Jpeg badly pixellated in Affinity

[David Cheshire]

I have a poor quality jpeg of a catalogue from 1898 and no time machine. I thought I would get a page into Affinity and smarten it up a bit. But when I open it in Affinity it becomes badly pixellated. This is as far as I have gone, just opening it in Affinity. The Affinity view is pretty well unreadable compared to the original, this doesn't seem to be just the effect of zooming in.

This doesn't look right to me, what's going on? And any suggestions on how to improve the original would be gratefully received 🙂

 

[walt.farrell]

JPEG files are inherently lossy, due to the compression technology they use. And as you said, you have a poor quality image to start with.

What you're seeing, I think, is a combination of (a) pixellation when you zoom in, and (b) poor quality of the background colors on the page. So it looks you're seeing both the pixellation and JPEG compression artifacts.

I'm not sure of the best way to work around this, but I'm sure someone will have a suggestion for you.

[Widestone]

Scan it lossless and in larger resolution.

or

Create the site new from scratch with texts in fonts like the original and insert the watches.

[MikeW]

This is scaled 300%. Don't think I could do better at that size. 200% is better.

[David Cheshire]

Thanks everyone for your input. I can see how this seems, newbie doesn't understand jpeg compression. Actually I have been working with  jpegs for over 20 years so I know them quite well - it is Affinity that I am new to.

The problem I am seeing is only revealed if you look at the same image in Affinity and another viewer side by side. The screengrab below shows the image in Affinity on the left, overlaid on the right with it in Irfanview. The Affinity view is noticeably more blocky and pixellated, and has more artifacts around the letters, than the Irfanview view, which renders the letters much smoother. Look closely at the "acier, cuvettes acier" wording, in Affinity it is noticeably less clear and harder to read, and this effect gets much worse as you zoom in.

When I first opened this image in Affinity and zoomed in to the detail shown in the crop in my first post in this thread I was shocked by how badly it was pixellated. I didn't want to start working on cleaning it up in Affinity, because it looked like just loading it into Affinity had lost a lot of detail that existed in the original. That is why I started this thread.

Why does Affinity seem to be chucking away details in my original image? I am sure it is not meant to do that, so I must be doing something wrong when I am loading the image. Or is it that Affinity is giving me a more true view of what is actually in the file, whereas Irfanview is trying to make it look as good as possible and smoothing away artifacts?

Post script: Opening the original image in Inkscape also doesn't show the same blocky pixels as the Affinity crop shown my first post in this thread.

[Fritz_H]

1 hour ago, David Cheshire said:

... The Affinity view is noticeably more blocky and pixellated,...

IrfanView has a feature called "resample"


This slows down the display a bit but makes zoomed images a lot less pixellated (below: 600%)
(click on image below for more details..)

[David Cheshire]

42 minutes ago, Fritz_H said:

IrfanView has a feature called "resample"


This slows down the display a bit but makes zoomed images a lot less pixellated (below: 600%)
(click on image below for more details..)

Thanks, that seems to be what I am missing, I guess Irfanview and others do this as standard.

But where do I find this option please, I have scanned the menus and searched the help and I can't find it.

[Fritz_H]

15 minutes ago, David Cheshire said:

But where do I find this option please, I have scanned the menus and searched the help and I can't find it.

I guess, Affinity-Products do not offer this feature at all....

Fritz

[Fritz_H]

@David Cheshire

You may try the following:
use IrfanView to scale-up (e.g.200%) the Images using the resample-Feature (Batch-Processing?)

(keep in mind: IrfanView is not freeware - for commercial use you have to purchase a license)

and adjust size in your Affinity-Application:

(left: resampled to 200% shown in Photo at 300%      -     right: original-file at 600%)


 

Fritz

[David Cheshire]

3 hours ago, Fritz_H said:

@David Cheshire

You may try the following:
use IrfanView to scale-up (e.g.200%) the Images using the resample-Feature (Batch-Processing?)

(keep in mind: IrfanView is not freeware - for commercial use you have to purchase a license)

and adjust size in your Affinity-Application:

(left: resampled to 200% shown in Photo at 300%      -     right: original-file at 600%)

Fritz

Fritz, thank you, I understand now, I previously thought (due to not reading properly) that you were talking about Affinity rather than IrfanView. Sorry, and thanks again for your help

You will be pleased to know that I have long been a fully paid up and licensed IrfanView user.

I also found this tutorial on YouTube which seems to be the sort of technique I need to improve my low res image:

 

[Fixx]

100 % in Photo is identical to 100 % view in this thread viewed with Chrome. Photo does not mangle your image, but sometimes its zooming routines do not present best possible view of the image.

Resampling with suitable method (Lanczos for example) and sharpening with USM can give you slightly better image.

Here is 4X resampled image (1976X1808) done with Topaz Gigapixel AI which has best upsampling algorithm at the moment. It looks pretty good but letter forms are mangled visibly (not smart enough AI for typographic content... 😄

 

[lacerto]

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[MikeW]

1 hour ago, Lagarto said:

... How much of your time did it require?

A couple button clicks. First I sampled an area of the yellow background and set the image to utilize transparency. Then masked the original yellow background and deleted it. Added a layer and filled it with the yellow. Saved that result. The used ON1's resize.

PhotoZoom Pro does a slightly better job. I don't have Topaz's Gigapixel application (but I'm tempted...). I suspect if I had kept my un-resized export, it would have done better.

[lacerto]

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