Degraded picture quality

[MetalSlugSV]

Hello there, I'm a newbie to the forums and I didn't find a newbie question section, so apologies in advance if this is in the wrong section,

I have a couple of on going questions,

I'm a huge nostalgic fan of SonicTH3&Knuckles, essentially since creating a full sonic fan game is impossible without a team (and because I'm unable to find any decent XNA C# source codes online). I'm creating a small limited physics simulation where Sonic jumps around in a confined screen and can turn super and hyper form. Basically I want to recolor Super Sonic from Sonic Advance sprites to Hyper Sonic, but when I edit an image in anyway it becomes more and more degraded, losing picture quality, this also applies to copying and pasting images or even resizing images.

I have Windows 7 x64 and I'm using MS paint and graphics gale, image formats are either .png or .gif, anyone know the cause? or how I can prevent it?

[Previous]

It's called "Questions, Info, and Tutorials" and located at the bottom. Moved the topic!


Can you elaborate on how the quality degrades? Is it the colours, artifacts or what exactly?
I've heard MS Paint is prone to darken colours on PNG and some programs have issues saving in GIF due to the palette limitations, but I'm not sure how MS Paint does, I never use it.

[MetalSlugSV]

Thank you for the quick responce, and thanks for letting me know!

It's kind of hard to see because its two individual sprites, and all I did was resize them on MS paint from a sprite sheet, nothing else

I'm assuming this is artifacting? And I opened this on graphics gale multiple times, didn't edit it, closed it and the quality eventually got worse, its so bizarre..

[Previous]

Does the same happen with PNGs too, or is it only GIF? This looks like a common GIF problem to me (awful colour reduction methods, trying to comply to universal web palettes and such weird things). I only have GG Free, without GIF support, so I can't test, but that'd be my guess.


PS: Just saved a picture as GIF using MSPaint (Win 7) and got a similar effect. Yup, bad GIF palette "optimisation" - Microsoft should feel ashamed, GIF can do better (as my GIF animator shows, GIF can have custom palettes with any 24bit colours as long as there are no more than 255 per frame).

[MetalSlugSV]

Well, I created a .png file and opened it with graphics gale, and pasted a sprite there and ended up with this..

Left = Copy and pasted into graphics gale .png
Right = Original unedited

This really makes no sense..

-Edit- MS Paint was the culprit, I was copying from MS paint and pasting into graphics gale, which gave the degraded quality, when I copied from GG to another GG window, it was fine, I agree, shame on Microsoft..

[Previous]

Did you copy it from MS Paint? It looks like Win7 paint sometimes messes up colours on copying - don't ask me why.

[MetalSlugSV]

Did you copy it from MS Paint? It looks like Win7 paint sometimes messes up colours on copying - don't ask me why.

Yes I did, and yes, that was the root of the problem, thank you very much for your help I'm hoping to become an active member of the community once my classes are finished and I look up tutorials

[Gors]

This is why I use XP Paint. You can use it without any problems, it's faster and overall better for pixelart.

you can get it by googling, but if you can't find it PM me so I can help you.

[Garamonde]

http://www.mspaintxp.com/
did it just to help him