well i solved my problem, and it was patience. I went in thinking the conversions would be easy and in the end it caused a ton of headache. Some careful planning and testing of layers BEFORE conversion has solved the big headache for me and I should now be able to make decent progress. I don't really like the sharpener in perfect resize either but I'm still messing around with sharpening in photoshop to find something I like. Thanks everyone for your help. And I am glad to say I am on track. Gonna test around and find a sharpening effect I like before proceeding too far, but that shouldn't take too long. I will be doing the whole game, regardless of whether or not I get help, but without help it could take upwards of 6 months or so, so I hope we can all come together as a team :]
also I just want to thank xLostWingx for the vote of confindence
one last thing for now. Frivol I dunno why you are resizing to 2046 but an exact 4 times resize of 512 should be 2048, just a friendly fyi.
*edit*
While I appreciate the input DLPB, any method of sharpening I seem to implement on a noticeable scale seems to add to the so called "blotchiness" and discoloration. I simply don't like it, and the detail it adds seems trivial when compared with the downside. In converse the slight blur is hardly noticeable, and while yes very slightly diminishes the level of detail, seems to fix all of my color issues. To prove this point to myself I zoomed in on a certain section of an image after resizing with fractals so that the pixels were visible, even without applying the sharpening, I notice little stringy sections of discoloration, after applying sharpening these become enhanced and thick, but after applying the 1.0 pixel blur completely eliminated these stringy inconsistencies and with a hardly noticeable diminish in quality.
To put it simply, in regards to a re-sized image, I feel like a slight blur is a compliment while sharpening is an argument. If the starting size of the resolution were higher than sharpening would be a great tool, but in my own experience it's better to work with what you have than to try and turn charcoal into a diamond. Yes of course it is possible but it requires a lot of time and effort. If we only had to re-size a single image then yes I would be all for it, and I would clean up the discoloration manually if need be. However we have to do 1,000 or more images here and I feel that my method is the best option (for what I have working with) for cleaning these images up.
I realize I will probably come across an image that would do well with some sharpening and I will take some time for each image to decide the best course of action, but in order to get this done it can't be done perfectly. If we try, we might as well start from scratch. I know I can't change anyone's preference nor would I like to, but it seems if nobody agrees with me on the blur issue than there is only one thing for me to do. We will have to make separate projects for now.
However I also feel I should be more helpful than to just have my way and finale. So I decided, I would release my final project in 2 formats. For in game usage edited to the best of my discretion, and another with all layers merged and re-sized with fractals. No blur, no sharpening or editing of any kind will be applied to the later. This will allow the entire portion of the community which doesn't have access to Perfect Resize to make their own decision on what it should look like without the need for expensive software (there are plenty of wonderful freeware image editing tools, GIMP is one example). of course you will have to cut the layers yourself, and when the time comes i'll try and write a detailed tutorial on this so that as many people as possible can participate. Consider it my way of making this project open source in the future. Of ocurse any one who has access to Perfect re-size can help me with this and it wouldn't take much time at all. But for now I would like to wish you the best of luck with your project sl1982, and with that I will get to work.
