Precise photoshop brushes

I have started getting much more creative in making stuff for SL and I have noticed that even when I make my own brushes for cutting and painting, the edges arent smooth. Im not getting the sharp lines I want when I cut etc They arent that noticable but I can see them and I dont like the way the "frayed" edges look. Even the basic Photoshop brushes are rather rough around the edges Are there any brushes or tricks to get the cutting/painting lines smooth?

You'll have to be a bit more specific about what you mean by "rough around the edges". That could mean any number of things. Screenshot?

Here are a few basic tips, no particular order:

1. Open up the Brushes panel (or Brushes palette, if your PS version is pre-CS4), and click on Brush Tip Shape. Make sure Spacing is turned on, and drag the slider all the way to the left.

2. Give your brush a small amount of softness. A totally hard brush will be less anti-aliased, so its edges will look more jagged.

3. If you're using a mouse, make sure it's a good one. Cheapos absolutely won't do. The higher the report rate and resolution the mouse has, the more smoothly you'll be able to paint.

4. Don't paint with a mouse. Get yourself a Wacom tablet, if you don't already have one. You'll be blown away by what a difference it makes. It will take you a few days to get used to it, and then you'll wonder how you ever existed without it.

5. Make sure you've got plenty of RAM, and that Photoshoop is allowed to use as much of it as you can possibly spare. By default, it will want 55-60% of whatever your OS is not using. Don't be afraid to give it more. (But be careful how many other programs you run at the same time, if PS is using a lot.)

6. Technique, technique, technique. Deliberate, quickly executed, strokes will always come out smoother than slow timid ones. This is true with natural media as well (RL pencils, pens, paint brushes, etc.), so it shouldn't be too surprising that the it holds true in the digital realm.

7. In the Brushes panel, make sure Scattering is turned off.

8. The faster your CPU, the better. Don't expect to be able to paint smoothly on an old clunker.

9. Make sure your hard drives are healthy. Defrag on a regular basis (at leat once a week). For ideal health, get Diskeeper. It will defrag in background all the time (utilizing an almost undetectably small amount of memory), so you never have to do it by hand. It makes an amazing difference.

10. For best perfromance, put your PS Scratch Disk (cache) on a different physical drive from your boot drive. It should also be on a different physical drive from wherever you've got your images stored. The ideal setup is to have at least 3 drives in your machine. One for system, one for data storage, and one for your scratch disk. If that's not an option for you, then use partitions. It won't be as effective, but it's better than using the same volume for everything.

11. If you're on a laptop, keep it plugged in while you're using PS. Mobile CPU's slow down when they're on battery power.


That's about all I can think of for now. I hope it helps.

I may be wrong, but I think Katnipsox is talking about 'anti-alias' itself. If so, then it really can't be avoided. Even with the pen tool or a hard brush, there will always be some sort of feathering effect (especially when working on a 512x512 or smaller image), because there are only a limited amount of pixels in an image.

For example, say you have a 512x512 vector drawing of a happy face you made in Illustrator... when imported into PhotoShop, the drawing will lose its crispness/sharpness around the edges. This also happens when you export an Illustrator file as a JPEG or other non-editable format. I believe it's called "rasterizing".

So, the only thing you can really do is just learn to live with it and try different things to create the illusion of a hard edge.

ZOMG why would anyone want to?

It sounds to me like the OP should be working on larger-sized images before smallerating them as targas for upload.

Sure it can. Use the Pencil tool instead of the Brush tool. That's what it's for.

But as Osprey said, I'm not sure why anyone would want to do that. Without AA, lines will be jagged. The whole point of AA is to give the impression of smoothness.


The pen tool draws vectors, not rasters, so terms like "feathering" are not applicable. The paths the pen creates are pixel-independent. It's only when you convert a path to a selection that anti-aliasing becomes a factor, and you can turn that off with one mouse click if you want to.



For this reason, and others, it's generally best practice to work at larger sizes, and then downsize as a last step before uploading.



Not necessarily. It depends what importation settings you use. For several years now, Photoshop has supported direct importation of the vectors, as smart objects, paths, or shape layers. It's only if you import as pixels that things might change a little.

Also, it's important to realize that when you view a vector image in Illustratior, it absolutely IS being anti-aliased. That's the whole reason it looks so nice and smooth. Without AA, it would look horribly jagged.

The reason you don't notice the AA in Illustrator is simply because you can't blow it up and examine it first hand in like you can in PS. No matter how far you zoom, Illustrator will always re-rasterize the image immediately for display, keeping the anti-aliasing at the per-pixel level.

