I work with the drawing tools in photoshop a great deal to enhance my Poser renderings. One of the things I use it for is to make the hair more realistic by drawing individual strands of hair over whatever hair prop has been rendered in Poser. The problem is, it's difficult or impossible to anti-alias drawings done in Photoshop. This means that the 1-pixel strands I draw in the hair usually look pretty clunky and awkward; if you zoom in by them, it's obvious that they aren't lines, but series of colored squares set next to each other. Is there a way to use anti-aliasing in freehand linework drawn in Photoshop? (BTW, I'm pretty sure anti-aliasing is in effect when you use the 'stroke' feature to outline a selected area; and when the line tool draws on an angle, anti-aliasing seems to be in effect.) If not, does Painter have any drawing tools that might be able to do this?

Photoshop has trouple with hand painting in general, and narrow lines especially, try sizing up your image (at least double, more is better, then sizing it back down when finished. Painter, combined with a tablet does a lot better, though. The scratchboard tool seems to work especailly well. Sometimes I'm suprized how limited Photoshop is, for a $600 program. Try doing any work over a 50% gray background, for example - Photoshop used 50% gray for most of the tools, you can't see what you are doing!

Another trick you can try is to select around only the area you've worked on, then apply a Guassian blue at about half-strength. Might need to do it twice or three times, so half-strength (around .5) is helpful so you don't do too much all at once. :)

Thanks, Jim and Varian. Jim, I'm wary about sizing up an image for fine-line drawing and then sizing it back down. When I size an image down to an signifigant degree, it always becomes blurry. I use the sharpen filter to counteract this, but I suspect that the antialiased lines and the colors are being affected in the process. Varian-- Your suggestions is intriguing, but I don't understand it. How will the guassian blur cause anti-aliasing? Won't it just blur the line? Actually, there are some other techniques that I've heard of. A couple of Poser artists in tutorials have suggested using the smudge tool. I suppose if you pull the color in a very narrow path you might get an anti-aliased line. However, this is hardly a way to create a springy free-hand line! I tried using Painter, but the results seemed no better than Photoshop-- the lines were not anti-aliased. However, I don't think I was using the scratchboard tool you suggested, Jim, because I got mixed up. Back to the drawing board. Another possibility is to try it in Illustrator, which I also have (I went crazy when I was shopping for art apps, and have this even though I never use it!) Illustrator creates all its lines as vectors, and presumably anti-aliases everything when you convert it to rastor. If this works then I'll end up using Illustrator 7 days a week! I'll report back my findings.

When you use the brush (not the pencil) every line is actually anti-aliased. How you describe it, I think it has more to do with the resolution of your image to start with. The thing about larger images (more pixels to start with) starts within Poser. You have to render in a new window with twice the size you want to end with (or maybe triple). Enlarging a 72 dpi render in Photoshop, working on it and then make its original size again has a blurring effect, and degenerates the original pixel information that Poser put in it. A bit of a trick is to do the unsharpen mask thing before scaling down, because it has a bit of an anti-antialising effect. It brightens pixels next to contrasting areas. Doing this on images with not a lot of pixels make the blocky appearance worse. Oh, I just thought of one thing. When scaling in Photoshop, use the bicubic option, otherwise you are enlarging or scaling down the pixels instead of the image. I mainly use Photoshop for print, so I work in 300 dpi all the time. Even then I do my retouche on larger versions to start with, and scale them down when I am done. In that situation I never have problems with the hairs I draw on Poser renders. When I scale the stuff down for Web use, it looks rather natural. The only thing you need is a bit of processor and plenty of RAM. Good luck experimenting, and when you have any questions or example files I would be glad to help out. Ruud

I find very little degradation from scaling items up and down in Photoshop, you aught to run some side-by-side tests (I have) to see how little the image is changed- just go up, then down, if you go reduce then enlarge you are throwing away information, of course, as there is no way to put the inforamtion in 4 pixels into one, the reverse isn't true, however. I'd stay with even magnifications, though - 4X then .25X, or 5X and .2X and so on, not 1.5X and .66X. This system is also the answer to "how do I paint a half pixel wide line", too - as Photoshop will not allow brushes smaller than 1 pixel, but if you enlarge 4X, and use 1 and 2 pixel brushes you have in effect 1/4 and 1/2 pixel brushes.

I agree on using a higher resolution to begin with .. don't use a 1px brush but a 2 - 5 px brush should help a bit. The second tip would be to set the opacity to 80% or lower. This gives you softer less ragged lines. I wouldn't recommend the gaussian blurr for things like this at all.

Adorna-- I agree that a 2 pixel or higher brush is easier to work with, and if you use pressure settings, you can make it taper for a more pleasing stroke. I tried some experiments expanding things up and then bringing them back down. One interesting thing I found was that when you draw a 1-pixel line and then reduce it 50%, you get a 1 pixel line at about 50% opacity. That would suggest that you use opacity to create an illusion of fine lines when it's inconvenient to expand and reduce. And yes, it does appear after all that Photoshop does anti-alias those lines. It's just hard to get a smooth stroke sometimes, even though I have a wacom tablet.

Actually, back-in-the-good-old-days I wrote some software to do exactly this, and your right, in effect a 1/2 pixel line is actually a 50% shift to the line color, but it "looks" like a half-pixel wide line!