Exporting pixelated Images without blurring pixels

[traumschiff]

Hi,

I would like to export a collage I made in publisher with the pixels, as it is displayed in the program. (see sreenshot 1). 

But when I export the image, the pixels turn blurry. (screenshot 2) How can I adjust the export settings to prevent that?

I think this article describes my problem (but for photoshop). https://www.hipsthetic.com/enlarge-pixel-art-without-blurring-in-photoshop/?expand_article=1

Thank you so much in advance!!

Edited March 25 by traumschiff

[Hangman]

Hi @traumschiff and welcome to the forums,

Probably the first thing to check is that everything is perfectly pixel aligned...

In the User Interface Settings/Preferences, ensure that Pixels are set to six decimal places then change your document units to pixels and make sure all positioning uses integer values rather than sub-integer values...

[nickbatz]

I can't really see what's going on, but I always resize everything to 300 DPI before working on it and have it resample using the Bicubic resampling algorithm (there are about five different resampling algorithms, including Nearest Neighbor, and you can try them to see which one you like best).

To be clear: resampling is what sharpens it, not changing to 300 DPI.

You can also use an unsharp mask Live Filter layer (it's under the Sharpen sub-menu). A little of that can be great, too much of it looks horrible.

That's in addition to what Hangman says, which is beyond my ken, so I'm certainly not disputing it.

[lacerto]

I have never realized this pixel alignment thing in context of Publisher. I do get it when positioning vector objects on a raster canvas (typically in Photo), and I have occasionally experienced it when placing Photo documents within Photo documents, but not in these kinds of contexts, and cannot reproduce this behavior in context other than when needing to rasterize images on canvas (but then Publisher typically leaves blurred edges around the image boundaries no matter whether the image was perfectly pixel aligned or not). 

I would check, in case the PPI of the placed image is clearly higher than the document DPI, that downsampling is not used at export time, and if it is, that the downsampling method is one that does not cause blurring. Or, if it is a question of an image like screenshot with low PPI placed in a higher resolution document (e.g., a 72ppi image placed in a 300dpi document), that the image has not been cropped with Vector Crop tool, since if this has been done, the low-res image that would look perfectly fine if it is let resized mechanically (by pixel duplication), would be upsampled by Affinity Publisher using Bilinear algorithm, which would result in a blurred image. If this is the case, simply crop the image using clipping method (clipping the image into a rectangle), rather than masking it, since masking (= effectively using the Vector Crop tool) will cause inadvertent upsampling of cropped raster content.