EDITING BIG

Here's a short one for ya. I've been working you to death so I thought I'd go easy on you for a change. This lesson is important, though, so read carefully.

When I first read Mike Peterson's Paint 101 tutorial, he suggested something that I didn't get at first. He suggested tripling the size of the .PCX file before increasing the colors to 16 million. I tried it, and 3 times the size was just too big. To get numbers the right size, you had to set the font size to 200 pt, and zooming in and still being able to see a decent portion of the car was pretty much out of the question. You also needed a HUGE image of any logo or picture you wanted to put on the car. Big images of logos and things are hard to find on the web, so that was another thing that bugged me.

So I figured that if tripling the size (and then shrinking it back down when you're done) would work, doubling ought to work just as well, if not better. I was right. It does work. The font sizes you use don't take up so much memory, and any logos or pics you want to import don't need to be so big.

What this means is that you have to double the size of the file before you start editing, and then shrink it back down by half when you're done. Here's the standard procedure for that.
  1. Load the .PCX file you want to edit
  2. Resize (SHIFT-S) the PCX by 200% (both height and width)
  3. Increase the colors to 16 million.
  4. Edit away, go to town, go gonzo, whatever. ;)
  5. Resize by 50% (both height and width)
  6. NOW load the color palette
  7. Load the car mask selection file and copy that to the clipboard
  8. Close the file WITHOUT SAVING. For cryin' out loud, DON'T SAVE IT! Hehe
  9. Open the file again, and paste the car over top of the old one (make sure to line it up right)
  10. Save the file
That's how I do it. Make sure you don't flip-flop steps 2 and 3 OR steps 5 and 6. If you do, when you resize it will blur the edges of the car area, and it will look NASTY when you import it. Let me repeat that, BOTH RESIZING STEPS SHOULD ONLY BE DONE WHEN THE CAR IS NOT AT 16 MILLION COLORS.

Following this procedure also rigs it so that you don't have to save the file to another .PCX file, and then save it as something else. You can just load the same file, pop the changes on there, and save it. The more steps you can eliminate from the process, the better.

Now, I probably do this 5 or 6 times per car. It gets to be automatic after a while, though, so don't get too disconcerted or overwhelmed by all these extra steps.

See, that's it. Not too bad, huh? When you're ready, head for the next session where I'm going to talk about graphics filters and plug-ins...
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