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Inspiring
July 15, 2025
Question

Images Exporting Blurry or Not Sharp from Illustrator

  • July 15, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 428 views

why are my images not exporting clearly?

 

 

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3 replies

Ton Frederiks
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 16, 2025

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

Abhishek Rao
Community Manager
Community Manager
July 15, 2025

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

 

Inspiring
July 16, 2025

here is a screenshot of my exporting page.

 

 

Brad @ Roaring Mouse
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 17, 2025

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
Community Expert
July 15, 2025

Can you explain what we're looking at here?

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