Pixelated textures upon upload?

[Pheonix Mistwallow]

I've recently encountered a new problem when uploading shaded images to SL. The texture is smooth and transitions well from dark to light areas in my graphics program but once I upload it to SL the shading is pixelated and rough and looks awful. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

I've tried to upload it as a png or a jpeg... both create the pixel look just in different ways. The texture size is 1024x1024.

[Theresa Tennyson]

Go to "Preferences" - "Graphics/Advanced" - "Hardware" and see if texture compression is turned on. If it is, it will cause that effect in your viewer but the texture itself should look fine if texture compression is turned off.

[Rolig Loon]

It's a little hard to tell what you're trying to show in this pic.   It doesn't look pixelated to me.  It looks like a very subtly graded gray image. If you're choosing between PNG and JPG, always choose PNG.  JPG is a lossy format, so you are trading way details to get a smaller file size --- not a good trade.  I'm not surprised if your JPG image looks a bit pixelated.  Personally, I always opt for TGA, though, because it gives me better control over alpha.

You do need to change one thing, though.  A 1024 x 1024 image is way oversized for almost anything except a sign with a lot of lettering.  An image that size takes a long time to load and uses a lot of memory on everyone's GPU, so it creates texture lag for anyone who looks at it. 

[Chic Aeon]

Just a couple of comments. It looks splotchy on my computer screen. Of course screens vary.

It does look like the uploader is doing a number on it and hopefully your graphic setting change (if needed ) will fix that.  It actually looks like the uploader has reduced the number of colors.

I have read that 1024 textures turn INTO 512 textures for both skin and clothes. This is done by the uploader much in the same way that it will change a 2048 x 2048 into the maximum for now size of 1024 x 1024. So I would check that out at the forums. I don't do clothes any longer. 

If you need to keep testing it might be good to do it on the Aditi grid where it is free. You can change your viewer to show more grids on startup and choose Second Life Beta Grid or Aditi (I think the listing depends on the viewer). That way you won't be spending money while you try.

[Pheonix Mistwallow]

That was it! Thank you so much this actually answered a few other problems I was having as well.