Unit cards in Paint Shop Pro

[Byzantine Emperor]

I can successfully get a good screenshot with moviecam for my unit card, but when it comes to cutting away the background, I have to resort to selecting every individual part of the unit and cutting the unit out onto a different image. There must be a faster way?!

Also, when I shrink my picture to fit the unit card, it looks very bad and squashed. How can I keep it looking good?

[Stuie]

Good unit card tutorial:

http://forums.rometotalrealism.org/i...showtopic=2002

[Byzantine Emperor]

No idea how to get those tools.

Anyone out there use PaintShop Pro?

[Myrddraal]

Yes. If you want to resize something, press shift+s then make sure you've got smart size selected. Also try to keep the proportions the same (i.e. the aspect ratio locked)

Try using the magic wand to delete the background....

Hope you understand that, I realise its not that clear, but I don't have much time.

[Byzantine Emperor]

The magic wand delets only individual pixels at once.

I will try your resizing methods

[Myrddraal]

when you select the magic wand, there should be a list of option at the top. If you select RGB value and put the tolerance up, it will select all pixels connected to the pixel you clicked on with similar RGB values.

[professorspatula]

When I made unit cards from movie_cam screenshots in Paintshop Pro, I found the easiest method is just to manually select the area you want. Use the point to point selection tool with a Feather of 1. Yes it takes a bit of time to get your unit selected, but not more than 2 or 3 minutes. You can use the magic wand tool to try and select certain areas of your unit more quickly, but you'll still need to fine tune the selection which takes additional time.

Also when resizing your image, as you know the image quality gets worse and blurry when reduced in size. It's sometimes worth reducing image size gradually and sharpening the image each time before reducing the image size further. But that only really matters if the starting image is a few times more in size than the size you eventually want it reduced to. I also use a very mild unsharpen mask filter after reducing the image size. This is a less drastic sharpening effect that reduces the bluriness of the image, so it's great for the small unit cards you need. My settings for the Unsharpen mask are a miniscule Radius 0.77, and strength 55. Applied once or twice is all you need.

The hardest part is making the little unit card look good. That's the one you see in the unit roster that you click on to order the unit around. You'll have to crop most of the image and play around with making it fit nicely in the very small box you get, as well as making sure it doesn't look too blurry or overly sharp. You can get some good results with PSP though if you give it a chance. Oh and don't forget about alpha layers!

[Byzantine Emperor]

I will try that later

[Myrddraal]

I tend to use the magic wand to delete the background rather than the unit. The unit tends to have lots of colours, but the background is often shades of green. Using magic wand and selecting colour works quite well. There are tons of ways of doing it.

[Byzantine Emperor]

Thanks for the hints I am in progress of changing the Scipii to Athenians, Brutii into Samnites and Greeks into Spartans, so I will need to make a few new unit cards :(