Nearest Neighbor scaling off by 1 pixel on the edges

Question

I'm a pixel artist who uses Photoshop to create high resolution versions of my pixel art (among other things). To increase the resolution, I typically transform>scale my layers using the nearest neighbor.

I recently noticed that if you scale everything 400% (where 1 pixel becomes 16 pixels in a 4x4 grid), it breaks a little bit on the edges of the image. It appears as though the top and left edges (user's left) produce an edge that is only 3 pixels wide. Meanwhile, the bottom and right edges produce an edge that's 5 pixels wide.

That small amount isn't breaking any of my printed artwork, but I've begun working on a digital project that's going to be scaled down 50% after this. The idea is that the finished product will be scaled up 200% from what I originally drew.

When I do this, the odd rows of pixels are creating an anti-alias effect that breaks the pixel art effect.

I'm going in and manually fixing the rows manually now, but this seemed worth reporting.

(I know my workflow of scaling up to scale down sounds insane, but I draw some pretty insane pixel art and I need to scale like this to achieve a certain effect in my project)

I am assuming this is a bug or some other problem. I'm somewhat new to Photoshop, so this may be a feature I can't wrap my head around. If there's a better way to scale my art up without using nearest neighbor (or settings I need to change in nearest neighbor), please let me know.

JJMack · Answer

We would need to see the originals image before any resizing is done. Sizing with Nearest Neighbor will destroy any anti aliasing that original image may have had in the first place. The discrepancy in stroke line thickness may be the results of the interpolation method. How did you create the stroke line the begin with. Many Photoshop tools do some anti aliasing. You also fail to state when you scale down 50% if you used Nearest Neighbor. You know Nearest Neighbor will destroy anti aliasing it will not be creating an anti-alias effect. You need to create your art without any anti aliasing if you are going to be scaling the images down and up in size using Nearest Neighbor. Interpolating an image loosed some image quality. Scaling down you need to discard some details, Scaling up you need to invent detail you do not have.

Using Nearest Neighbor is for hard edge image to begin with not antialiased edges. Here is a ellipse stroked with a 4px hard round brush note the edges are not hard.

Here is the same ellipse stroked with a 4px pencil note no anti aliasing

The image will still change in quality downsizing and upsizing. Here I down size 50% upsize 200% and downsized 50% and Upsized 200% so the imags is the sam size it begain. It easy to see the difference in quality.

Use AI create vector art if you want to scale your art.

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