Disable Layer Aliasing

[Chris Thomsen]

Ok, thank you for your comment.

Hope, you all understand my problem.

My problem is not that it is impossible to zoom into bitmaps without loss of quality.

I know the difference between “pixel-orientated” an “vectorized” files.

Greetz Chris

[Chris Thomsen]

Alright.

Thank you very much. 🙂

Greetz Chris

[Todd Kopriva]

I’m still not sure that I understand what you’re asking for, but it may be that setting the layer to Draft mode will do what you’re after. (See “Layer image quality”.) My reading of the original question was that it was about preventing anti-aliasing. Sorry if I misread this.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
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[Chris Thomsen]

YES!!

Sorry for this confusion. My english is not that best, but you understood me very well.

You solved my problem!

First it didn`t work.. because i wanted this effect only for one layer, i had to set the quality in the rendersettings in the exportdialog to “actual settings”. 😉

Thanks so much!!

Greetz Chris

[Luke Harris]

Hey mate,

I’ve discovered an easy way to get bitmaps etc to not anti-alias, while still giving you the ability to render at best quality.

Open up Illustrator, drop a bitmap into it, save it as an Adobe Illustrator file.

Put that Adobe Illustrator file into an After Effects, enable continuous rasterising, and even though it’s a bitmap, AE treats it like a vector!!

Hope that works as well for you as it did for me… Now I can get that awesome retro bitmap look and combine it with some lighting and 2.5D 🙂

Luke Harris
Motion Graphics Design
Sydney, Australia
https://www.lukeharris.biz

[Luke Harris]

It does not “Magically turn it into a vector”

– When you scale up that small .ai file, it merely *treats* it like a vector file, i.e. does not try to anti-alias it. This is not a treatment which suddenly creates resolution where there is none, this is a treatment which when you scale up a bitmap will give you large, sharp squares for each bit as opposed to those terrible AE anti-aliased blurs.

This treatment carries on through to the render stage at full quality renders, very useful for making 8-bit animated characters, even in 2.5D with lights affecting the layers.

Just give it a go, my money has already been put on the table and I don’t bluff.

Luke

[Ellis Elkins]

try these suggestions from Aharon Rabinowitz

[Jan Vork]

You can also make a ‘hires lores’ image by increasing the .psd’s resolution by multiplying it with an integer (2x, 3x, 4x, 8x) without interpolation (‘nearest neighbour’). In that way, AE threat it as hires, but you keep the lo-res look.

http://www.jaydude.nl

[Cole Johnson]

Hey! No clue if you’re still checking this thread, but just in case I figure I’ll attempt to help.

If you still happen to have the original PSD file, simply create a new PSD with the same aspect ratio as the original and copy the old photo into the new file, resizing it to fit the larger size.

Luckily, Photoshop doesn’t add anti-aliasing, so this is the best way to get a larger file of a bitmap.

Either that, or I’m fairly certain you can trace it in Illustrator.

Never used Illustrator extensively before, however, and am not 100% sure on that one.

[Steve Bentley]

Actually Cole, PS does terrific anti aliasing. But it all depends on how you have your scaling preferences set. There are half a dozen options that let you scale with, say, “nearest neighbor” that will do what you suggest, and the image will be more pixelated when its blown up. But there are also options (in fact the default) that use a bicubic algorithm to smoothly (read: anitaliased) scale the content to make it as smooth as possible even though the scale is increasing. It doesn’t generate detail per se but handles edges in an intelligent way. There are also choices for scaling down, which tends to lose detail, so some of the other choices help to over come that.

I think we’ve missed the boat with the OP due to the date, but I was more concerned that if you think that PS’s normal state is not to antialias then you have your settings opposite from what the rest of us usually run at and you are missing some great features in the app.
The other clue was that you suggested copying the picture to another file – this would be no different than simply changing the image size of the original file and choosing the kind of scaling algorithm (nearest neighbor bicubic etc). Scaling is scaling whether its in a new comp or the original.
Check you scaling settings in the prefs.