Results tagged “smoothing” from Final Cut Studio, Avid, Adobe, and Video Streaming

Application: Fonts and Vector Images
Antialiasing also has something to do with why fonts and vector images always look good, even if they're really big or really small.  Actually, fonts are vector images, so that's a bit of a strange thing to say - but at any rate, vector images are simply a set of mathematical equations that describe the curves that make up a shape.  So, like the real world, the computer can "look at" these images with infinite precision.  Therefore, it knows enough about the shapes to behave like our eyes do, and approximate the way we would see the fonts and such if they didn't have to be on a quilt of pixels.

Application: Photoshop
One place where this knowledge might help you think is in Photoshop, especially if you're designing for compositing software or DVD production.  Say you're doing a glass bug for your video: did you notice the anti-alias checkbox when you used the Magic Wand tool?  That checkbox means that the computer will actually select fractions of pixels on the edge of the selection it shows - "blurring" the selection boundary in the same way that it did to the red channel in the example reproduced below.

We know antialiasing best as "smoothing" the jagged edges that any digital editor will eventually happen across.  Why do we need to antialias, and where do aliasing artifacts come from in the first place?  The answer is a little mathy, but we'll bring it down to size.