I use Photoshop for pixel art. When I have a reference photo, I’d like to be able to use that image as the background and start drawing my pixel art on a layer on top of it.
The thing is, the best way I found to do pixel art in Photoshop is to work with actual pixels and zoom in to ~2000%. That means that I have to reduce the size and resolution of my reference photo to fit my final art. This way, I lose a lot of detail in the reference, which makes some decisions in the art harder than they should be with a full-resolution reference.
Is there a way to have layers with different resolution in the same document? For example, I have pixel layers of 160 x 120 to work on, and a reference image behind those of 800 x 600? That way, I could still use a 1px pencil brush to draw my pixels but still have a high-res image as a reference in the same document.
I’m working in CS6 if that is of any importance.
This is a bit of a mockup of what I’d like to achieve as a document to work in:
EDIT for clarity: this image is not the ultimate effect I want to achieve, it is what I want my working file to look like. A high resolution image in the background and a low-res pixel art in the foreground which I can live edit with a 1px pencil brush.
Answer
No.
I’d approach it one of these two ways:
Use a multiplier for your pixel brush size, and just use nearest neighbour interpolation to resize your image to the correct size without deforming it. (let’s say you had to blow up your pixel art 10x, just use a 10px square brush). You can always have a second view zoommed out to simulate the final size. Although you’d have to do it without a nice automatic pixel grid.
Or do as you said, reduce your reference artwork to the final size but open a second window with a copy of it in the original size; this way you might be able to pick some of the details.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Vincent , Answer Author : Luciano