Author Topic: Apply nearest-neighbor algorithm for low resolution theme graphics  (Read 1748 times)

CyberAP

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With MusicBee supporting interface scaling I think it's important for old\not updated themes to play nicely on scaling values higher than 100%. Having nearest-neighbor algorithm applied to styles' graphics would help this a lot. I've made a very simple comparison of nearest-neighbor and bicubic algorithms (MusicBee right now has the one that's on the right):



The biggest problem on high DPI is blurriness and the most basic algorithm gets rid of it completely. Hope this makes some sense.
Last Edit: June 01, 2017, 02:30:17 AM by CyberAP

hiccup

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Some might argue that the sides of the triangle look better under 'Bicubic'.
And I am curious what would happen to a circle.

More importantly, for non-vector regular colour images, Nearest-neighbour usually turns out very ugly.

Steven

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there is a mechanism now for skinners to put in larger icons for high DPI screens

CyberAP

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Some might argue that the sides of the triangle look better under 'Bicubic'.
And I am curious what would happen to a circle.

More importantly, for non-vector regular colour images, Nearest-neighbour usually turns out very ugly.

Yes, some people might prefer Bicubic mainly because they're used to it, since all browsers use it for scaling. Maybe an option would help here, since some skins are not updated as often as we would like them to be. But I don't agree here that color bitmap images look bad with N-N scaling. You get a lot of smoothening and even lose some details because pixels overlap and it all becomes a mess, especially with images that consist of regular shapes. With N-N you perceive an image as it would be displayed on a lower resolution monitor, without any extra filters on it. I think it a matter of a fair representation here, not just a visual preference.

hiccup

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Yes, some people might prefer Bicubic mainly because they're used to it, since all browsers use it for scaling.

For me it's not because I'm used to it, but I mainly know the feature from Photoshopping. And for enlarging photograph-like images, nearest neighbour is really absolutely terrible.

But since this is about icons for use on high-dpi displays, this might be a whole different story.
I don't have an high-dpi display, so it would be only guessing for me what would look best.
Perhaps somebody with the hardware and the skills could try try this out and present some real-life examples.