I have been playing with creating pixel art images in PhotoPaint by zooming in and using the pixel grid along with a 1 pixel brush. It is working great but I would like to be able to scale up the pictures once they are done. But when I do this it anti-aliases evertything and everything goes blurry. Does anyone know how to maintain the integrity of the pixels while scaling?
Bit images are generally better when scaled down rather than up, so if there is a possibility that you may later want an image in a larger version you should always start by creating the larger version and reducing it, rather than the other way round.
But even scaling down bitmaps is likely to cause some degradation. Edges which no longer exactly coincide with a pixel boundary will be approximated. Fine detail will either become bolder or thinner and in some cases the results can look bad. This particularly happens if you put small print text in a bit image and then try to scale it.
There are two possible answers:
I think I would go the opposite way. I would start with an image, reduce size and resolution, convert it to a paletted image. Then to get a larger pixelated look, Resample up with anti-aliasing unchecked. Example:
The original:
The pixelated version:
Patti