Anachronism in Imagery

he browser is such a handy tool in this day and age, and functionality continues to advance further and further making usability and user-friendliness not only the norm, but a mantra for developers.

This is mostly a good thing.

Unfortunately, from time to time, one man's gem becomes another man's garbage. The visual browsing experience is such an important part of our daily life, that I can very easily understand a developer's wish to improve that experience. However, something that is widely considered an improvement isn't always what we need. This is rarely more true than in the case of image filters. A very real bane of my netgoing existence lately is the advent of bilinear filtering on image scaling.

For 99.9% of the netgoing public, it seems, it's a good thing. It's a "smoothing" method that anti-aliases pixels on resize by taking neighboring pixels and altering the border between them to be a middle color, blending them with their neighbors.

If you do a lot of pixel art and are a part of the pixel art community, you are probably at the very least familiar with it, if not hating it just as much as I do. Let me give you an example of bilinear filtering:



The above is a comparative demonstration of an image that has been resized to exactly 200% (2x) using bilinear filtering, and nearest neighbor (non)filtering, respectively.

Now there are certainly arguments that can be made to laud bilinear filtering, when making something smaller, it's often an improvement, and stretching images leads to some very interesting geometry without filtering, but when your entire purpose on viewing an image is to see the details, the extreme anti-aliasing done by bilinear filtering destroys a pixel image, and creates the 'blur' effect that you can see above.

Unfortunately, most people don't see it this way - the general public sees usage of this filter as an improvement, since most people consider the resized pixel to be ugly. Firefox 3 - my weapon of choice - applies a filter (Developed, I believe, by Cairo Graphics) that does what we see above. Windows picture and Fax viewer also applies a bilinear filter to resized images. By and large it has become the industry standard, but is having large detrimental effects on pixel artists.

Thankfully, a man whose name I am not sure how to pronounce is becoming the savior to the pixel art community by setting the system back (in the eyes of the general public) and giving us the option to turn off the aforementioned Cairo filter. For those who care enough, keep an eye on this bug tracker on Bugzilla. Until it's resolved, I'm stuck in Firefox 2 which seems more and more broken the longer I use it.

Hopefully, it will be implemented in the next edition of Firefox, and I won't have to wait until 4 to finally upgrade, since the 'never' button doesn't actually seem to believe me when I say I don't want to upgrade.

I'm very eagerly waiting to install Firefox 3 again.