Hi everyone,

I created this cute little guy and I am having problems with clarity when I export him to a .png. I hope I don't bore you but below I have included the steps that might help in solving my little problem.

I drew a character and put a blue circle with a stroke(with 0.2 blur) and no fill. I positioned the circle below the character and copied a version of it and set it aside for later. I grouped the character and the first circle together. The duplicate circle I brought it to the top, aligned it with the other circle and grouped them together.

I made another duplicate of the last circle, made it a little larger, added a fill and stroke to white. I used this circle as the basis for my mask, because I drew the character complete.

In the image I have circled the section that is pixelated, no he doesn't have a halo. I thought by adding a blur to the blue stroke it might help reduce the pixelation, hmm nope!

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Actually I've noticed this too, which version of Inkscape are you using?

I've not tested this theory at all, but I think that the blur effect is more pixelated in the development (0.46) build than tha stable release (0.45) - again, I've not checked so just a thought!

I was in quite a rush when I noticed this, so I just smoothed it out in the GIMP (gimp.org) using the blur tool.

Anyone have a real answer?

Thanks for replying.

I am running 09.01.08 dev vers for Mac Osx Leopard. Unfortunately I never used the mask tool in previous builds, so I am unsure if it is a problem with this version.

I tried the blur effect on the stroke to try and reduce the pixelation, but I haven't tried the clean up method in Gimp. Please let there be another solution because I would prefer not to blur my image if possible.

The clean up method maybe a good last resort solution, but I would prefer to use Inkscape and not the Gimp.

So fellow Inkscapers I need your help!

you could try exporting it larger than you want and resizing in the gimp or whatever.
Q tho, is it jagged in the viewport when your editing it?
If not then you could set the zoom 1:1 and do a screen capture...
not ideal I know, but it'd get you the image you need.

I enlarged the image in Inkscape and exported the .svg to a .png. I resized the image in Gimp like you suggested and it worked. Whilst this is a quick fix it would be nice to see this little problem ironed out.

However I did encounter one slight problem, the colours of images were effected. It made the colours darker and it lost the look and feel I was after.

Can I calibrate the colours of Gimp to match up with Inkscape, if so how?

Wow! I think my fiancée would be impressed to see someone more anal about image quality than I am I say this only because I wouldn't have faulted it because whilst there is visible stepping, at least some anti-aliasing has been applied.

If it wasn't for the fact that it has been suggested that the stepping doesn't appear so obvious in the Inkscape window I would have suggested there was no real problem. Stepping will be more or less obvious in different situations which can be observed in your example image.

Has a bug been reported for this? It seems it's probably a simple difference in anti-aliasing threshold being used between the PNG export and the Inkscape window.

Does it have to do with gradient banding? I think I saw a bug on that, gradients in Inkscape are always banded into a 1000 or so strips if I remember correctly.

Gradient banding? If that's the issue where pixelation occurs between two colour stops when the stops are positioned very closely, then I would suspect that's a seperate issue.

Id say its more pronounced when stops are far apart. Heres the bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/180693

@microugly
I have been accused of being anal once or twice or a perfectionist. Hmm! I guess it's not a bad thing, especially for the Inkscape project.

I had another look at my image because you guys were talking about gradient banding, the green circle with the stroke is gradient free. I forgot to mention in my original post I had to apply a clipping path. Would applying a clipping path and or a mask cause pixelation?

Just thought I would add another spanner.