Keel rocketjump

I was going to make an entry for an animeseed background contest, since I had an idea of what to make. It's Halloween themed, so I figured I would just use some orange/black/grey colors and pass it off. It turned out sort-of nice, but not what I originally wanted.

The main problem with this is the aliasing. I have no graphics card, so I can't take super high-res pictures and downscale them, or take normal images with high AA. I took this screenshot at 1600x900 and upscaled, without using any blur or post-process AA. The result is a horribly aliased piece of crap.

Thinking of adding a bit of blur around the edges to remove some aliasing, but I'm not sure if I really want to spend the time on this. It failed pretty hard anyway.

 So I decided to try and anti-alias this image. First, I blurred it a bit using a couple different types in PS. That was a bit better, but because the image was upscaled as much as it was, the aliasing was more a part of the whole shape than a little bit of imperfections here and there. This means that a simple blur wouldn't do the trick.

Because this is just a silhouette, I decided that it wouldn't be that big a deal to just go around it with the eraser tool and do it all myself. I believe that, if you want something done right, you should let a machine do it. But I'm not nearly smart enough to listen to my own advice, so I do everything manually.

This is what you get when you do everything yourself: half an hour of time wasted, and an image with imperfect anti-aliasing. There are still some deformations visible (such as on the outside of the left leg), but overall, it's probably better than the original. So there xP

You can download the image here (2560x1440)