MAKING ICON-SIZED IMAGES
Banishing the Jaggies
FACES . EXPRESSIONS . SYMBOLS . ICON-SIZED GRAPHICS
DRAWING . New addition:- PAINTING on tablets and smartphones
GETTING RID OF THE JAGGIES
in tiny two-colour graphics
Here are some very small two-colour images created in different ways.
As you see, the first two flowers, automatically processed from a photo of a real sunflower, are not very clear.
Vector art editors give sharper pictures, and make it easy to draw symmetrical shapes - see the third image.
You'll probably agree the fourth flower looks the most lifelike and is clearer still. It was hand drawn in a paint app.
You'll notice that the text on every image has a bad case of the jaggies. It looks ragged. You can't get sharper pictures because the graphics are saved with only two colours. You need shades of grey to soften the edges.
Black and white line drawings and lettering at all but the tiniest sizes look sharper when scanned at the greyscale ('black-and-white photo') setting on your scanner. I edited and produced a professional cartoonists' newsletter for two years, and naturally had to scan a lot of cartoons. Even the simplest line drawings looked better at photo setting.
BUT - when you have no grey pixels to soften the lines, antialiasing - removing the jaggies from slants and curves - is difficult if you don't want to get your fingers inky. Slanting lines resemble flights of steps. Italics look particularly gap-toothed!
To arrive at sharper pictures at tiny size you do best to edit by hand.
How to make icon sized images. Banishing the jaggies.
CUT PIXELS, CUT EXPENSE Email big photos . Cut gallery costs
HANDLING ICON-SIZED IMAGES Sharper pictures . Nano images
Icons from photos . Photoshop icons . MS Paint . Graphic Converter
DOWNSIZE GIFs Photoshop GIF optimizer . Rainbow ride . GIF secret
SAVE SPACE Use a pun . Animate . Anagrams . Part for whole
AGENDA ICONS Beat information overload . Calendar icons
(c) Valerie Beeby 1998 - 2011
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