Making Images Smaller and Losing Quality

[KJ7272]

I have noticed that when I export a high image from Illustrator and resize it in Photoshop quality gets lost more than expected. I am not changing the resolution in Photoshop. Only resizing. Example: Ai file at 600x300 at 300 ppi exports as a png around 2500 but I need it at 600x300 at 300 ppi, so I open it in Photoshop at 300 ppi resize and save, but when I view or upload the crispness is gone. If I size it to 1200x600 the crispness still dissappears, not as much still starts to create blurriness/pixelation.

It seems to affect text and logos the most and unsure if there is a way to avoid this. I even noticed it with a smart object on the correct sized artboard in Photoshop after saving as a PNG.

[Bojan Živković]

What is magnification (zoom) level when previewing exported images? Original after exporting from Illustrtaor looks good at 100% zoom? 

If you pass creation through Libraries or using Copy/Paste Smart Object there should not be any problem. Can you post some screenshots to illustrate issue?

[Mylenium]

Think about it logically: You are going from 2500 pixels to 600 pixels. That's 25% of the original size and you're throwing away three out of four pixels. Of course the quality will be worse. Your workflow simply doesn't make much sense. Why not simply export those 600 x 300 directly based on AI's cripser native rasterization? You may want to read the online help on how to correctly set artboards and document DPI to that effect.

Mylenium

[melissapiccone]

What Mylenium said... you are making very small images, they will look pixelated.

[D Fosse · Accepted solution]

I think this is probably the retina scaling of raster images, which is done by all the OS-native image viewers and browsers. "After saving as PNG" probably means viewing in e.g. Preview, Safari etc, where you will see a 2:1 scaled image.

If that's compared with a vector original viewed in Illustrator and rendered at full screen resolution, I can imagine the contrast is striking.

For raster images, retina/4K is a mixed blessing! Every consumer-oriented image viewer and web browser will scale images up so that one image pixel is represented by four screen pixels. It turns the high resolution screen into a standard HD screen. As such you don't actually "lose" anything - but it doesn't compare well with material that isn't scaled, and it negates the native high resolution of the screen.

[Earth Oliver]

Changing the size of an image is essentially changing the resolution. You're going from a "resolution" of 2500px to 600px, which is 4x smaller.