Hello,

When I am trying to export my work to a PNG file it is coming out rather blurry.

People who have saved PNGs to the same size on other similar projects have had much clearer results and I am unsure why mine is coming out blurry.

Can anyone help?

Many thanks

TheRealHammer

Hi.

If anti-aliasing is switched on in the document's settings (it is by default; Shift+Ctrl+D), then it should come out "blurry" -anti-aliased. Semi-filled pixels are rendered with an intermediate colour based upon the renderer's calculations.
Thus no matter what "as per se", everything is blurred.

Now, we need some clarifications.
The other "similar projects", or more particularry, what is your project like?
You can try switching off or force anti-aliasing with filtering into sharp, alias edges. Yet, that won't look good either at small resolution.

So for a better outcome, you can rise the resolution or exported image px size, or
make sure your graphics shows no effect when anti-aliasing is applied.
That is, drawing with horizontal/vertical lines only, and aligning everithing perfectly to the rendered area's pixel grid.
You see, the latter won't work but only on particular projects.

Hi Lazur

Thank you for your reply.

My project is making badges for a game that I play.

Badges that I have seen look much sharper and clearer than mine but are at the same resolution.

I will upload some pictures for your viewing.



The above is one someone has made to the same scale.

And this is mine.



In my opinion mine looks more blurry.

What is funny is that when I open the file to view it in Photos on Windows it shows up fine for a split second and then gets this blur effect put over it.

This effect seems to carry through to my games when I add the badge.

Hi.

Guessing not much can be done about it -within inkscape.
For small images, this thread can help.

A general approach is oversampling the image at the export and use a raster editor for downsampling =exporting at a larger size, then resizing to the intended size in gimp or alike, where you can set the method the intermediate/dropped pixels are calculated.
Also, in a raster editor there is a sharpen filter which may help making the image look more in focus.

I guess the red one does look like it has maybe a half or quarter of a percent of blur. Especially the white text. Was it scaled at all, after exporting it? The key to avoiding blurriness in raster images, is never scale them. Never-Ever.

I've heard some people say you can scale them down without much problem. But I still see some pixelation with scaling down.

Or, has it been saved more than once or had a format conversion (which essentially saves it again)? I don't know how it actually happens, but I've seen saving a raster file more than once can degrade it.

Partly it's just the size of it that makes the text seem a little blurry. If I save the same file with white text on red, it looks slightly blurry in the small version, but the larger version looks sharp. See attachments

Edit
I don't see that effect in Windows Photo Viewer. But I have seen it before, in other cases, so I know what you're talking about. I don't know what causes it.

There are special techniques for making sure text is not blurred when exporting to relatively small size bitmaps, and that is what you are encountering. One solution is to create a pixel grid and follow it when designing the text parts of your image, create at even multiples larger i.e. 2x 4x
The Windows Photo viewer has a smoothing algorithm that is not optional. I use Faststone which has a checkbox that allows you to see the image with and without anti-aliasing, or use the GIMP
edit
also I think you are being too hard on yourself in comparison