It's time to talk about another big Photoshop editing tale!
Anyone remember this image? I believe it was posted by the official PAW Patrol Twitter account back in March of 2021. It's pretty cute! Of course, being a Marshall fan, it's no surprise I found the Dalmatian's pose especially adorable! And considering my penchant for creating transparent PNGs out of stuff like this, naturally I wanted to add it to my collection!
Unfortunately, I can only really do that if the image is big, and as you can see, he's really small here. His portion of the image is about 200x200, and for comparison, the screenshots I use for my daily Marshall pics are all 1920x1080.
Furthermore, when something like this is so small, a lot of the detail is lost, not to mention tiny PNG's simply aren't very useful. As such, I kept hoping and waiting for a bigger version to appear one day.
Cut to over a year later, and no such luck... well, kinda.
The thing is, this particular image of Chase, Marshall, Rubble and Skye has been used elsewhere, such as on products, magazines, etc., but the image is usually smaller than the one I found on Twitter, so it's just not much help. Thankfully, I finally found something that was... a little bigger, at least.
This image is 2300x2300. Marshall, himself is around 400x400, so while that's still small, it's at least nearly twice the size of the one on Twitter. I decided to try and make a transparent PNG out of it, thinking it might work if I use a tool I found online.
You see, not too long ago, I discovered something called "AI Upscaling". Basically, it can take a small image, rework it, and make a bigger version that actually looks pretty good! Well, sometimes. It's pretty dodgy, but I have tried it on a few of my smaller PNGs, and the results were pretty good!
AI upscaling, however, only really works well when the image quality is great. That 2300x2300 picture I found... wasn't. As such, when it got upscaled, parts were iffy and simply didn't turn out great.
To make matters worse, the light-colored background ended up blurring together with Marshall's white fur, thus I had to pretty much guess where one began and the other ended. But I continued on, hoping it'd work out. In the end, the results weren't good, but I figured it was the best I was going to get.
Thankfully, while searching around the net a few days ago, I found another image that helped me out quite a bit!
I have no idea what most of this says, but my new pal, Sagrotan, just-so-happened to upload an ad of their product that has Marshall in the pose I've been looking for! He's roughly 450x850, and though it's not complete, I can still use it!
Going back into Photoshop, I AI upscaled, rotated and resized Sagrotan's image to match what I had, removed the background, and tried aligning it up with my previous image as close as possible so I could use it to fill in the missing parts (such as the right front leg and paw, portions of his back, tail, etc.). It wasn't easy, especially since the colors didn't exactly match, not to mention some details (like the shadows on his helmet) got lost during the AI upscaling. But after some time and effort in Photoshop...
This is the result! It's 760x680, and though it's not perfect, I'm actually quite happy with it! It took over a year, but I finally got a transparent PNG of Marshall in this adorable pose! 😃
Now... I just hope I don't have to do something like this again for a while. For the time being, I'm sticking with bigger, complete images to make transparent PNGs out of. lol
