Curing the Jaggies with Colors>Adjust>Highlight, Midtone and Shadow

This method works well with enlarged black and white graphics. When you enlarge a graphic, the edges become very pixelated (or get the “jaggies”). This is how to cure the jaggies from an enlarged image.

Save the following “remote” graphic (downloaded from Qvicker’s wonderful site).

1. Open the “shape.gif” image.
2. Up the colors to 16 million (Colors>Increase Color Depth).
3. Enlarge the image by 200% (Image>Resize).
4. Apply a Gaussian Blur of 4.
5. Apply Colors>Adjust>Highlight, Midtone and Shadow set to Shadow -100; Midtone -100, Highlight 100.
6. Repeat step 5 above one more time.

This method may need some adjustment of the Gaussian blur depending on jagged your edges are. The point is to blur the edges until they are very smooth. You may also only need to apply the color adjustment once.

Curing the Jaggies with Curves

Before

After

How often have you found a really nice piece of clip art that suffered from the “jaggies” or where the lines were too thin for your purposes. Well, PSP 6 has given us a great new feature for “curing the jaggies”. To get started, download the “before” picture above.

1. Open the “jag_before.gif” graphic. Up the colors to 16 million (Colors>Increase Color Depth).
2. Apply a gaussian blur (Image>Blur>Gaussian Blur) to your image. The larger the blur application, the thicker the lines will ge. I applied a Gaussian blur of .90 to this image.
3. Right click on the layer in the layers palette and choose New Adjustment Layer>Curves. Adjust the curve downward until you see the lines sharpen. The following shows the settings I used for the curve and the results of the curve adjustment:
4. Ok, that’s a lot better, but it still looks slightly blurred. To fix this, merge all layers (Layers>Merge>Flatten). Then apply the Sharpen filter (Image>Sharpen) as needed. I applied Image>Sharpen>Sharpen More once to adjust this graphic.

Thats all there is to cleaning up the jaggies. Obviously each graphic will require a different application of the Gaussian Blur and Curve Adjustment.