Token blurring...

[Kefrem]

ive been making tokens for awhile now in gimp...but a problem i have had and ive wondered if theres a fix is that when i reduce big pictures into tokens....they blur horribly.

Is there a fix in gimp for this?

[phantomwhale]

I use photoshop, but when reducing the pixels per inch on a token, there are a number of options on which algorithm to use, some of which sharpen and others soften. For reduction in size, it recommends the sharpening option. Equally there are "effects" you can apply to in image pre-shrinking it to sharpen the edges which can help.

That said, once I've shrunk a detailed picture to 32x32, it can look pretty poor and blurred. Simpler, smaller pictures are actually better, as there is less detail to lose. Nonetheless, the number of nice pics I have to overlook to get my 32x32 size has made me consider upping the size to 50x50, but then again the ruleset default is to make 30x30 PCs, so I'd need to adjust that too (or have constant token rescaling nightmares).

Ben

[Kefrem]

Hmmm....but is there a tool or function in gimp that allows me to fix it? i have a few pictures i want to shrink but when i do they get horrible in appearance and blurry.

[phantomwhale]

Looks like GIMP has a sharpen tool, which might help to apply before shrinking : https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-convolve.html

Equally, at the bottom of this page : https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-image-scale.html it talks about interpolations algorithms, which might change your results.

These two tools are the equivalent of what I use in photoshop, AFAICT.

I shared my photoshop experience as you will still be facing the core problem no matter what tooling you use - shrinking a detailed image down to very few pixels will probably end up very blurry, as subtle detail turns into pixellated junk. Simple images, already in low-res, will suffer less.

That all said, do try out "semi-blurry" tokens in the FGII interface. Sometimes what looks awful (esp. when zoomed in) in the graphics tool looks quite passable on the combat map.