Black not showing black

[RobertB]

I tried a HC tree face on my pixel tree last night. It's a 24 string, 40 pixel tree. This is a 30x30 pixel pic scaled to the tree. The black on the tree is not showing black or "off" pixels. How can you turn off the pixels to make them black (off) while the other portions are on?

[RobertB]

Here is the pic (30x30) as it was uploaded to xL4.

[Gilrock]

I always like to scale my images outside of xLights and then make sure the surrounding pixels are truly black.  The scaling algorithms are going to normally add some of the color from neighboring pixels.  You gotta edit the image yourself to fix it.  We are scaling using built-in wxWidgets algorithms and they aren't going to always be as good as using an external program.  Soon you will be able to fix it in xLights.  I'm working on an editor.

[dkulp]

Also, don't use JPG's.   Use PNG's or BMP or GIF.    The jpeg compression causes artifacts which may be what you are seeing as well.  If I just adjust the color levels, a lot of the things that look "black" are suddenly not black anymore.   There are artifacts all over the place.

[RobertB]

I did scale these OUTSIDE of Xlights. I used the 200x200 pic from somewhere. That makes complete sense though about the artifacts. I had forgotten that jpeg is lossy.

Now to go and see if I can find a png, bmp or gif of that singing tree ;-)

[RobertB]

Well I did find that a .gif file shows better than a .jpg file
https://www.facebook.com/BurtonChristmasLights/videos/841699149211931/
With this in mind I took a Singing Pumpkin pic and tried to make it readable on the tree. I started out with a paint pic that was a .png at about 5xx X 4xx resolution. Then I resized it down to 30x23 resolution (for my 24 x 40 pixel tree.  Was very blurry.  Continued in next post.....

[RobertB]

...wouldn't let me attach more than one pic....
....then I tried it with thinner (one pixel wide) lines and a different format.  Tried it at a 26x20 resolution as well. Blurry and was not bright at all.

What can I do?

Would love to get some Singing Pumpkin pics instead of trying to do this myself. Wonder if anybody has any? Also wonder if you convert a larger .jpg to a .gif,.png or .bmp THEN size it down... would that work for this pixel tree?

[Gilrock]

When I say scale it outside of xLights I mean if you have a 24x40 tree you create a 24x40 image.  If you use any other size its going to get resampled by the software libraries.  If you shrink a larger image you usually need to do some manual editing to the pixels.  Whatever you create should look exactly like what gets displayed if you match the pixel sizes.

[JonB256]

I use IrfanView to resize. Frequently, I'll take one more step to convert the jpg to a gif.

Keep in mind that ALL matrix graphics look best from 40ft (13m) away.

[RobertB]

Jon do you find that .gif's do better than .bmp or .png's?  Yeah. The prime location for the display viewing is right at 45ft from that tree. I almost want some of the pics to be smaller so it forces the view for this to be almost center. Kind of distorts it from the side. It is a 180 tree. I do have it slightly (just a little to the side) shifted towards the center. 

Gil - (This might be a question for Sean) I was hoping to get the attached pic kind of like the clean lines in Auto Faces effect. How can I  that?  While still not distorting the pic? Is this something coming up in a new feature???

[Gilrock]

Are you on our Facebook page?  That's where you get the breaking news.

That photo is really big.  If you want it smaller and want it to be clean lines you need to draw it yourself.  In the next release you will be able to do what you see here in this video I made yesterday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzfePh6ROGU

[RobertB]

Wow Gil!
Johnny on the spot! Just what I am looking for. Could you copy and paste to it? That would be cool.
No. I didn't know about the facebook page. My browser is screwed up so I need the exact name. Kind of like https://www.facebook.com/BurtonChristmasLights . When it does the groups/ numbers... it defaults to my own page :-(

[Gilrock]

Initially its just basically functionality so no copy/paste yet.  I had to limit the features to have something ready before the Expo.

Just search for xLights/Nutcracker and you should find the facebook page.