Best tools for converting photos to Spectrum format

[nw24576]

Hi,

I used to have a Spectrum back in the day and have discovered this forum recently.

I've got an interest in maybe (time permitting...) developing a few simple games (in C, using z88dk) for the Spectrum. However being a programmer rather than an artist, I'm interested in finding out more about generating the graphics. I'd like to feature real-world characters as the baddies in the games so consequently I'd ideally like to start with Creative Commons (or similar) licensed photos or clip arts of said people.

I have found a few tools to convert standard image formats (JPG, PNG) into Spectrum format, for instance img2spec which I have compiled successfully on my system. However a test image (of a certain famous person, from Wikipedia) comes out rather distorted.

Can anyone offer some tips as to generating reasonable-quality Spectrum graphics from photos or clip art as source material? Also any recommendations for good clip-art sites? There are a lot out there, but these days you don't know whether to trust the images hosted there due to malware concerns, etc.

Thanks.

[Alone Coder]

I use my own con18pal. It generates a lot of Spectrum formats (scr,img,mc,mcx,8-color,R-Mode). However, it uses bright levels of Pentagon/Scorpion (bright=2*nobright). You can set "nobright" mode in it.

[4thRock]

I use Retro-X
http://members.inode.at/838331/retrox.html

Good number of options and formats.

[p13z]

... for instance img2spec which I have compiled successfully on my system. However a test image (of a certain famous person, from Wikipedia) comes out rather distorted ...

Not sure if we're on about the same thing - but I tend to use img2zxspec (a Java app) -
Either way -
With img2zxspec, you need to crop the the input image to 3:4 aspect first - or it will stretch to convert it to 256x192. Then have a quick play with the "pre-process options" in the menu, generally brightness and saturation want adjusting, to get the colours lined up with the Speccy palette for good results.
There are a bunch of options for dithering type, too - different shading/dithering algorithms are better suited to different styles of image.
Final thing to remember - the Speccy display isn't really suited for decent digitised reality. When you see photos that look really good* on the Speccy, there is often a lot of hand finishing of the image to get it that way.

[p13z]

And if you can't get decent results - I imagine a request on these forums for someone to convert the pictures for you would probably turn out OK.

[nw24576]

OK - thanks for the tips everyone, some useful pointers there

[Ralf]

In most cases you won't get a decent result from autoconverting a colourful photo to Spectrum picture. There will always be some problems with attributes. So you may need to retouch it manually later.

[Turtle_Quality]

This is a nice tool for importing graphics, and it's recently added GIF animation support. Currently free on itch.io

https://unaux-25917242.itch.io/image-co ... 4XytfnsFyk

[Sol_HSA]

Seems like this is a common issue to tackle =) There must be more "image to spectrum format" converters than spectrum emulators, and there are a lot of spectrum emulators..

[patters]

BMP2SCR 2.11a is my go to tool. Has great parameters to tweak to get optimal colours and dithering.

[Alessandro]

BMP2SCR 2.11a is my go to tool. Has great parameters to tweak to get optimal colours and dithering.

Same choice for me. I also used Retro-X in the past (always by Leszek Chmielewski if I remember correctly) but BMP2SCR allows for a lot of tweaking and is quite stable under all the Windows versions I employed it on, up to 10, 64-bit.

[+3code]

I use normally ZX Paintbrush to convert and edit images.

This small tool is too nice to make some things: viewtopic.php?p=52204#p52204

[R-Tape]

Can anyone offer some tips as to generating reasonable-quality Spectrum graphics from photos or clip art as source material?

I use normally ZX Paintbrush to convert and edit images.

Another vote for ZX-Paintbrush here. It does need a bit of time to get familiar, but it's very user friendly, and you can compare & contrast all manner of conversion methods. You can also use the art package to tinker with it afterwards too.

The homesite for it is normally here, but it's inactive at the moment, so you can get it here.

[desertkun]

Have you looked at this?

https://github.com/jarikomppa/img2spec