Images Exporting Blurry or Not Sharp from Illustrator

Forum|Forum|8 months ago
July 15, 2025
3 replies
428 views

why are my images not exporting clearly?

Import and export

Ton Frederiks

Community Expert

@hendy_5450 What is is the maximum zoom percentage you can get in your Illustrator document? 64000% or 6400%?

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @hendy_5450,

Thanks for sharing the image and explaining the issue.

When exported images appear blurry or not as sharp as expected, it's usually due to the resolution or export settings. Could you let me know which export format you are using (like PNG, JPG, or PDF) and what resolution you have set? Also, please confirm if you are exporting for screen or print.

For clear results, it's best to set the resolution to at least 300 ppi for print, or 150 ppi or higher for web or screen use. Also, check that 'Anti-aliasing' is set to 'Art Optimized' in the export options to help keep the edges crisp.

If possible, please share a quick screen recording or a few screenshots showing your export settings along with a comparison of how it looks in Illustrator versus the final exported file. This will help me understand exactly what's happening and guide you better.

Looking forward to your update.

Abhishek

H

hendy_5450Author

Inspiring

here is a screenshot of my exporting page.

Brad @ Roaring Mouse

Community Expert

First off.... If you want quality, you shouldn't be starting with using the Smallest File Size preset, even if you manually select Maximum Image Quality. Use High Quality or Press Quality (or whatever your printer suggests if you are sending this to print commercially)

But despite that, I think your issue is caused by the fact that you have set Color Images to downsample to 300 ppi for images above 300 ppi. (Normally, this would be set at above 450 ppi). So, what's happening is if your images are even a slight bit higher than 300ppi, they are being reprocessed and resampled unnecessarily creating blurry pixels.

Reset the Above setting to 450ppi and try again. In fact, considering the relative small size of your final images, you could probably stand to change the Above setting to 600ppi, or, even turn off downsampling altogether.

Doug A Roberts

Community Expert

Can you explain what we're looking at here?

What result are you expecting and what do you think has gone wrong?

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