AuthorTopic: Rotating a very small pixel without distortion?  (Read 2845 times)

Offline cali

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Rotating a very small pixel without distortion?

on: November 02, 2016, 07:55:23 am
I'm making a emoticon for a website (as a casual hobby) and I want a tilting head motion, but the images are only about 25x30 pixels. I'm using Photoshop CS5 on a Mac if it helps. I'm trying to save time by rotating my original image, but photoshop distorts the image when its rotated.

Before and After

How do I avoid this? Do I have to re-draw every frame of the rotation from scratch, or is there a shortcut?

jun

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Re: Rotating a very small pixel without distortion?

Reply #1 on: November 02, 2016, 08:09:03 am
Rotate, then clean up the frame by hand.
There are no shortcuts as far as I'm aware. Maybe someone else knows some. There are different algorithms for dealing with it like RotSprite, but you still need to do cleanup anyways.

Offline questseeker

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Re: Rotating a very small pixel without distortion?

Reply #2 on: November 02, 2016, 08:19:18 am
If possible, rotate vector art or a high resolution image: it will be a better reference for redrawing because it will have better proportions, with less mangled, warped and displaced features. Even if you have to scale down the rotated reference image it will be just blurred, not devastated like your example.

Offline cali

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Re: Rotating a very small pixel without distortion?

Reply #3 on: November 02, 2016, 09:42:09 am
thanks for your replies guys! You've been a help.

Offline Lores

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Re: Rotating a very small pixel without distortion?

Reply #4 on: November 10, 2016, 02:25:17 am
Hi there. Rotating then doing cleanup is your best bet, unless you wan't to do what the person before me said, go higher resolution then drop it down again, but that could have negative effects as well (such as detail loss, Photoshop will probably cut out minor colors).

Rotate, then cleanup.

Offline questseeker

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Re: Rotating a very small pixel without distortion?

Reply #5 on: November 14, 2016, 10:27:26 am
Hi there. Rotating then doing cleanup is your best bet, unless you wan't to do what the person before me said, go higher resolution then drop it down again
I didn't suggest to use downscaled images directly, I just argued that, as an approximation of high-resolution rotation, they are a better reference and starting point for cleanup than the results of low resolution rotation.
Scaling down the reference rotated image to a blurred one with mixed colours might be needed for the common case in which unenlightened image editors operate only at the final resolution of the sprite, without any way to align a higher resolution reference with the canvas.