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FPAA - Anti Aliasing "Post Process" for Photoshop

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fatihG_ polycounter lvl 14
What is FPAA?
FPAA stands for Fake Photoshop Anti Aliasing.

Now if for whatever reason you cant have anti aliased edges in a screenshot that you took, this little hack will allow you to have smooth edges edited in, in Photoshop.

Here are some examples.

GLAABA.png

GTAABA.png

Download the Photoshop action, so you do not need to do jack. =D

http://www.bb0x.com/misc/PC/FPAA/FPAA.atn


It is a simple process. (You need to have the xNormal Photoshop Filters installed though.)
- Extract whatever you want to anti alias.
- Duplicate that layer.
- Select opaque pixels of the layers and make a mask based off the selection.
- Select the layer, (make sure the mask is not selected)
- Apply a Dilation filter, 2 pixels is good. (Dilation comes with xNormal plugins for photoshop)
- Select the Mask and blur it by 1 pixel.
- Using a levels adjustment on the mask and slide the black and white arrows to the center, to the grey arrow. I like to use 100 1,0 and 155 for the input levels, but experiment and see what works best for you.


There are limitations to this hack though.
The model you want to apply this hack to needs to be on a solid BG, so you can extract it.
This means that anti aliasing of layered meshes will not work, it will only be applied to the outline of the extracted meshes. (Check the arm of the character in the back view.)
Since this method makes use of blurring, sharp corners will most likely get rounded. (Check the greentooth's teeth)
However, since it is a pretty non destructive process, manually editing the outline afterwards is not an issue.

Though I dont think there is much need for this.. It might be handy for folks like me with crappy/incompatible hardware/software.

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