time to do PM repositioning and color changes. Now it's on the left, competing with ANTIC stealing nine cycles for memory refresh.

[+Philsan]

36 minutes ago, patjomki said:

Actually I do not understand. How can I find out what color is in the Atari palette?

In Rastaconverter there's a palette folder.

Load the palette you use for your conversions (for example "altirra.act") in your paint program and choose for the background one of those 128 colors. 

[patjomki]

Thanks for all the tips.

 

I am going to try all of them but I suppose that it will take a while.

 

I have to admit that a quick try without dithering led to an awful picture (preview) though.

Edited October 27, 2023 by patjomki

[Beeblebrox]

2 hours ago, patjomki said:

Thanks for all the tips.

 

I am going to try all of them but I suppose that it will take a while.

 

I have to admit that a quick try without dithering led to an awful picture (preview) though.

You can do a conversion where the dithering is only visible on the subject and not the background. Use a mask and keep tweaking the contrast and gamma settings and preview in rc's gui until I looks right. I assume you are using RC with it's gui? 

As mentioned use altirra as the pallette and I'd use yuv for both settings. 

[+Stephen]

I've found I almost always get great results by doing the following.  Making sure the source image is 320*240.  Sometimes I will add black bars to top or side to preserve the aspect ratio.  I then convert the image to 128 colours.  I know that it can still pick colours not in the Atari palette, but it doesn't matter.  Often, these source images will be 50 to 60 thousand colours.  Dropping them to 128 at such a small resolution, is barely if at all perceptible.  This makes the work on the convertor much simpler.  To do all of this, I use a free program called Fastone Image Viewer.

 

For another project I am working on (VBXE), I also wrote my own little PC utility which uses the "median cut" algorithm to take a picture and convert it from 2 to 1024 colours (in power of 2 increments).  2 colour mode in this case is not black & white - it is the 2 most used colours in the image.  It's pretty amazing seeing the difference as you go 2,4,8,16,32,64,128, etc.  Many pics look good enough at just 32 colours.  I did this because obviously 8-bit indexed images top out at 256 colours, but I needed 512 and 1024 for the aforementioned VBXE idea.  Check this out!

 

This example (the link is to a Flickr album with the progression is the stunning Karen Gillan (2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024 colours - ORIGINAL - 88,966 Colours)

 

This is a rendering of our little dog that my wife put together ((2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024 colours - ORIGINAL - 898,760 Colours)

 

[Beeblebrox]

I too always resize the image to 320x240, (or 320x200 if letterbox), and always reduce colours to 128.

I also always ramp up the contrast and saturation in the source image. I still tweak in RC settings also. 

My chosen initial tool is Irfanview. Been using it for near 20 years.

 

I always use altirra pallette, and also yuv for both settings.

 

Don't underestimate how much more improved a conversion be made by playing around with RC's contrast, gamma and brightness in the gui. And using the RC created destination image as the source works wonders also. (Start and stop a conversion, then take the resulting destination image created and make that the source image).

 

Finally I now never convert anything without using mask in the RC process. 

Oh and I always use Sheddy's tools. (hpos remover and with letterbox conversions I use the centering tool). 

 

 

 

Edited October 28, 2023 by Beeblebrox

[+Atari8man2004]

1 hour ago, Beeblebrox said:

I too always resize the image to 320x240, (or 320x200 if letterbox), and always reduce colours to 128.

I also always ramp up the contrast and saturation in the source image. I still tweak in RC settings also. 

My chosen initial tool is Irfanview. Been using it for near 20 years.

 

I always use altirra pallette, and also yuv for both settings.

 

Don't underestimate how much more improved a conversion be made by playing around with RC's contrast, gamma and brightness in the gui. And using the RC created destination image as the source works wonders also. (Start and stop a conversion, then take the resulting destination image created and make that the source image).

 

Finally I now never convert anything without using mask in the RC process. 

Oh and I always use Sheddy's tools. (hpos remover and with letterbox conversions I use the centering tool). 

 

 

 

Is Irfanview used to make the mask?  

[Beeblebrox]

2 hours ago, Atari8man2004 said:

Is Irfanview used to make the mask?  

