Steve McDonald's Area View Zone art gone blotchy

[Jadefang]

Whenever I copy-paste the area view zone samples from Steve McDonald's site (the ones found here), the art becomes all blotchy when pasted onto the template (or any other image file, for that matter). The image I attached is made from Hard Surfaces and an Outdoors tile. Anyone know why the art doesn't copy nicely?

[manikus]

When you are copy-pasting, it's from a jpg image which is very 'lossy'. If you download the zip file, it contains a png file which will not have the bloctchies.

[Jadefang]

I've been copying from the .png files. But now I found that I don't have the problem when I paste into MS paint; it only happens with Adobe Photoshop.

[manikus]

That's odd. I just tried cutting and pasting in Photoshop with no loss/blotchiness. But, I am using an old version of Photoshop -> version 7.

[Jadefang]

I've been using version 7 too.

[Uatu]

Are you using palettes? If the image you are pasting into has a set palette already, colors will change to match that palette (this even happens in MS Paint if you start from a GIF/PNG that has a selective palette already).

[Jadefang]

I'm not sure. Does the AreaViewZoneArt.png file have any attached by default?

[Uatu]

Here is something you can try...

In MS Paint (or probably something else):
1. Open the AreaViewZoneArt.png file and then paste something else on top of it. If the colors change, then the file has a set palette.
2. Open a new (blank) image and paste the AreaViewZoneArt.png image (open it up and copy it first separately) into the blank image. New images have no palettes set, so no colors should change. Once you do that, try pasting onto the new copied image; you should have no problems.

(Of course, if your problem is a different one, what I wrote might not be of any help )

[Jadefang]

For MS Paint, it pastes the same way for both blank images and the AVZ template.
For Photoshop though, it pastes the same way for blank images, but becomes splotchy on the AVZ template.

I guess it's something inherent in the AreaViewZoneArt.png file that Photoshop can pick up, but MS Paint doesn't. Maybe it has something to do with the transparent layer thing in the background (those squares + the text that says Zone 1-5, 6-10, etc), since saving the file in Photoshop leaves them invisible, but saving the file in MS Paint makes them visible.

[manikus]

This is weird. I just redownloaded the avza template and all of Steve's area view art to make sure that I was using originals and not something I had modified. In Photoshop 7, everything worked fine for me. I also looked at everything in Paint Shop Pro to see how it acted and it worked correctly there, too. I checked and all files are 24-bit and none of them have an alpha layer/mask. These are the two issues that I could think of that would have Photoshop acting different from MS-Paint... Sorry I can't be of further help.

I do have this to add, though. When Steve and I were getting his site ready, we had trouble with the purple worm icon. The file would display correctly on his machine, but not on mine or the web. We tried everything - different file formats, changing color depth, etc. Nothing worked. We sent the icon to a third party and they had the same issue that I had. Eventually, Steve went back to the source image and redid the icon, meanwhile the third party sent it to a fourth party and it worked fine for the fourth party in all the various forms that the icon had become.