Baking alpha stamps/brushes

Fuiosg

I'm beginning to build up a library of personal alphas (screws, etc), and have a couple of questions I don't see come up.

Why are alphas, such as on pixologic's site, generally low res? does it not matter? Is 1024 the highest you should need to go?

Second when I make them I just bake out a height map in xnormal, set to 4k tiff, then resize it down to 1024x1024 8-bit. Is this excessive? It seems to help reduce artifacts.

Mossbros

I find it usually better to work at higher res then downres when creating the actual alpha also, what you seem to be doing doesn't seem to be wrong at all. 
Some might use other methods but if it works for you and the height is coming out fine, keep doing it. 
Also the sizes, 1024 is a good resolution tradeoff for good quality without being an excessive filesize so there's no problem with that either. 

Fuiosg

@Mossbros Good to know i'm on the right track, thanks.