Any Photoshop tutorial on how to enlarge skill icons?

I want to use several for a project...anyone know how?

If this is what you want then here it is.

I believe the official site has a package that contains all skill icons.

would you mind giving us the direct link to it ? ^^

EDIT: nvm i found it: http://www.guildwars.com/community/f...skillicons.php

http://www.guildwars.com/community/f...skillicons.php
There you go.

thankyou ^-^ some of the icons are beautiful ~ graphicswise

Thanks alot for that link really useful.

But any way to REALLY resize them? I remember seeing a really big size of Vigorous Spirit and I think Frenzy.
It was this...

















....Tall.

im not sure sorry but maybe.. you can stick one inside photoshop and resize it there? ^^

Resizing things larger in Photoshop is an enormous no-no. There are two types of digital images: Bitmaps (made of pixels) and Vectors (made of mathematical lines). Bitmap images are what Photoshop creates and edits. Since Bitmap graphics are made of pixels, if you make them larger they will always lose some detail, because the same number of pixels must then cover a larger area and clarity and resolution suffer badly. Those pics you saw of Vigorous Spirit and Frenzy could not have looked good if they weren't that large to start with... i.e. someone put them in an official ArenaNet fansite kit or something.

Because of this, Tundra's suggestion is the only option if you want it to look its best, because it gives you the best image quality possible from the start.

If you simply must do it, Image > Image Size and set the new pixel dimensions. Depending on how much you need to resize upwards, it may look...alright. Its impossible for it to ever be as good as the original though, that's a limitation of the technology.

You can import the graphics into Flash and convert them to vector, then make them any size you want. Probably not an option for everyone though.

If you mean converting it to a Symbol in Flash, that's not a vector image. Its still a bitmap embedded in Flash, with all of the issues involved with resizing. A Guild Wars screenshot or icon or whatever, with all of its subtle colors and continuous tone, cannot be created or rendered using vectors, a vector is a line.

Okay Here's the reason why it's a big nono:

Original:



Resized in Photoshop:



Resized in Flash: (wanted to try it)




As you can see, the PS resize has a lot of fuzziness, and the Flash Resize is just bad...

My only idea is to open it in Illustrator, and maybe that'll turn it into a vector. I never work with Illustrator so...

The resized image you saw was probably just someone who is incredibly talented and chose to recreate it by themselves. If you outlined the basic shapes in the skill icon and used a program to recreate it as vector (i.e illustrator, or inkscape, which is free to download) it is possibly to then resize that and re-add the shading yourself when it is the size you want.

That's only if you're very good at photoshop though, and possibly in posession of a graphics tablet...

crap. back to flash training...

Not sure how big you want the icons, but they do scale on the skills window.

Just drag the window so that it's as far left as it can go and then drag the corner all the way to the right. Depends on the size of your screen resolution too I suppose.

This effect is independent of screen interface size too.

Its not a matter of skill, its a matter of where the hell the new pixel information is coming from. You can't squeeze blood from a stone. There's tricks to make it look a little better but its a rock-solid fact that the resized copy will be of lower quality than the original. Techniques do exist that are used by experts to reduce the loss slightly, but as a general rule they stop being effective once you go up past about 110% of the original size. Then you're best off just using a bigger original pic.

I Might Avenge You, the reason the Photoshop one looks better is because Photoshop anti-aliases it to make it look slightly less horrid, but it uses the same technique of simply doubling adjacent pixels to resize upwards.

The only way I know of that you can effectively convert a bitmap to a vector using Flash or Illustrator is a Live Trace, which results in this:


Obviously that isn't what the OP is after. Notice it reduces all of the gradients and subtle colors to simple bands... This is because a vector image is made up of lines, not pixels. This image could be resized to put on a freeway billboard, or made the size of a stamp with no change in quality whatsoever, though.

I found the enlarged pics:





I don't know where my friend found it, but it looks good to me.

Hopefully someone would share their secret and make a tutorial on how to make it in photoshop.

you can get a few from the wiki userpage of emily diehl, found here

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/User_...estial_Mauling

Godlike, thanks a bunch.

Doh! That's right the Sealed Play Card!
They contains much larger icon that can be chopped out with Photoshop.

By the way the link to the Cards is here.

No, no, no. Read my last few posts, I've been trying to explain why you won't find a tutorial for that. There is no a secret technique to doing this.

If you take a 100x100 image (that's 1,000 pixels) and enlarge it to 200x200 (4,000 pixels), you're asking Photoshop to pull 3,000 pixels worth of data out of its ass. There's a lot of complicated formulae that it uses to come up with that extra data, but basically the end result is that it triples the pixels already there. Its a mathematical fact that it will always always always look worse than the original, its only a matter of degree. If you really want a bigger image it can be done with Image -> Image Size, but the reality you have to deal with is that you will lose quality.

The few (keyword here) high-quality large icons showing up in this thread were clearly rendered at that size originally and then scaled down to the size needed in game. If it were me, and I knew I absolutely needed the highest res images possible, I would try to contact Gaile and ask for them. Failing that, I'd try to make due with the smaller ones.