Known Participant

Question

Pixel art scaling up moves layers

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
July 3, 2021
5 replies
3000 views

Hi there. I create low resolution pixel art, and I've noticed that when I scale upwards using nearest neighbor, all the layers misalign.

All the layers are linked to one of 5 separate files, they all have layer masks on them too.

I've set nearest neighbor in preferences, on each layer scale preference as well as in the image resize section.

The only thing that may be affecting them is that all the layers have layer masks on top of them, rasterizing each layer first *seems* like it may fix the issue. But I'd like to avoid that because I want to be able to edit the 5 different original files separately. Can anyone help figure out what is happening?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Jeff Arola

Community Expert

In addition it might not be a bad idea to reset the photoshop preferences by going to Photoshop>Preferences>General (mac) or Edit>Preferences>General (windows), click Reset Preferences On Quit and resart photoshop

Jeff Arola

Community Expert

You can report this over here and see what adobe says:

https://feedback.photoshop.com/

What version of photoshop and operating system are you using?

Do you have older versions of photoshop you can try?

J E L

Community Expert

@UltraEverything Crazy, right, but you always need a larger file! I'm not sure if you'll ever get that alignment right with the existing files and layer sizes you are trying to upscale without flattening the file first (even then the results may not be great depending on several factors with your original art and how high you are trying to go).

UltraEverythingAuthor

Known Participant

I need to retain the groupings and layers for this particular project. It's a shame because clearly there's an issue with the upscaling for Smart Objects on lower resolutions, but I guess not many people work with such low resolutions so perhaps it's not been noticed.

Nancy OShea

Community Expert

The rule of thumb is to flatten layers BEFORE you resize image. That said, I prefer NOT to resize rasters because it invariably introduces pixelation artifacts. For best results, start your project with the required canvas size so you don't need to resize later.

Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert

UltraEverythingAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks for the reply. The style is pixel art, so it's designed to be low resolution. However, it's only when having to scale it up for an export at a normal resolution, is when it becomes misaligned.

Nancy OShea

Community Expert

In other words, start with a canvas of normal output size and resolution.

File > New > See screenshot (adjust values as required).

Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert

UltraEverythingAuthor

Known Participant

Just tried to recreate this with vector masks and trying unlinking the masks from the layers and the same problemn is happening.

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