Originally posted by Jim Sachs
There will be a gradient background, and it will not be totally covered. I found early on that the fish need some open areas to be silhouetted against, or they get lost in the detail. This is even more true for the poor little drab freshwater fish.
Regarding moving plants: Yes, there is a difficulty in rendering plants against a gradient background, but perhaps it's not the problem you thought. When the plant is photographed against a blue background, then clipped out in a paint program by turning blue to transparent, the object still has an outline of almost-blue pixels that acted as anti-aliasing. If the plant is then pasted back onto a blue background it looks fine, but what if the background is black? If the background is a detailed picture, a lot of this is masked by the detail, but on a smooth ever-changing gradient, they really show up. On a plant with thousands of tiny tendrils, there can be hundreds of hours of removing these fringe pixels by hand.
Dear Jim. This is my first post. Bought 2.0 recently, have been using the free demo for about a year. Looks great! Can't wait for the seaweed upgrade later on!
I use photoshop quite alot, what I'd call an experienced hacker.
What about bring the image into photoshop? There are fairly easy routines for changing the blue edge pixels to something closer to the rest. Then one can capture the image border, and do some kind of mild blur, say 0.3 pixels, to add variation. Or, force the image into GIF config, then look at the blue index colors and edit them.
I'd be happy if you sent me a small fragment to work on, to determine if anything I know how to do could help eliminate the painstaking hand-work.