What's new
By:
Photoshop Gurus Forum

Welcome to Photoshop Gurus forum. Register a free account today to become a member! It's completely free. Once signed in, you'll enjoy an ad-free experience and be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Resize (reduction) image and maintain sharpness


R

raym0nd

New Member
Messages
3
Likes
0
Hi,

What is the best way to resize (reduction) an image and maintain the image sharpness.

The image I have is a high resolution 500 x 500 pixel logo with a text which I have the Adobe Illustrator (AI) vector file.

I need to resize the image to as small as 130 x 40 pixels and export to gif.

I have tried the following methods:
  • Photoshop Resize > Resample Image > Bicubic Sharper (best for reduction)
  • Create a 130 x 40 pixel photoshop file and copied object from AI to Photoshop as a smart object and export as gif
  • Create a 130 x 40 pixel AI file and export to gif
However, I tried to view the image from my mobile phone (iPhone), it is not sharp even though I have created from the vector ai file.

I research on the internet and find out that I can actually create a double size image and use CSS to control (divided dimension by 2) so that the sharpness can be maintained. However, I do not have control of the site html/css hence I can't use the method.

Please let me know if there is any other way to resize (reduction) an image and maintain the sharpness.

Thank you
 
I presume your concern is more about the softness of the text than the softness of the edges of the star.

The reason that the text appears soft is that at the small final image size, there simply is more detail in the font you used than there are pixels available to represent this amount of detail. Put differently, the narrow linewidths involved in the font (at the final size) are comparable to or smaller than individual pixels, and is especially noticeable when the font doesn't line up with pixel boundaries.

This problem comes from both the particular font that you selected, as well as the anti-aliasing method that you specified for that font. There is no perfect "solution". The best you can do is to add the text at your final size, use fewer characters, select the font and the font size more carefully, and turn off anti-aliasing.

To see the problem more clearly, I've attached 5x magnified views of (a) your work, and (c) an example of the improvement that you can achieve using the font (and characteristics) specified in the font fly-out menu (screen grab supplied - (b)).

HTH,

Tom M

test2-50pct_down_by_OP-view_5x-01.jpg

character_fly_out_menu.jpg

test-50pct_down_rez-re_letter-up5x-01.jpg
 
Perhaps I'm missing something, but isn't one of the main features of a vector file the ability to resize it without loss of detail or sharpness?
 
What you are missing is that while features described by vector-based programs and stored in their associated file formats can be scaled to arbitrarily large and small sizes -- microscopic to gigantic, eventually the output must be converted to pixels for display and presentation to humans. This is true whether the output is to a screen, a desktop inkjet printer or a building-sized ultra high volume offset press.

If you describe a white star (like yours) on a black background in AI or whatever vector based design program you use, size it to have a diameter of 1 cm, and then output it to a device for which each pixel is 1 cm on a side, you will get exactly one square pixel whose brightness is some average value, and all other pixels will be black. OTOH, if you output it to a device whose pixels are 1 mm on a side, your star will have a nicely white interior, some fuzzy boundary pixels, and quite a few fully black pixels around it within the 10pixel by 10 pixel (ie, 1 cm) square it fits into.

As I said in my previous message, your text has low contrast and blurry edges because you are in a size range where the finest features of your text are about the same size as the pixels in your output. The best solution is as I described above: carefully select a font, do not use any anti-aliasing, and try to tweak the size your text so that the boundaries of your letters mostly fall on pixel boundaries.

HTH,

Tom
 
Hi Tom,

Thanks for the great explanation :)

I just realised the logo text are not using any font from AI, it may be using some pen tools or shapes to form the text.
 
Do-it-yourself letters made from (vector) paths or shapes, ie, non-rasterized, will act exactly the same way as letters that came from a "real" font, ie just like I described earlier. However, it occurred to me that to get the maximum sharpness & contrast, the originator might have rasterized a reasonably good font, and then edited the relatively small number of pixels, one at a time, to fine tune it.

T
 
Back
Top