Mould tool giving jaggy edges on bitmap fills

[instinctive.de]

Hi!

Is it just me, or is the quality of the Mould Tool not too astounding as far as bitmap fills are concerned?

I tried to do a slight perspective correction on a product photo with a perspective Mould, and the result is a bit sub-par (see attachment - the jaggies along the left and right inner edges). View quality set to highest...

Is there anything I can do about this maybe?

Thanks

[steve.ledger]

There's always a trade off whenever you push a matrix of pixels around to suit your fancy.

Could you attach your original jpg because my tests don't show quite so much jagginess when correcting perspective.

[Egg Bramhill]

Alexander, I'd also believe the final outcome is very dependant on the quality of the original photograph. If your using a fairly low quality jpg to start with the resultant moulds going to be crap.

[sgiff]

Actually there is nothing you can do about this until Xara fixes the problem which has been around as long as bitmaps have been used with the mold tool. This should not happen as there are many other apps that do realtime perspectives on bitmaps and don't look this bad. This should be an easy fix for Xara, doubt it will happen.

[steve.ledger]

Well actually my results are not as bad as Alexander's which is why I'd like him to attach the original.

This should be an easy fix for Xara, doubt it will happen.

I agree that Xtreme doesn't have the bitmap bending power of dedicated raster editors, but then Xtreme is not a dedicated raster editor either, which is why they include Magix Xtreme Photo Designer with it's better skew tool.

Have you tried it?

[handrawn]

Relying totally on memory I seem to recall the the mould tool does not work in high quality [anti aliased?] mode, even if xtreme is set at that view

There was a 'fix' which involved something along the lines of using a higher size/resolution image for the mould, exporting and re-impoting as bitmap and reducing in size... ?

Perhaps this sounds familiar to another member?

[tonylondon]

Alexander, I'd also believe the final outcome is very dependant on the quality of the original photograph. If your using a fairly low quality jpg to start with the resultant moulds going to be crap.

If you create a rectangle with a border in Xara and convert to high quality bitmap and put the perspective mould onto this you still get the same jaggies. The jaggies get less as you zoom in on the result. This suggests to me that it is simply resulting from a lack of anti-aliasing rather than anything to do with photo quality.

[instinctive.de]

Thanks for all your replies!

Yes, it does indeed look like there's no anti-aliasing / oversampling taking place at all, which means that the source image quality can't really be the issue. The same source JPEG will produce decent results in dedicated bitmap editors indeed.

I've never even tried this Xtreme Photo Designer thing though - will do it now!

For sledger's pleasure, though, here's the original file

(And please, I DID NOT TAKE THIS PHOTO!!! )

[haakoo]

To get rid of the jaggies.
create a bitmapcopy>300dpi
It should be fine now.

Hans

[instinctive.de]

Wow haakoo, nice trick! That works like a charme - "manual oversampling" :-) Now Xara just needs to do that automatically and the problem is fixed Wonder why they don't do that...

The Mould tool in general seems to be a bit like a "relic from stone age"... It doesn't even do a live preview