Photoshop 'Pixelating' Web Images (v27x)

Question

Have Photoshop 27.10.0 on Windows 10 Pro, AMD RYZEN 5. Recently, resizing and exporting any types of raster images are coming out very “pixelated” (looking like old-school 80’s low-rez images!)

I tried turning back to v27.9.0, same thing. Searched online, found that I should make sure that under Preferences > General tab, that “Image Interpolation” should be set to “Bicubic Automatic” or “Bicubic Sharper” to fix that issue. Tried both settings - no luck. Tried changing to “Bicubic Smoother”, still the same, crappy results.

Is there some manual “reset” I need to do (like Command-line code, or going into some buried subfolder and deleting some reference file or something) to stop this from happening? It’s making my web images look horrible!

Sample

From 2024:

Now:

caring_Flutterb421 · Answer

I’d check the resizing/export process before assuming the preferences are corrupted. In Image > Image Size, make sure Resample is enabled and try Bicubic Sharper (reduction) or Automatic. Also make sure Nearest Neighbor isn’t being used, since that will intentionally create a pixelated result.

I’d also check Image > Mode and confirm the document is RGB Color, not Indexed Color or Bitmap.

As a quick diagnostic, export the same image as both JPEG and PNG and compare them at 100% zoom. If the PNG looks clean but the JPEG looks blocky, it’s likely an export/compression setting rather than Photoshop’s interpolation.

If the problem happens even when you’re not resizing, then I’d try resetting Photoshop’s preferences as a troubleshooting step. That would help determine whether this is a Photoshop settings issue or something specific to the source/export workflow.

If you can share the original pixel dimensions → resized dimensions → export format/settings, we can probably narrow down exactly where the pixelation is being introduced.

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