"Anti-aliasing" a still image

My fledgling little shareware empire has a nice little logo and I think I got a pretty slick design to it, but the only thing I'm having trouble with it smoothing out those jagged, stairsteps on the angled lines and curves.

The logo is two-tone, and I tried manually taking each jagged little pixel and making a half and half mixture of the background and foreground color to try to blend it, but it looked pretty lame.

The only two image editing programs I use are MSPaint and PhotoDeluxe Home 4.0. I've found that PhotoDeluxe has a whole lot of features for a program that came bundled with my scanner, but using the soften feature just seems to make the image look blurry and doesn't seem to give me what I'm envisioning.

In the past I've briefly toyed with font smoothing programs with very nice results, but is there something along the same lines for a bmp image?

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

http://209.120.143.185/attachment.php?s=&postid=1038848

The best looking way would probably open it up in a decent graphics program and repaint it from scratch (meaning: take the current image as a background and draw lines over it). Most graphics programs can draw lines using anti-alias... vector graphics make it even easier, since you can move and bend the lines easily afterwards...

There are more techniques, although most I've tried will result in a blurry looking image...

Since none of you slugs were able to give me any help, here's a little tutorial:

I set about making some text in paint using arial with a font size of 144 (figuring the larger the original, the better and selecting 144 for a font size since 72 is the last listed font size, doubling it is probably cleaner).

It's crucial to make sure you create your text in 24-bit color mode!!! It's amazing the difference between 256 color and 24-bit color when working with Windows fonts!!! Just check out the difference by using paint and the text tool and zooming in and looking at the difference between jaggedy 256 and lovely smooth 24-bit.

I used the text tool in paint to make the logo and saved it at 24-bit color (just to have the original with ALL the color data).

I then saved the file again as a 256 color bmp. This is crucial, start with 24-bit and your fonts are smooth as silk, save it at 24-bit just to have a copy of the original if you want to tweak it in the future, but then save again into 256 color and you won't really see any noticable deterioration.

We now have a 256 color bmp which will translate much, much better into a gif than the original 24-bit bmp. I used PhotoDeluxe at this point because it has some options available when you save gifs, however I ended up just going with the defaults. I took that 256 color bmp and saved it as a gif with exact pallet and interlace selected and now, the brand new logo:

http://209.120.143.185/attachment.php?s=&postid=1052120


smooth, baby

Uh, you could always just use a vector-capable image editor like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop, then dither it down to 256 when saving to gif.

It's very nice of you to call us all 'slugs' because we weren't able to fix your mistakes for you. You didn't have the foresight to render your logo at high-res in true-color, and that's your problem - in the future you'll know to create all logos at as high of a resolution as possible.

When you have an image that is small, there is no way to 'add' detail, either by resampling up, or 'anti-aliasing' - anti-aliasing implies shrinking an image, but preserving detail by merging pixels. You can't anti-alias an image without calculating multiple pixels for each destination pixel, it's by definition, impossible. There are methods like edge-smoothing, but those require knowledge of the source coordinates, and calculating multiple pixels for each edge pixel. Any other method is NOT anti-aliasing.

Calm down, dude! You couldn't hear the playfulness in the tone of my post?

I figured I'd been a fixture here long enough for me to call the forum body "slugs" without any need for the :p

Hey, there's no one here more appreciative of the help they've received than I am. Witness the help about from my program:

http://209.120.143.185/attachment.php?s=&postid=1054872


Now that's not the help | about of an inappreciative jerk, is it?

anyone know of small downloadable software that will find jagged edges and fix them?? I have a picture, but the persons hair looks really dodgy...

Thanks, :)

Never seen you around here before, and it didn't seem 'playful' to me. :P Anyway, whatever. Wasn't a big deal either way.

Tim_L_012: Forget about it, such software, even if it existed, would be useless. What you would be better off doing is opening an image editor like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop, and using Smudge or Soften to manually soften the edges of the hair (both apps have smudge/soften brushes).

I guess after reading it over, there really wasn't a discernable 'playful tone' to it unless you heard the voice in my head as I typed.

Note to self: "No matter how much you hear your own voice speaking as you type up your posts, never assume that it translates without using the emoticons."

Another note to self: "Try to avoid referring to any of my own posts as having been written in a 'playful tone'. It just sounds way too gay."