These are cool Glacier! I like your retextured paintings a lot, and I'll test these out too.

BTW, your tutorial is great--I'm really glad to have the detailed info on using TXTR Extracter--sometime (hopefully soon) I am determined there will be a "new and improved graphics" painting of mine in beta recolors to replace my other!

Best,
Suzanne/ Crow Ridge Studio

LOL well I just started to use the PhotoShop plugin and I must say the quality of the images is EVEN better than that from TXTR Extractor. I am making my own templates for it since there are only 3 that Quaxi made for inclusion. The time and quality of the finished product is well worth effort. BTW the ones in this post are not done using Photoshop as I did not have the template for it. When I get ALL templates done am going to go over all my stuff and redo it.

:argh: I'm so envious you have the technical side of these things down! (kicks her computer because it can't find the path to her DDS Utilities!?)
Anyway, keep up the good work, I'll really have fun seeing the new stuff posted!

Suzanne/ Crow Ridge Studio

I have updated to version 0.14b of SimPE and pointed to where my DDS stuff is. Not as happy with the quality of images produced using this. It DOES bring the file sizes down - i.e. they had been at around 600k without using the compression and now back to the normal range of 80k or so but the quality does seem to suffer. Am testing some pictures to see which of the settings works best. There are some more templates with 0.14b and if my templates hold up will see if Quaxi would like to use them for inclusion in later versions of SimPE. Reason for testing is that some of templates work fine and others seem to be intermittent.

I'm sorry to be taking up all this space with my graphics quality fascination; not sure if I should post all this here or not, but I will ask:

Do you mean that SimPE 0.14b itself doesn't deal with graphics as well as v.0.14a (like I have,) or is it the way SimPE has been updated to work with TXTR Extractor, or...?

Thanks for being patient with my CN SoM1 PLz XPLANE!!!! questions!

Edit:
Just did what I should've done already and read about the update--I think I pretty much get it, but I'm still interested in your input, if you have some.

Actually .14b works JUST as fine as .14a did just that since I pointed to where the DDS utitlity was I now have options as to what compression I can use when making an image. DDS compresses the file but you lose quality. You can use the RAW24 option and you will get high quality BUT at the price of a large file size. Actually what I have found out is that some of the premade templates and some of mine do not like RAW24 and while they work fine at the lower quality settings just produce 2 red lines on a white canvas that makes it look like an envelope. I think I broke it :smash: I have been posting over in the Photo Studio tutorial alerting Quaxi to the problem and have posted a template that works for the Engineered Angst Poster in Red (at all settings).

Just waiting on Quaxi now to see what can be done.

That really interests me, honestly, and I may very well end up with midrange reproduction quality as a somewhat happy compromise--nice quality, without people wondering, 'Good grief! Why are her packages so huge?'

Don't want to lock up testers' game either, including my own!

Ok, I'm finally done with my chit chat :-) but I'm off to take a look at the other thread you mentioned.

A lot of images need a high quality setting so they look good in game. Its why I have been banging on Photo Studio when I saw what it was doing. Even TXTR Extractor does not do as good on quality though better than SimPE by itself. Still haven't heard from Quaxi on what the problem might be about the reason there are problems with using RAW24. I still have a lot of images I want to produce and thats held up by this problem. They dont look fine at all except at high quality. Anyways I notice he is online so looking to see if he's awake and doing anything......

I updated my watercolor, using RAW32. I agree about the image quality, it's just not great--but I really am concerned about my files being too large too; I'm the one that's the graphics nut, maybe people don't really notice the small differences?

On the other hand, I noticed when taking my snapshot, that the doorjamb next to the picture looked sharper than my image! So anyway, I'll try to follow your photoshop thread and see if options occur.

I love these paintings... but I have a question , sorry if its obvious and im just stupid but ... what object is that in the picture that looks like a thing for taking camera pictures .... just wondering if its already in the game and im just stupid or .... nvm Im just wondering what it is ?

Mattalways, if you are talking about the light with the umbrella thingy - from what I can understand this was a file that Maxis left behind and someone has dug it out and fixed it up for us to use! If you want it - go to the top of this page and use the link to the CEP - if you work your way through this you will find the "lost" files and you can download them there. Good luck!

Big Big thank you,have really been wanting some decent pics, these are really great.

Hi, I'd love to download these paintings but my computer won't open .rar files. What is that and why won't it work for me? I have the CEP thing though.

These are real cool. Thanks

rar is just another compression format which seems to be a bit better at compression than Zip. Google for WinRAR and you should be able to find programs that will unRAR for you no problem. I use rar because the program uses less steps to do the same tasks as WinZIP does so less keystrokes/mouseclicks for me when I am doing things so less to get wrong.