The importance of resolution and your photoshop settings for optimising games and also art generally!

So it's embarrassing for me to admit to this but because I have been mainly dealing with sprites and simply 'learning' artwork for years like all the different aspects of anatomy and so on I had never had to properly experimented with photoshop's quality settings assuming it was mainly resolution that affected how your images looked. Boy was I so fucking wrong when my teacher pointed this type of thing out to me because she was baffled as well when I was trying to make nice textures as to why things weren't turning out nice and clean.

You may have noticed with the recent experimenting with textures that I was struggling to get clean and crisp images onto my models and it was because I knew nothing about the wonders of Bit Depth. I got the resolution settings completely right, so the scale was fine for what I was doing but in the end it would still end up blurry, now why is this?

Well as described in the video explanation, the problem is that I simply didn't have enough colours available for photoshop and my computer to display the image clearly. What I was doing was trying to stretch out an extremely fancy image across my canvas and I hadn't enabled the right bit depth so that meant everything would come out blurry because photoshop was desperately trying to stretch the pixels across the screen but just didn't have enough to make everything look crisp.

Yes I fucking know, I can already hear the eye rolls from the professionals with them snidely going "Really? You didn't know about bit depth?" but this just goes to show you it's always worth while taking some time to just learn about various settings in your preferred software so you don't run into these sorts of issues when trying to do something big or high quality for a project.

What's interesting for me though is something I've tweaked on when studying the affects of resolution generally in regards to video and things like that it actually presents and interesting conundrum. You may not know about this unless you're a professional or are just generally interested in things like 720 pixel resolution or 1080 pixel resolution is there is a debate going on quite a lot in these circles it seems about whether it's worth recording in extremely high resolutions past 1080p and I'm going to have to consider that not just for my gameplay recordings but for how I optimise my games generally.

Why is this? Well it's simple, computer components are physically incapable of rendering above a certain amount of pixels and quality. It will come to a point where because the majority of people will not own fancy high end components I'll have to go, since the majority of my players aren't going to be buying anything above a 1080 graphics card do I just ignore the whole idea of doing images with really high settings on?

This is the thing about bit depth as well and resolution, you have 8bit, 16bit, 32bit, but as the professionals have been debating even with video resolution. Do you go through all the bother of rendering everything at the highest settings? In my case with 32bit where it can actually be a bit clunky getting everything done? Or do you just stick with a reliable 16 bit depth because the majority won't even notice the quality change or will even be able to run it on their computers.

All of this applies to any work that you do in digital, even digital paintings and I found it that interesting I thought I'd mention it because you'll probably see a dramatic jump in my texture quality for example just because I studied this properly. If you're struggling as well with brushes and trying to make everything smooth like the professionals do it will likely be these settings that are affecting your work and should save you a lot of frustration in the future.