In part. I take the image from Irfanview after decreasing colour depth, resizing to 320x240, (or 200 if letterbox), and tweaking contrast and saturation, but you can use any similar image manipulation editor.

 

Then I paste it into paint.net. I use the latter's lasso select tool to cut out the shape around the image I want to mask, then use the fill in tool with the colour black to full in all those areas left which I don't want to mask in. Then I cut the entire image, (say 320x240), paste it back into Irfanview and save it as a jpg with the same name as the image with the word mask in the filename so I know which is which. I also usually reduced the number of colors of the mask down to 2, so it's just black and white, before I save. I just do that out of habit. 

 

RC then knows that the bit you cut out, in this case white, is the bit you want it to prioritise/focus on, and the other bits in black it doesn't. 

 

Experiment and you'll soon see.

 

Edit: @Atari8man2004 crude example as I've just done this on my phone with my finger in a very rudimentary app

Say you want the mask created to focus on the head in this image, this is how the mask would look:

 

 

 

Then in mask settings in RC gui I usually set it to 10. Experiment.

 

The more you priorise the masked area, the more any details outside of the mask will suffer as it were, but that depends on the source image and background. I tend to use wider masks that almost cover entire images. Sounds odd but it works. And for my images like the girl one, where the background in black, you can just cut the mask around her head, like in the above example. Just experiment. 

 

All my images in the past 12months use masks. Before that they didn't and it's clear some previous conversions would have been a lot better had I used one. I may revisit an early image and use a mask, to illustrate this. 

Edited October 28, 2023 by Beeblebrox
Adding extra info

[+Atari8man2004]

13 hours ago, patjomki said:

People use to say that skin tones on ATARI are difficult. Well, I find that this conversion is ok, don't you think? Please be kind, its my first attempt with RastaConverter.

 

PAL, 11 billion iterations, 40.000 solutions.

 

blonde.xex 20.17 kB · 2 downloads

I am also new to the rastaconverta theres a learning process and the end results is rewarding.  There are over thousands of awesome images in this thread.

[patjomki]

10 hours ago, Beeblebrox said:

I assume you are using RC with it's gui? 

 

Yes, that's the way I converted the picture above.

[Beeblebrox]

43 minutes ago, patjomki said:

 

Yes, that's the way I converted the picture above.

No worries. There is a dos only version of rc as the gui interface was added later. 

[+Stephen]

10 hours ago, Beeblebrox said:

And using the RC created destination image as the source works wonders also. (Start and stop a conversion, then take the resulting destination image created and make that the source image).

Wow - what a great tip.  I can't believe I never thought to try that.

[Beeblebrox]

27 minutes ago, Stephen said:

Wow - what a great tip.  I can't believe I never thought to try that.

I think I learnt this from Amarok. 

This also enables you to do the double dithering I've recently alluded to. Double dithering sounds like something I increasingly find myself doing as I age heh heh!!

 

Seriously though doubling up on dithering is pretty effective.

 

So in the first pass you use dithering, (my preference is either flloyd or jarvis), then get the destination image to then make that the source, and then use dithering again. Had some cracking results that way.

 

Rc is all about experimenting, tweaking, experimenting some more, tweaking, etc etc. Defo the more prep you do and the more tweaking of the gamma, contrast and brightness you do in rc settings, previewing each time, the better. I can ramp up the latter settings, say, on the first pass to create the destination file I am gonna then use as the source, then almost find it needs the settings to come back down. The preview function more or less allows you to fine tune it, although as all know you don't always end up with exactly the right result. 

 

Between all this and masks, and of course being savvy with the actual image you choose to convert in the first place, you can get some amazing results. I was so pleased with girl portrait image (again below). This was done that way and the double dithering really enhanced the skin tones, etc imho.

 

Again I'd love to see this on real hardware on a CRT.

Edited October 28, 2023 by Beeblebrox

[+Atari8man2004]

9 hours ago, Beeblebrox said:

In part. I take the image from Irfanview after decreasing colour depth, resizing to 320x240, (or 200 if letterbox), and tweaking contrast and saturation, but you can use any similar image manipulation editor.

