tip for cleaner Bump / Displacement effects

most images in the netverse use 8 bits per color channel, which gives us 256 grayscale levels.

image 1 - is a graymap with 256 levels of gray named yuppp8.png

image 2 : yuppp8.png was applied to the Displacement channel in daz studio and software-rendered.

By converting this graymap to a 16-bit tiff file and blurring it a little
we can get rid of the staircases.
it's not as good a solution as having a natively 16-bit map but i think it helps

the freeware way is : imagemagick from www.imagemagick.org

write a batch file like this ( use notepad and save it as go16.bat )

c:\imagemagick\convert yuppp8.png -depth 16 -blur 16x16 yuppp16blurred.tif

note that this batch file pre-supposes that imagemagick was installed in c:\imagemagick

note: it also pre-supposes that yuppp8.png is in the same folder as go16.bat

the 16-bit tiff image will be created in the same folder as go16.bat

you run the batch file, by double-left-clicking on go16.bat

it will convert 8-bit png image yuppp8.png into a 16 bit softened image named yuppp16blurred.tif

image 3 : yuppp16blurred.tif was applied to the Displacement channel in daz studio and software-rendered.