Masks appear blurry when they should not

[malcolm.murdoch]

Hi,

I have masked some solids. The masks to do not have any feather applied but appear with blurry edges both in AE and when exported. I want the edges to be sharp. Please help 🙂

[Martin_Ritter]

Unfortunately posting full resolution screenshots is not working anymore - so I can hardly see anything of your settings. Can you upload the image somewhere else?

Common issues would be:

- zoom level of preview is not 100% and you see an interpolated version of your compositon

- motion blur

- alaising: the mask, the object with the mask, its size, its anchor point, its rotation and any geometric effect is not at full integers, therefore the edge is not fitting in with the pixel grid and AE compensates with with anti-alaising

When working with masks and you need highest precision, better use a shape layer as matte layer. You'll have all transform proberties and size expressed in numbers instead of "path" when using standard objects.

*Martin

[David Arbor]

Hey Martin, while it's inconvenient, there is actually a way to see the full resolution screenshot. If you right-click on the image and choose "open image in new tab" or do something to copy the URL (as opposed to just clicking on it on this page) you'll get: https://community.adobe.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/17070i89533BEF65C94B62/image-size/large?v=1...

If you then delete "image-size/large?v=1.0&px=999" you'll see the full res screenshot. It doesn't give any more help here, but I'm thinking what Rick said is the culprit. 

[Martin_Ritter]

Wow! I already tried to alter the 999px value, but I never throught the original resolution is stored anyway. So it's a whole month and forum devs can't do a little url rewrite...head -> table.

Thank you for the tipp!

*Martin

[Rick Gerard]

What is the layer scale? When you are having problems with a layer the best way to show us what is going on is to select the layer and press the U key twice. If you scale up a layer with a mask the edge will go soft because the mask is applied first then the layer is scaled up. You can't turn on CR for masks.