Exporting image blur

[bram]

Good day,

 

 

I am trying to export my logo to jpg, for the use of signature at Mac Mail.

 

But every time I export it, it becomes blur.

Please see the image attached.

 

Shouldn't this just be the simplest task?!

What do I do wrong?

 

B

 

This question might have been asked countless times. I'm sorry for that, I just can't find the right answer.

 

Mavu Logo signature .afdesign

[MEB]

Hi bram,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

You can change the Resample dropdown to Lanczos 3 (non-separable) to get a sharper result.

 

Note that you can only compare the logo inside Affinity Designer with the exported image if its set to 100% zoom. That's because all logo elements are vector objects and they never loose quality no matter how you enlarge them in Affinity Designer. The exported image is raster based (not vector) and so it will only look good at the size you exported it (100%), if you zoom in the exported image, it will look pixelated or blurred (depending on the software/viewer). 

[bram]

Thanks,

 

However, I must be doing something not right.

 

I did scale down the dimensions in document setup to 300px. 

In the dropdown menu i did adjust it to Lanczos 3 (non-separable) like you mentioned, and exported in jpeg.

 

Then when I open it in Preview on my mac, I view in actual size and its still blur. See image attached.

 

What is it that I am doing wrong?

 

B

[Oval]

bram, we achieved a sharper result. Perhaps you used separable accidentally?

[R C-R]

Then when I open it in Preview on my mac, I view in actual size and its still blur. See image attached.

To begin with, note that the current version of Preview gives you a choice of two different "actual size" interpretations in Preferences > Images:

Since your logo is not intended for printout, I suggest setting this to the '1 image pixel' setting shown. This will give you a larger 100% "actual size" view more representative of the image's actual size in pixels.

 

But the real issue is that you are exporting an image composed (mostly) of vector elements to a raster (bitmap) file format, in this case JPEG. That means everything must be mapped to a fixed grid of pixels on export.

 

Your afdesign file is actually 300 pixels wide by 187.4 pixels tall, so that 'extra' 0.4 pixel is going to make it difficult to get a perfect fit -- on export everything must be scaled very slightly vertically & then (one way or another) mapped to the pixel grid of the exported bitmap. (For your screenshot, the grid is 200 x 320 pixels, but that could just be how the forum stores uploaded image files. I suspect that locally, your exported JPEG is 300 by 187.)

 

Moreover, most of your vector elements in your afdesign file are not pixel aligned to begin with -- in other words they do not begin or end on pixel boundaries & may be an odd fraction of a pixel tall and/or wide. (You can see this by selecting various elements & looking at their values in the Transform panel.)

 

Regardless of what resampling method you use on export to any bitmap image format (JPEG, PNG, whatever), this is going to result in a reduction of sharpness, variously described as blurriness, jaggies, or aliasing/anti-aliasing artifacts. This is because, unlike with pure vector formats, in bitmap formats every pixel in the grid can have only one value & it must be completely filled with it.

 

It is easy to see this if you open your exported JPEG in Preview & 'zoom in' to 5 or 6 times 'actual' size. Below is a screenshot I created comparing the same part of three different exported versions of your file at 6x actual size in Preview. The rightmost one is your uploaded screenshot. The other two are exports I created from your afdesign file after adjusting its document size to exactly 300 by 187 pixels and changing the size & location of the red & blue shapes at the bottom & the 'sports development' image (not a vector) to align on pixel boundaries. The leftmost one used the simple 'nearest neighbor' resampling method & the center one the most complex 'Lanczos 3 (non-separable)' one.

 

Note that the resizing & relocating improved the sharpness in the transition between the bottom two red & blue  elements (because they are now aligned exactly on pixel boundaries) but had essentially no effect on the 'sports development' image, & that (in this particular instance) the nearest neighbor resampling method arguably rendered that image with fewer or less objectionable artifacts than with the Lanczos 3 (non-separable) one.

 

Also note that all of this had essentially no effect on the sharpness of the large letter shapes -- their jagged, stair-stepped edges are essentially identical in all the exports.

 

What all this means is no matter what you do, there is a fundamental limit on the sharpness of any bitmapped image file, & it is determined primarily by how many pixels it contains. More pixels offer higher resolution at the expense of greater file size & more image area to display it. So if you are going to design logos (or whatever) to be viewed as displayed on a screen (in emails, webpages, whatever) in AD it is best to start with a document with the desired pixel dimensions, make sure the 'Force Pixel Alignment' option is turned on in the main toolbar, & avoid creating items with fractional pixel sizes or positions.

 

Finally, note that for emails there is no guarantee that these images will be displayed at your design size, or even at all. That depends entirely on the 'client' email app used by the recipient, its capabilities, & user settings. But that is yet another, more complex than it seems topic for another discussion.