image quality when creating a magnifying glass in AE

[Julia Calbetó]

I found one solution but I don’t really understand it since I am a beginner with AE:

“The effect probably doesn’t honor the continuous rasterize setting. One option is to precomp your illustrator file, then double that nested comp’s size (and scale up the illustrator file, with continuous rasterization). At that point you can scale the nested comp down to, 50% and reposition it so it matches how it looked before.”

[Audrey Paranuik]

hi

did you change the image RESOLUTION

hope this helps!!

[Julia Calbetó]

I tried it and it’s still blurry… any other ideas?
Thanks!!!

[Herbie Humperdink]

Hey Julia,

Make sure the image you want to magnify using the bulge effect is big enough so you can scale it down a bit before you use the bulge effect. Any time you use some form of distort that scales the the layer beyond 100% it will have some quality loss. The trick is to start with a bigger better quality image so it’s not noticeable.

[Julia Calbetó]

Hello Herbie, thanks for your response.
The image I imported has 4111×5486 px and a resolution of 200ppi, and I scaled it down to 535×717 px, I think it is big enough, isn’t it?
But it’s still blurry…

[Herbie Humperdink]

That is huge it should be good. when you scaled it down, did you precomp it? It should not be blurry.

Can you post a link with a screen grab?

[Julia Calbetó]

Trying to follow the instructions I posted before, I did sth like precomp but I didn’t really know what to do next. Can you explain this step to me please?
Thanks!

[Herbie Humperdink]

Take a look:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/okhxdl55u0livey/magnify.aep

let me know if this works.

[Julia Calbetó]

Have a look at the image, I did the pre-comp (the item 20 at the timeline) and nothing changed…

[Herbie Humperdink]

What is the scale on that?….when I asked if you did precomp it was because if you layer (layer 20) is scaled at a 100% anything beyond that would blur.

Another alternative is to ditch the bulge all together and just use a traveling matte that uses a bigger version of your graphic to reveal as it.