Tiny images are blurring when rotated

[ljarbeau23]

I have been using PSP for several years (back to when it was JASC PSP)
Using PSP 18 currently


Can someone help me understand why when I rotate a layer, the image becomes blurry? Sure I can sharpen it but it doesn't have the same feel after that.

Am I missing a setting?

Working with photo mock-ups for stickers/decals/shirts/nails etc

Thanks
Laura

[JoeB]

That is happening because images on your monitor are displayed as pixels, small square dots which are represented in your displayed image as square blocks of pixels (e.g., 4x4, 8x8). If you rotate the image by anything other than 90 degree increments then the image editor still has to work with squares that are horizontally and vertically oriented. So it must interpolate the rotated area to reproduce horizontally and vertically oriented squares and does do by creating kind of halftones to fill in the areas of the needed square using its best efforts to reproduce the data from the edges of the rotated block of pixel data. So you will always get blurring - which can be more or less apparent depending on the pixel size of the image and/or amount of rotation but is always there - with any rotation other than in 90 degree increments.

[ljarbeau23]

Fair enough, thank you for the response

[migf1]

For minimum distortions, try rotating to the final angle just once. In other words, avoid multiple intermediate steps.

Photoshop's Transform tool uses the Enter key to finalize transformations, and as I learned recently here in the forum (thanks Levi) Paintshop Pro's Pick tool finalizes transformations as soon as you switch to another tool, or to another layer or in general as soon as you do anything else but transforming.

I'm not 100% sure this always works, but in case it doesn't there is a little tedious workaround shown by HEC in this video: https://youtu.be/U-_ZRizxvVE
(she uses Resize as an example, but it should work the same with any transformation).