Lineart: from crisp to blurry

[qwatkins]

What you are experiencing is the effects of anti-aliasing on your image. Without getting into a lengthy discussion, think of your image like a grid full of pixels that is permanantly fixed in its orientation. A "computer" pixel by nature is square. When you shove a bunch of them together in straight rows and columns this is what defines your "grid". This grid has a fixed resolution as do all raster images and output devices (your monitor is 72dpi). Your image is aliased on the black parts around the eyes and such which gives you nice seperation of shapes and colors (i.e. no intermediate shades inserted). So, your "grid" is filled out with colors and shades that are nice and clean, when you attempt to rotate your image in essence you are trying to take the color "pattern" of your image, change its orientation, and then re insert it back into the fixed orientation grid yet still maintain the integrity of your "pattern". In other words, the grid that the colors and shades go into is fixed, and any rotation of the colors that is not an exact 90 degree rotation will never line up with the grid. To compensate, photoshop employs anti-aliasing to overcome the abberations that would show up in a non 90 degree rotation, because anti-aliasing is based upon (to put it in laymans terms) a mathematical representation of your total image size, or, within the boundaries of your image the anti-aliasing algorithms can define any shape or pattern to an infinite (think of the Dewey Decimal System at the Library) "refinement" level which means that it is not limited by the fixed resolution of the grid in its calculation. It is, however, limited in the sense that the results it comes up with have to go back into the fixed grid. So, for example, a black pixel that gets rotated 45 degrees partially spills over into adjacent pixels and so what anti-aliasing does, essentially, is say Oh, that 100% black pixel spilled into the adjacent pixel and would be covering about 40% of the area of that pixel, AND since I can only give one value to a pixel at a time I am going to fill that pixel with 40% gray. The net result is "fuzzy"

[halo]

preferences>general>interpolation....set it to nearest neighbour

stops any antialiasing and resampling...remember to turn it back when you want to go back to normal (a BIG post it note on the machine helps me...)

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