Nearest Neighbor in Photoshop Elements?

[Kastchey]

Dear Community, 

I was very excited when I found out about Elements because it seemed like exactly the piece of software I needed, but I'm hesitating to purchase after I noticed the newest versions do not offer any image interpolation options, not even in Expert mode.

Being able to switch between Bicubic and Nearest Neighbor is crucial in certain types of work. Afaik, early versions of PE (3, 4 etc) offered this option. Obviously Photoshop has it, but full Photoshop is overpowered for my needs and way too expensive.

Is nn gone for good from the contemporary versions of PE or is it still being considered as a potential addition in the future?

[Jeff Arola · Accepted solution]

The only place in photoshop elements, as far as i know, that you can change the image interpolation options is in the Image Size dialog (Image>Resize>Image Size) Don't recall any version of photoshop elements ever having the image interpolation options in Preferences like photoshop does.

If your interested in a pay for addon, themn elements+ can change the global Image Interppolation settings:

https://elementsplus.net/help/en/pref-presets.htm

[Kastchey]

Hi Jeff, 

Thanks so much for the helpful and prompt response! 

I have tried Elements+ and it is indeed a fantastic tool, but it appears unable to unlock nearest neighbor. The only image interpolation available through JS are some bicubic variants, which all produce antialiased output, so they are no good when pixel perfect effect is needed.

You may be right about PE never having nn before - I don't own any older version of PE, I just sourced some legacy manuals that seemed to refer to it.

Anyway, it does seem that nn is simply not there, not even hidden, which is a bit of a disappointment for me personally since everything else about the software is just perfect for my needs. But I do get that PE is both a budget version of PS and aimed at a casual user, so many functions deemed non-essential are simply not there.

Thank you again for the reply and the effort to help, I will leave my post as a feature request then in hope Adobe consider unlocking nearest neighbor in PE in the future. I do think there is some target audience who would benefit from it, given the popularity of pixel art among hobbyists and indie game creators.

[Jeff Arola]

If you need to resize a layer using Nearest Neighbor you could  create a new document from that layer, use Image>Resize>Image Size, then copy the layer back to your original document.

[Kastchey]

Thank you, yes, resizing works. Would be great if rotating worked with Nearest Neighbor too. One day, perhaps :]