[wy4tt]

i've searched past threads on this, but couldn't find an answer. is there a way to disable smoothing for pics smaller than full size? for text it's great, but for pics, i'd rather be able to choose.

[cpac]

what pictures where?

[KidRed]

So you're trying to find out how to make your icons look jagged and crappy as opposed to smooth and clean?

I don't think Panther has an 'make icons ugly' option.

[dtriska]

Originally posted by KidRed:
I don't think Panther has an 'make icons ugly' option.

LOL!!

[malique]

Didn't u guys recognize: Preview always smoothes pictures, regardless if they are placed inside pdfs (which would be useless) or if you just wanna see your favourite porn JPG (which would be even more useless).

I'd also like to switch that off. (even for work purposes )

[bmhome1]

I hate it too. Its an incredibly poor, embarrassing implementation of graphics display. Why can't it automatically detect a image file from a text file?

[dtriska]

Yes, Preview smoothes pics. They look better that way.

[wy4tt]

Originally posted by KidRed:
So you're trying to find out how to make your icons look jagged and crappy as opposed to smooth and clean?

I don't think Panther has an 'make icons ugly' option.

hey, thanks einstein. i guess it doesn't help you read posts right either. but if i'd asked about "icons" i might appreciate your response.

anyway, if there is no way to turn it off, this is a design flaw.

[timmerk]

Yah, it may look better- but we are Mac users - graphic designers a lot of us. We want to see what the actaual pict is. What about if you make a pict and send it cause you think it looks one way, but no one else gets to have smooth picts?

Very unstandard and unprofessional.

[cpac]

Originally posted by wy4tt:
hey, thanks einstein. i guess it doesn't help you read posts right either. but if i'd asked about "icons" i might appreciate your response.

anyway, if there is no way to turn it off, this is a design flaw.

Ok, you still haven't said it, but what you're asking about is picture smoothing IN PREVIEW.

First, from your topic/original post it was unclear whether you were talking about icons, or pictures in the finder, or in preview, or in iPhoto or what.

Second, this post belongs in the Software forum.

Third, no, I don't think there's a way to turn this off in Preview, but if you're a person who needs to avoid this smoothing, you can simply use another tool - Graphic Converter comes to mind, or Quicktime Player, or any number of other shareware/freeware utilities.

[SJ]

First off, if you were a professional designer you would know that there is no such thing as "image smoothing" in the context you are using. You are basically asking is there is a way to get MacOS X to use bi-linear scaling instead of bi-cubic.

The short answer is no. And to be honest, I am yet find a situation where bi-linear is more appropriate than bi-cubic scaling.

The long answer is basically as follows. Bi-linear scaling uses two adjacent pixes to scale an image. Their values are generally averaged out to shrink the images as required. This has the side effect of making images look jaggy.

xx = x

Bi-cubic scaling essentially uses two adjacent pixels, plus the ones underneath them. (I am simplifying a lot here to make it understandable.)

xx = x
xx

This makes scaled images much more true to the original.

Bi-cubic is generally (almost universally) considered to be a better way of scaling images and thats why Apple uses it.

[wy4tt]

I don't think there's a way to turn this off in Preview, but if you're a person who needs to avoid this smoothing, you can simply use another tool - Graphic Converter comes to mind, or Quicktime Player, or any number of other shareware/freeware utilities. [/B]

thanks. i'm new to mac, and didn't know that Preview alone processed images this way. i have yet to get ps for mac, so i was worried that it was an os issue, not a software issue. graphic converter does the job though. thanks.

[barbarian]

So you're trying to find out how to make your icons look jagged and crappy as opposed to smooth and clean?

I don't think Panther has an 'make icons ugly' option.

Download any pixel perfect "World of Copland" type icons. They always look like crap smoothed. As these are the icons I prefer and use, I always have to keep them at exactly 32x32 or risk having them look aweful. I'd much rather un-smoothed larger versions of these. In fact for the icons I use the most I've gone and created 128x128 un-smoothed versions of the icons. These lego-esque look a lot better than smoothed off blurry blocks that I would get otherwise.

I know this option will never appear, but I'd like to have the ability to turn off icon anti-aliasing.... at least in the terminal.

Otherwise I also agree that bicubic is generally a much smarter way to scale..

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by SJ:
First off, if you were a professional designer you would know that there is no such thing as "image smoothing" in the context you are using. You are basically asking is there is a way to get MacOS X to use bi-linear scaling instead of bi-cubic.