You see, unlike rasters, which are static and fixed, vectors are interpolated dynamically in real time for display, and as such, have infinite resolution. But since physical pixels obviously cannot be infinitely small, the only way they can create the illuision of smoothness is to blend colors along jagged lines, which is the very definition of anti-aliasing.

If you hold a magnifying glass up to your screen, you'll see what I'm talking about. It will look exactly like what happens when you zoom in in Photoshop. Those "smooth" lines you think you see in Illustrator are really nothing of the sort.


Yes, and no. Yes, the process of converting a vector to a raster is called rasterizing. But no, that's not why your JPEG images look so bad.

You've got two strikes against you when exporting vectors to JPEG:

1. JPEG is a low quality, lossy format, which is chock full of compression artifacts. The smaller the image (and textures are quite small, compared with the photographic imagery JPEG was designed for), the worse the artifacting will appear to be.

2. JPEG is not optimized at all for crisp, abrupt color transitions. It's meant for photographic, not diagramatic, imagery. A white box with a black outline will end up with gray spots as artifacts where the black and white meet. A field of red next to a field of view will end up with purple spots along the border between the two. Etc.

If you want to preserve the crispness of your vectors when you export to a raster format, JPEG is the worst possible choice. If you need high compression, GIF, PNG, or even JPEG2000 will do a MUCH better job.



There's really no "living with it" in Photoshop. If it's possible to do with pixels, PS can do it. It's just a question of the user knowing how.

Heh, I need to remember that one can't over generalize while Chosen is around. LOL

I understood what the OP was after with their question, because sometimes PhotoShop's anti-aliasing can be unforgiving when working on a small area of an image... I've had the same problem many times before. So, short of starting off with a billion x billion pixel image, there's just some things that you have to live with and do the best you can within the image size you've already set. Which is why my reply was so un-technical.

With that said, knowledge is never a bad thing, so thanks for the lesson on what anti-aliasing is. I never knew why vector programs looked sharper than PhotoShop when zooming in on the image, so again... thanks!

Thank you for all the information. I dont know what right words to use to correctly explain my issues. I do understand the directions that you all suggested though and I thank you for all your help. I dont know if what I mean can even be corrected. You dont really see it unless you look very closely. Ill try to take a screen shot and post it so you can see what I mean. Okay, this is jagged but usually it horizontal and kind of frayed looking.

Ah, what you're seeing there is the avitar stretching your texture. If you put Robin's or Chip's unaltered templates (showing the mesh lines) on the avitar you'll see what I mean. There are some areas that stretch more than others and the mesh lines of the templates will look blurred. I'm sure Chosen will have a better explanation for you. XD

Sadly, I don't think there is anything that can be done about it... at least not that I know of.

You might be right, Skuz. The underarm area IS problematic. Still, I find it odd that the fabric of the front bodice is messed up but the fabric piece for the back, right next to it, isn't. The two pieces are from different fabrics, and I imagine were cut separately on different layers. It looks to me as if the front bodice was cut out without anti-aliasing or maybe was cut after the image was downsized to 512x512, for some reason. In any case, it looks more like a technical drawing issue than an SL stretching one.

I think a lot of problems like this can be traced back to lack of care in making the alpha channel image, or to having too many misaligned masks trying to cut the same piece. If you make the alpha channel image well, you shouldn't have to cut out the basic shape of any piece on any layer. The alpha channel image will act like a cookie cutter and do the job for you, separating transparent from opaque areas. To get a clean cookie cutter edge, you do have to draw with the pen tool and use anti-aliasing as you create a selection from the path. And you do have to work at 1024x1024 so that any jaggedness is minimized with downsizing. If you do it carefully, you ought to be able to avoid edges that look like the OP's.

Quite right Rolig, a clean alpha channel will save you a lot of headache in the end when it comes to the garment's edge.

I always make my alpha channel the last step in the process, so I can be sure everything is included. In fact, I make a separate "mask" layer that sits at the top of the layer stack. I'll draw my mask with Pen Tool, make an anti-aliased selection from it, then save that selection as an alpha channel. It's the best way I've found, so far.

Absolutely. It also beats the white halo problem, since you're letting the alpha channel image do all the trimming.

I have to admit I quit using the alpha channels on my work as it made everything too transparent. I am very happy with the outcome too. I didnt know I could do that till I read it here and tried it. Now my tops arent so transparent you can see through them.

Hmmmm.... If your tops were ever "so transparent you can see through them," then you were doing something wrong. For designs like the one you posed in this thread or have shown in previous postings, the opaque areas should be 100% opaque and the areas beyond the article of clothing (at necklines, sleeves, ...) should be 100% transparent. That's true whether you are creating TGA images and using alpha channels or creating PNG images and using simple transparency.