 

Then I paste it into paint.net. I use the latter's lasso select tool to cut out the shape around the image I want to mask, then use the fill in tool with the colour black to full in all those areas left which I don't want to mask in. Then I cut the entire image, (say 320x240), paste it back into Irfanview and save it as a jpg with the same name as the image with the word mask in the filename so I know which is which. I also usually reduced the number of colors of the mask down to 2, so it's just black and white, before I save. I just do that out of habit. 

 

RC then knows that the bit you cut out, in this case white, is the bit you want it to prioritise/focus on, and the other bits in black it doesn't. 

 

Experiment and you'll soon see.

 

Edit: @Atari8man2004 crude example as I've just done this on my phone with my finger in a very rudimentary app

Say you want the mask created to focus on the head in this image, this is how the mask would look:

 

 

 

Then in mask settings in RC gui I usually set it to 10. Experiment.

 

The more you priorise the masked area, the more any details outside of the mask will suffer as it were, but that depends on the source image and background. I tend to use wider masks that almost cover entire images. Sounds odd but it works. And for my images like the girl one, where the background in black, you can just cut the mask around her head, like in the above example. Just experiment. 

 

All my images in the past 12months use masks. Before that they didn't and it's clear some previous conversions would have been a lot better had I used one. I may revisit an early image and use a mask, to illustrate this. 

I got 4 images that has to be done with mask they been converting seem almost forever and in each one  theres a section rasta has problems with I'm going to redo them with mask later today fingers crossed!. 

[Beeblebrox]

47 minutes ago, Atari8man2004 said:

I got 4 images that has to be done with mask they been converting seem almost forever and in each one  theres a section rasta has problems with I'm going to redo them with mask later today fingers crossed!. 

Also try flipping the source image horizontally as has been suggested by others. See earlier posts. As I say its a lot of trial and error and I often convert loads of images but only end up posting some as it hit and miss. 

[+Stephen]

8 hours ago, Beeblebrox said:

Again I'd love to see this on real hardware on a CRT.

I'll get you a shot tomorrow (what is the exact filename?) - I will experiment with all the different modes on my camera.  It's a Pixel 6 Pro, should be able to take a decent shot, but I've never had good luck getting images from any of my 3 PVMs ranging from 8" to 20".  Either bad reflections, or exaggerated "screendoor" effect that is not present.

 

[Beeblebrox]

3 hours ago, Stephen said:

I'll get you a shot tomorrow (what is the exact filename?) - I will experiment with all the different modes on my camera.  It's a Pixel 6 Pro, should be able to take a decent shot, but I've never had good luck getting images from any of my 3 PVMs ranging from 8" to 20".  Either bad reflections, or exaggerated "screendoor" effect that is not present.

 

Thanks

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/200118-images-generated-by-rastaconverter/?do=findComment&comment=5299136

 

[+Philsan]

On 8/15/2023 at 5:19 PM, Beeblebrox said:

I've been playing around with some new (to me) pre-processing techniques/practices, mixed with the usual and also playing with dithering. Will outline it all at some stage but I've had some really good results. 

 

Obviously having a black background helps the conversions a lot.

 

Here is the first of many I've just cooked up. I've many still cooking.

 

Portrait of a girl

 

The dithering really enhances it as a portait. 

 

Source: a digital art portrait image by digital artist Sky Skewa

 

1.5 bill evaluations/ 131 norm dist / Altirra pallete / 20000 sols / 320*240

82 unique colours

Mask and lots of preprocessing/double dithering used (I'll explain later with another image).

 

Filename: Beeblebrox_FacebySkySewa_DEST_SM1_13_fixed.xex

(snapshot taken from Altirra with PAL high artifacting setting):

 

Beeblebrox_FacebySkySewa_DEST_SM1_13_fixed.xex 19.71 kB · 17 downloads

Very nice picture.

 

Would it be possible to avoid those lines?

 

[Beeblebrox]

58 minutes ago, Philsan said:

Very nice picture.

 

Would it be possible to avoid those lines?

At the time I tried to use Sheddy's tool to remove. In the end they are so small I didn't bother trying another attempt. Very happy withnit as is.