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Thread: PNG image with no background: outline is not smooth and they are ugly
Member
Join Date Sep 2011 Location NJ, USA Posts 66
PNG image with no background: outline is not smooth and they are ugly
Just like the title says. You guys know how a png image sometimes has a checkerboard background instead of a dull white square background?
Those png’s are cool to import into Xara and have a smooth outline.
My question is. why is it when i EXPORT a png with the checkerboard background the outline looks like an 8 bit nintendo outline when placed on a website?
These type of pngs with the checkerboard background are meant to be viewed as having no background. which actually works for me but the outline looks horrible.
what do i need to do to fix that outline issue? Is there some sort of setting that i have to tweak?
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08 September 2013, 03:40 AM #2
Member
Join Date Apr 2007 Posts 22,877
Re: PNG image with no background: outline is not smooth and they are ugly
Post your file, we can’t tell what you are seeing without it.
| XaReg2 Download
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08 September 2013, 01:34 PM #3
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Join Date Aug 2000 Location Placitas, New Mexico, USA Posts 41,315
Conrad Allan
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Conrad Allan
4 Jan 2021 • 4 min read
Bit depth refers to the number of variations of a single colour (Red/Green/Blue) which can exist in your image. I don’t want to get too technical in this article as you’ll find plenty of information online about it. Instead, I want to show you the benefits of working in 16bit.
If you have a little understanding of bit depth you might think that, since a jpg file is only 8 bit, there’s no benefit to working in 16 bit if you’re saving your image as a jpg. This would be an incorrect assumption!
Let’s first outline 2 facts:
8 Bit colour has 256 shades of Red, Green and Blue for a total of 16,777,216 colours (256x256x256)
16 bit colour has a whopping 65,536 per channel! That means a total of… a lot. (~280 trillion colours).
If you’re interested in understanding more about the above, check out the Wikipedia page on colour depth.
But. 16,777,216 Colours is a lot!
Yes, while that is true, the problem is that often in our art, we are only using a small sub-set of colours and often with a gradient, this is where you will notice the limitations the most.
As you can see in the image below, the gradient in the sky becomes heavily degraded when we use 8bit.
So how do we fix this?
Ideally, we could work with 16bit source files all the time. However, JPG files don’t support 16bit and most 16bit formats are big. However, you can gain most of the benefits of working in 16bit simply by converting your Photoshop documents to 16bit at the very beginning of your work!
Simply head to Image -> Mode -> 16bit, to convert your Photoshop document to a 16 bit file.
By doing this this at the start of your work, any edits you make to images in this document will have the benefit of 16bit colour. It doesn’t replace the benefits of using a 16bit source file, but it’s a good step!
