Tauren hero hits home

[Gryphon]

Nothing more needs to be said except Lorenda is the property of Amber.
The purpose of this card is to literally complete any one quest on the field and claim the rewards. Take that Alliance dogs! Unfortunately there already is a card called "For the Horde!"

[Tapewolf]

Do you want any help removing the JPEG noise?

**EDIT**
Actually it looks like most of it was added 'at mixdown' rather than from the original artwork.  That would make things harder.

[Zedd]

Meep! I wonder you do requests >> <<

[Gryphon]

Umm... I have absolutely no idea what jpeg noise and at mixdown mean. If you can give me a better picture than the original go ahead. I just cut out what I could from the original comic and well you see the result. I mean I am not even using a commercial product here. Artists use paintshop. What I used to cut and resize it to fit the card? Paint.

As for commissions... You do realize this is a Frankenstein creation? I mean you can probably ask any one of the normal artists to whip you up a card. Me? ZERO artistic talent. This piece of crap took about an hour and a half of hack and slash and it STILL looks lousy. I was sort of hoping people would give me a couple hints, criticisms on the card effects and stuff before I officially give it to Amber as a gag gift. I have the original on my computer and it looks a lot better on my computer than it is here. I have no idea what photobucket did to it...

But if you want... I can try to make do. I already did most of the research and know the terminology so I don't have to redo it. Just as long as you know that what you get... will be monstrous. Tell me what faction, race, professions, spec, and special ability. For anyone who is doing this please stay within the rules of WOW. This is a WOW card after all...

I'm surprised no one else said anything yet...

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Gry, you know the forum limits sizes to 500x500 pixels? So if it's taller than that, and it looks like it is, it'll be shrunk by the browser.

And look like, well, like it does. It looks somewhat better if you open it straight on photobucket....


And we like. We're all just too busy laughing about it to post :-)

[DigitalMan]

Well... it's a card. To your credit, it's better than many cards I've seen, and doing just about anything in paint impresses me. Though bear in mind that saving anything in .jpg format from paint yeilds crappy noisy results, because it doesn't have a maximum-quality option (as far as I know).

I think you have potential. You just need some better tools.

[Gryphon]

i22.photobucket.com/albums/b317/Gryphon_2/lorendaccg.jpg

well then. Let's give this a shot.

You might want to give the creator a shot as well. As I said. I suck at art.
http://www.wowtcgdb.com/creator.aspx

[Tapewolf]

Umm... I have absolutely no idea what jpeg noise and at mixdown mean. If you can give me a better picture than the original go ahead.

Okay, I'll do that tonight if I remember.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only person who can see JPEG damage.  I mean, it's not like I even have very good eyesight.  Anyway, here's an example:


On the right-hand side we have the original picture, blown up about 4x to make it clearer.
On the left-hand side is my attempt to restore it to something like it should have looked before Amber reduced it and saved it as JPEG.  (This was done in GIMP by the way)
See the difference between the wing colours?  Even on the left side you can see whether the colours have run around the edges of the wing.. I have to try and repair those manually.

JPEG is a lossy compression scheme and when you save an image in this format it will cause artifacts.  Look at your card, around Lorenda's hammer in particular is a halo of visual noise.  The loss is accumulative - each time you reload it and save again the noise becomes worse (I have a few good examples of that myself).
Personally I always work in PNG format for this reason - I'm pretty sure even Paint supports that.

[DigitalMan]

Well, when using Photoshop and 3D Studio, you get the option to crank the quality all the way up to 12. That usually eliminates noise problems. PNG is definitely one of the best formats, though.

*ponders* I've always wondered why jpeg does that kind of thing...

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Well, when using Photoshop and 3D Studio, you get the option to crank the quality all the way up to 12. That usually eliminates noise problems. PNG is definitely one of the best formats, though.

*ponders* I've always wondered why jpeg does that kind of thing...

.. because it's a lossy format. It's designed to make the file size somewhat smaller, at the expense of the quality. The default settings many apps use are about 75 or 80% quality, which is fine, for once-only editing. You can adjust that up to 100%, if you wish, in which case it's not losing anything, but the file size gets much bigger.

And, of course, the content changes how well the compression algorithm works, as well. Some file types compress well under jpeg, some don't.

[DigitalMan]

Yeah, but I mean literally why I wish to know exactly what it does when saving, how it's stored exactly, etcetera. Because I'm odd like that. Even at 100% they're still smaller than bitmaps and PNG's, which makes me so very curious...


EDIT: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/jpeg-faq/ For the truly technical-minded geeks with no life. You may laugh at the predictions cast in the ancient FAQ.

Alright, I'm happy. Next up: how does PNG work?

[xHaZxMaTx]

Don't worry Tapewolf, you aren't the only one who notices .jpg noise.  That's why I save everything in .png.

-EDIT-
Actually, I save eveything in .psd, first.

[Supercheese]

Don't worry Tapewolf, you aren't the only one who notices .jpg noise.  That's why I save everything in .png.

PNG FTW!

.jpg = Not enough minerals

Yes, this entire post was pointless and random. And...?

[Tapewolf]

Here's some cleaned up versions.  I didn't notice you had excluded the speech bubble on your card, otherwise I would have removed it here too.

http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k216/tapewolf/dmfa/Vol546b.png
http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k216/tapewolf/dmfa/Vol546c.png

[Gryphon]

Well if you want it to follow the format of the WOW cards there is just supposed to be the hero. Maybe a mount and maybe a pet. No speaking and they have to strike a pose. If you can get rid of the text box and that little line I dare no touch with only a command of 8 colors it would be beautiful.

[Zedd]

Im not sure why I am asking this but..Gryphon are you the same Gryphon or known as 2?

[Tapewolf]

Not my best but it will do.  The background is obviously going to be a bit different as it was made with different software.


http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k216/tapewolf/dmfa/Vol546e.png - 1x size
http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k216/tapewolf/dmfa/Vol546d.png - 2x size (working size)

[GabrielsThoughts]

facinating.

[Sid]

Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only person who can see JPEG damage.

Don't worry, you're not. I had to remove the JPEG noise while making my current sig (The irony is that I later decided to output the result as JPEG again to decrease the final filesize. But the base is a cleaned-up PNG and the compression level is set to quite high quality, so I effectively only end up with one level of light noise.), among various other operations to make it look this way. Fun times.

On-topic: The card idea is quite nice!

[Gryphon]

Well it took a while but here it goes.
Here is the original hack I made.
http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b317/Gryphon_2/lorendaccg.jpg
This is what it looks like if I just tried to shove it in straight without stretching the image.
http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b317/Gryphon_2/laugh.jpg
This is what happens if I try to put the good image I was given originally. Looks a little bit ugly with the white borderline on a black border ground.
http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b317/Gryphon_2/version1.jpg
This is what it looks like if you remove the borderline.
http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b317/Gryphon_2/version2.jpg
And finally just to make sure Lorenda looks like any other card with her being center stage...
http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b317/Gryphon_2/version3.jpg
Any comments? Because at this point I can easily just muck around with the base image till everyone thinks I've got something interesting.

And no I am not that 2 the Ranting Gryphon of fame.