Affinity Designer Resolution Issue

[Steganographer]

Hello. I just got Affinity Designer when I ran into an issue. I was doing pixel art in a 32x32 file. Because I wanted this to be a rather big .gif, when the export menu popped up, I chose 1080x1080 instead of 32x32. However, the resolution was still bad. Really, I just want to scale up my pixel art to a 1080x1080 format without losing any resolution. If anybody could help, that'd be great. Thanks!

[Fixx]

If you just scale the pixel art up in export resampling algorithm will soften the edges (as it is what works best for natural images). Try resampling separately using Nearest Neighbour method.

[Steganographer]

Unfortunately, I just got Affinity and am new to all of this... Haha. Do you mean go to the Export Persona?

[v_kyr]

He meant on the export panel setting ...

[toltec]

15 hours ago, Steganographer said:

1080x1080 instead of 32x32. 

Honestly, you are totally wasting your time.

It is impossible to size a pixel document up by more than a tiny amount because sizing a pixel document up means adding new pixels to fill in the gaps between the existing pixels. For a 32 x 32 pixel document the best you can realistically achieve is about 36 x 36 pixels, far short or the 1080 you want.

You need to start from scratch to get any sort of quality !

[Alfred]

7 minutes ago, toltec said:

It is impossible to size a pixel document up by more than a tiny amount because sizing a pixel document up means adding new pixels to fill in the gaps between the existing pixels.

‘Nearest Neighbour’ resampling (as suggested by @v_kyr) should work OK for resizing by a power of 2 (i.e. going from 32 × 32 to 64 × 64 or 128 × 128, etc). So 1024 × 1024 should be fine, but 1080 × 1080 wouldn’t work so well.

[Steganographer]

I've been doing Nearest Neighbor and it is working fine. (1080x1080)

[toltec]

9 minutes ago, Alfred said:

‘Nearest Neighbour’ resampling (as suggested by @v_kyr) should work OK for resizing by a power of 2 (i.e. going from 32 × 32 to 64 × 64 or 128 × 128, etc). So 1024 × 1024 should be fine, but 1080 × 1080 wouldn’t work so well.

You must have a better method than me ??

I took a 32 x 32 pixel image and resized up by 4 (400 percent)

The image on the left was just increased in Designer, the one on the right in Photo using nearest neighbour/

How do you do it ?

 

triangle.afdesign

[lepr]

.

[Steganographer]

I went into the pixel persona in a 32x32 canvas. Then, when exporting, change the size to 1080x1080 and change it to Nearest Neighbor.

[toltec]

7 minutes ago, Steganographer said:

I went into the pixel persona in a 32x32 canvas. Then, when exporting, change the size to 1080x1080 and change it to Nearest Neighbor.

Ah, wait a minute. Are you talking a Pixel art original (made from pixels) or a Vector art original (made using lines or shapes).

It will be much better if you start off with vector art before outputting to a .gif or similar.

I think I got confused when you said "pixel art".

[Steganographer]

Pixels. I am having no resolution issues so far so I don't see a need to switch.
https://giphy.com/gifs/tJNuamoM78TjheUTk8 (something I quickly made)

 

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, >|< said:

You'll get a perfect result from Nearest Neighbour resampling when multiplying the size by any integer, not just powers of two.

You’re right, as usual, but the point is somewhat moot since 1080 isn’t an exact multiple of 32.

[lepr]

.

[R C-R]

19 hours ago, Alfred said:

You’re right, as usual, but the point is somewhat moot since 1080 isn’t an exact multiple of 32.

As long as the intent is to retain the blocky nature of pixel art, as @>|< said & @Steganographer confirmed, Nearest Neighbor resampling works fine at any scaled up factor.

FWIW, I was going to reply to this topic when I first saw the OP & suggest that 1024 would work better, but as I was writing a reply to say that, I decided to add a screen capture to show that even with NN resampling of a 32x32 px AD doc, exporting at 1080 it would look blurry due to anti-aliasing. When it did not, I confess that it took me longer than I would have liked to figure out why.