Why Does My Vector Art Pixelate on Zoom in Photoshop?

[Tijen34]

While the fundamental characteristic of vector artwork is that it can be enlarged to any size without any loss of sharpness or quality as vectors scale mathematically, I'm experiencing my vector drawings unexpectedly pixelating when magnified within Photoshop. Do you have any suggestions on how to troubleshoot or potential causes of this problem? Any help is appreciated.

[Myra Ferguson]

Does you vector artwork include raster effects?

[D Fosse]

Vector data will always be rendered as pixels in Photoshop, at the base document resolution.

For most kinds of output it will also be permanently rasterized.

[Conrad_C]

It is not a problem. This happens because Photoshop is giving you a realistic preview of the fact that, unlike in a pure vector graphics app, in Photoshop the document has specific pixel dimensions, so everything it shows in the document must be limited to those pixel dimensions. 

For example, if a Photoshop document is 400 x 400 pixels, you draw a vector shape, and you zoom in, what you should see is what the vector shape looks like rasterized to 400 x 400 px. Low resolution. If Photoshop showed you a continuously rasterized (always sharp) vector image when you zoom in, it would be lying to you…because it would be showing you what it looks like rasterized to the display resolution, not to the document resolution.

When a vector graphic looks horribly chunky when its 400 x 400 px document is magnified to 800%, well, that’s the truth: Any 400 x 400 px document in any pixel editor looks chunky at 800%, and using vector graphics won’t change that. What if you drew it in a pure vector graphics editor like Illustrator, so it was sharp at any magnification, but you needed to export the final as a bitmap (e.g. PNG) at 400 x 400 px, guess what, the exported version will no longer be smooth at any magnification. Because it was converted to a bitmap format. Which is how the Photoshop document format works, although it can contain vectors the document is ultimately based on a pixel grid of fixed pixel dimensions.

What that all means is that the first thing you should always do in Photoshop is, in Image > Image Size, make sure the pixel dimensions are correct and not too low, that they match what the document should be when delivered. If that’s correctly set up, then what you will see is an accurate preview, at any magnification, of what that vector graphic looks like when it’s rasterized to those document pixel dimensions.

More proof that this is not a problem: I just tried this in competing photo editing apps that support vector shape layers, from two different other companies…and it works exactly the same way. Like Photoshop, they both maintain fully editable vector objects, but they always preview rasterized to the document pixel dimensions.

[Tijen34]

Thank you for your reply. But I recently used 7000 x 7000 px @ 300 ppi to avoid dealing with resolution issues. However, this caused crashing/freezing in every program I used it in, including Photoshop. What kind of solutions would you recommend?

[Conrad_C]

That is unusual. 7000 x 7000 px should not be a problem, it’s only 49 megapixels…many people are now editing photos from cameras that capture more megapixels than that, and many panoramas are wider than 7000 px. The number of pixels alone should not be causing crashes in any application on a good recent computer. What kind of computer are you using? (Include the year, amount of memory (not storage), and type of graphics hardware.)

[jane-e · Accepted solution]

While the fundamental characteristic of vector artwork is that it can be enlarged to any size without any loss of sharpness or quality as vectors scale mathematically, I'm experiencing my vector drawings unexpectedly pixelating when magnified within Photoshop. Do you have any suggestions on how to troubleshoot or potential causes of this problem? Any help is appreciated.

By @Tijen34

To keep vector drawings vector, keep them in a vector application such as Adobe Illustrator. 

If you bring them into Photoshop, put them in a Smart Object and view them at 100% Zoom. Everything pixelates in PS when zoomed in.

Jane

[Tijen34]

Great, thank you so much for taking the time to provide such a helpful and practical response. I really appreciate...