move tool and blurring

[silent skies]

Hi all, new user, first time poster. I've been toying around w/ paint.net for only about a month, so for all intents and purposes I'm pretty much a complete newbie with the program. I'm having an issue which probably has a very obvious solution I don't know about yet, but I don't know about it yet

I've been using Paint.net to make some pseudo-charcoal sketches of chess pieces, which I want to use in creating a map for a 2D-game.

I'm happy enough with the results of the sketching for my purposes, but the problem comes with repositioning said pieces, especially when I try to rotate them. They automatically blur over... I suppose this is the effect of the 'smooth' property for the move tool. (The 'pixelate' function is even worse, I tried)

Pictures speak more than words:

This is the knight I sketched up and recolored.

There is slight, but still quite noticeable, blurring going on when the piece is repositioned (as on the right, when rotated). The problem becomes more and more obvious once I start throwing in the other elements of the map. For example, the repositioned knight, which I want in the foreground, is blurrier than the background!

I'm sure this is a basic enough problem, but I didn't find anything relevant w/ the search function so I thought I'd ask. Does anybody know of any way to work around this issue? Plugins that might help? I've tried the Photo-> Sharpen Image function but with only limited success...

Thanks for any insights.

[Sarkut]

The best work-around is to work on an oversize canvas,

then resize down once you have things looking the way you want them to.

[csm725]

Try dpy's AA Assistant: [link]

[silent skies]

The best work-around is to work on an oversize canvas,

then resize down once you have things looking the way you want them to.

Okay, that's working pretty well, since I drew the majority of the pieces way too large to begin with.

I drew the pawn to be exactly the size I wanted it, though, and it's suffering from this rotate issue. Aside from just scrapping it and starting over, any other ideas?

Try dpy's AA Assistant

Okay, I gave that a shot. It's a neat plugin, and I'll have uses for it in the future, but it's not working out here. It does wonders for the edges of the object, but the remaining issue is that the actual object itself remains blurred.

[Sarkut]

This may, (or might not), help with the pawn:

Before rotating the pawn, resize it up by two or factors of two. (2, 4, 8, 16, ...)

(This is in terms of width and height dimension, not area.)

Then rotate and resize down.

Edited July 7, 2010 by Sarkut

[APShredder]

Just a little FYI, you image is always going to blur when rotated unless the angle you rotate by is a multiple of 90. (You can use Rotate/Zoom to set an exact rotation angle.)

[Rick Brewster]

(You can use Rotate/Zoom to set an exact rotation angle.)

Or you can hold down the shift key and watch the status bar.

[silent skies]

This may, (or might not), help with the pawn:

Before rotating the pawn, resize it up by two or factors of two. (2, 4, 8, 16, ...)

(This is in terms of width and height dimension, not area.)

Then rotate and resize down.

Alright! Seems to have some decent results.

I had actually tried it earlier but it didn't work, but... I've found that one needs to select 'nearest neighbor' for the resampling, then the results are far better than w/ the other 3 options. The resize doesn't look blurry, but it screws the edges up a bit... but then I applied the AA assistant to fix that little problem and it looked pretty good, very close to the original.

Thanks for the help!