I could be way off, but it does look like they apply a smoothing algorithm after scaling the picture. On my iMac 400, when I scale a picture in Preview, it will appear at the size specified, and then a second later it will blur slightly.

[arekkusu]

Originally posted by SJ:
First off, if you were a professional designer you would know that there is no such thing as "image smoothing" in the context you are using. You are basically asking is there is a way to get MacOS X to use bi-linear scaling instead of bi-cubic.

Off topic, but if you're going to correct somebody you might as well give the right information.

Mac OS X uses lanczos filtering, not bicubic. And if he wants to disable smoothing, he'd be using "nearest neighbor" filtering, not bilinear.

[Simon Mundy]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
I could be way off, but it does look like they apply a smoothing algorithm after scaling the picture. On my iMac 400, when I scale a picture in Preview, it will appear at the size specified, and then a second later it will blur slightly.

Nope, you're spot on. Preview waits until you've stopped resizing before applying the algorithm, otherwise it would chew up a lot of processor time (and probably be pretty choppy) if you tried scaling it in real-time.

[STAT]

I agree that the smoothing looks like crap. I am very picky about how my images look and when I get done with them in Photoshop, they look the way I want them to look. But if I open them up in Preview to take a quick look (since Photoshop takes a while to launch), it "smoothes" them, making them look blurry. NOT the way I had them looking before.

[bmedina]

So try another app, like Graphic Converter, that launches more quickly.

And for those of you about to continue the flame fest, please notice that this thread is over a year old. Shouldn't threads this old be auto-locked?

[STAT]

I dunno...GraphicConverter seems to take longer, plus it has that dang splash screen. But maybe it doesn't. Also though, Preview lets you select multiple images, drag them down to the Preview icon, and it won't open up a ton of windows, but will instead just show one window with multiple thumbnails.

[TETENAL]

Originally posted by STAT:
I dunno...GraphicConverter seems to take longer, plus it has that dang splash screen.

GraphicConverter just takes longer because it pauses to show you the gorgeous splash screen. You can turn the splash screen off in the preferences and it will launch faster.

[d0ubled0wn]

Originally posted by Simon Mundy:
Nope, you're spot on. Preview waits until you've stopped resizing before applying the algorithm, otherwise it would chew up a lot of processor time (and probably be pretty choppy) if you tried scaling it in real-time.

Anybody know if Tiger changes this behavior? I'd like to think it could do this real-time with Core Graphics or whatever.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by timmerk:
Yah, it may look better- but we are Mac users - graphic designers a lot of us. We want to see what the actaual pict is. What about if you make a pict and send it cause you think it looks one way, but no one else gets to have smooth picts?

Very unstandard and unprofessional.

If you want to see "the actual picture", view it at actual size. No smoothing is performed at that scale, because none is assumed to be needed. Viewing an imageat any other size, on any platform or any graphics program, is not "the actual picture", because there is always some form of interpolation that has to take place, whether it is to make the image bigger or smaller. I would have thought that graphics professionals, of all people, would understand this concept.

All that Apple has done is implement a better sizing algorithm for an image-viewing application. I fail to see how that is unprofessional. If you don't like it, then feel free to use a graphics editing application, which focuses on the individual pixels rather than the image as a whole.

[TETENAL]

Originally posted by Millennium:
If you want to see "the actual picture", view it at actual size.

Of course the graphics professionals know this, but I would like to mention for the others who might not know this yet that you need to turn on "Ignore DPI for actual size" in the Preview preferences to get a pixel to pixel equivalent display of images.

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by STAT:
I agree that the smoothing looks like crap. I am very picky about how my images look and when I get done with them in Photoshop, they look the way I want them to look. But if I open them up in Preview to take a quick look (since Photoshop takes a while to launch), it "smoothes" them, making them look blurry. NOT the way I had them looking before.

No, it doesn't. This ancient thread that you resurrected already covered this. At 100%, it looks exactly the same as it would in any other program. When you shrink it, most other programs would use a lower-quality (but NOT more accurate) resampling algorithm that makes the picture look jaggy. OS X uses a more sophisticated algorithm which makes the picture look better and actually preserves shapes better. I've seen this to be true with some pictures I had that included a very fine crisscross pattern that would get distorted into weird-looking arches before the enhanced resampling kicked in.

[STAT]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
No, it doesn't. This ancient thread that you resurrected already covered this.

You sir, seem to be somewhat of a jerk. Have a merry Christmas.