Looking for feedback from people that have created custom banners for their games. For images above a certain degree of complexity, I’m getting weird pixelation that makes them seem ugly compared to official ones from Lutris. Here you can see an example: left is one from the official db, right is a custom one I created: https://files.catbox.moe/ycdji6.png
I used https://steambanners.booru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=31880 as a source for the image. The pixelation is most visible above the top of the “2” character. I’ve tried a few different things - changing export quality in GIMP, exporting as a PNG, upscaling before cropping, upscaling after cropping, downscaling - nothing seems to work. Is there anyone who has created banners who can share their process, especially if you start with images that don’t fit the 8:3 aspect ratio?
Rather than pixelation, this looks like JPEG compression quality loss (which is likely caused by conversion on server, as they seem to be storing the image in JPEG format to cut down on size). The cause of this particular distortion is probably the noise in your source image (rather than a smooth colour gradient, the background in that picture is drawn as a bunch of tiny blots in different shades of the main colour; I imagine that doesn’t translate well into JPEG compression).
Just figured it out, you’re right! It looks like if you create an image and then set it as the banner using the GUI, Lutris will internally resize and convert to JPEG by itself, with apparently bad quality settings. But if you manually overwrite the banner file, e.g. cp -v exportedimage.jpg ~/.local/share/lutris/banners/game-slug.jpg it will take whatever you give it, even if it doesn’t match the 184x69 resolution. Thank you for the hint.
