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I'm free transforming a small icon ( I work in 10x zoom mode). I stretch the image. When I press OK(submit transformation), the image is blured. I don't want this to happen.

Does anyone know the solution?

UPD: Here what I mean. I am stretching and skewing an image. The pixels are moving somehow, that's ok. To apply the changes I must press a green button. and IN THE MOMENT I PRESS IT the blur is applied. Am I clear?alt text alt text

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can you please post the pre- and post transform images? – ysap Jan 5 '11 at 13:08
the images are very small ). can you see them in the end of the post? – Dan Jan 5 '11 at 13:19
My answer was edited after seeing the images. – ysap Jan 5 '11 at 13:56
Hi Dan, and welcome to the forums. I hate to do this on your first question, however general photoshop and image editing questions that are not specifically related to photography are off topic here. You could try going to DocType.com, or see if there is a graphic design site at Area51. As this refers to icon editing, it falls into the off topic category here, so I'm going to close this. – jrista♦ Jan 5 '11 at 15:55
& @jrista area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1924/graphic-design public beta in 6 days ;-) – koiyu Jan 5 '11 at 23:34

closed as off topic by jrista♦ Jan 5 '11 at 15:55

Questions on Photography Stack Exchange are expected to relate to photography within the scope defined in the FAQ. Consider editing the question or leaving comments for improvement if you believe the question can be reworded to fit within the scope. Read more about closed questions here.

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

I moved this part to the top b/c it is my ultimate suggestion: Last thing: having this specific image as the source, I'd not even bother to waste more than 3 minutes on transforming. Rather, I'd do it manually. You can select one row at a time and manually move it in 0 or 1 pixels to the right, relative to the row below.

How far are you stretching it? If it is to more than a few dozens %, then you can't resize without noticeable blur. There is not enough information in the original to construct a much higher resolution transformation and blending of adjacent pixel values must be performed to generate the interpolated pixel - which is the source for the blur.

Also, when using such a high zoom ratio you are more likely to see the blurring of the stretched image than when viewing at 1:1.

EDIT after seeing the images: It looks like the "fuzziness" you see is the inevitable result of the skewing. I am not familiar with PS as I mentioned earlier, but I can imagine that you have a anti-aliasing switch in the transform dialog. Try to turn it off and see what happens. Otherwise, you may be able to control the interpolation (sampling) algorithm (bilinear, biqubic, lanczos, etc.) If you can disable interpolation, it should remove this fuzziness.

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Hello! Thanks for reply. I'm skewing an image (about 20%). It looks like photoshop is applying blur AFTER the transformation (automaticaly). See my update in the question – Dan Jan 5 '11 at 12:43
I'm using CS3. Can you try to do tha same thign in your photoshop? Set the maximum zoom to notice the effect – Dan Jan 5 '11 at 12:57
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@Dan - I don't use PS at all. I use GIMP. – ysap Jan 5 '11 at 13:08
using gimp has solved the problem – Dan Jan 5 '11 at 13:56
@Dan - it must be a matter of different default settings between PS and GIMP. I'm sure that you could get the same result with PS. – ysap Jan 5 '11 at 13:59
up vote 0 down vote

Here's what you're seeing. When you are moving the preview around, in order to present the data in real-time, Photoshop doesn't apply any blending of pixels. It just approximates, with hard edges. If you could zoom 1:1 on that image, you would see that it actually looks quite ugly, with a lot of jaggies. This is similar to scaling an image without interpolation -- fast, no blur introduced, but the results are no good. When you press okay, it does a high-quality transform, with interpolated pixels. This inherently results in blur.

I'm not sure if there is a way to disable this (or to choose the algorithm used), but you probably don't really want to. You can (and probably should) apply an unsharp mask (selectively if need be) after rotating to get back the appearance of sharpness, and this will work pretty well. But overall, you have to accept that this kind of tranform is a lossy operation.

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