FPAA - Anti Aliasing "Post Process" for Photoshop
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.
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.
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.
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.
Replies
If you want, you could also try and use a Sobel edge finding action to blur the internal jaggies too, especially for highlight or color contrasting parts of your model.
Cool technique...sounds like useful for sure.
Ace, I dont blur the edges, just for the sake of blurring it. I am blurring the edges to get a smooth edge after using a levels adjustment on the mask.
So simply blurring stuff wont cut it I'm afraid.
then use it as a mask w/ levels to blur the internal edges as well as the outside ones.
I didn't take much care but you get the idea. Could be a good addition. Maybe you'd want to further mask it by finding the most high-contrast areas and only blurring those or something. Maybe you'd want to try and avoid blurring the outside edges twice by some further masking or something. It's worth a try, I think.
edit; just realized I raised this thread from the dead, woops lol.