a Dr t Oi sWt sN U N D E R Australia and New Zealand
SOME PHOTOSHOP INSPIRATION DOES YOUR FLATTENED IMAGE LOOK DIFFERENT? By Andrew Haysom
Have you ever flattened your layered Photoshop image, or perhaps just created a Stamp Visible Layer, and the appearance of the image has changed somewhat? There are two reasons that I know of for this to happen and I will try and explain why, and to a degree what you can do to avoid the issues, in this article. The first reason has to do with the way that Photoshop renders the image you see on the screen. When you are viewing your image zoomed out smaller than 100% Photoshop is blending “image previews” in order to speed up the screen rendering. In most cases this will look identical to the “actual image”, but in some cases there will be a slight difference. What this means is that to get a true render of your image you should view it at 100% and tweak it to where you want it before flattening it. Often the differences will be very subtle, but occasionally can be very noticeable. See Figures 1-4 for a recent example I came across. Note the quite extreme differences on the doors and side of the car in the example, between the layered (unflattened) image at 63% and all the other examples, which are identical. Thanks so much to Penny de Jong for bringing the example to my attention and for allowing me to use it in this article. What this means is that only the image viewed at 100% can be taken as a reliable version of the true image. Get into the habit of checking your images at 100% before flattening them, or before creating Stamp Visible layers (which are the same as a flattened image). The second way that your image can potentially change when you flatten it is if you still have some areas of partial transparency in your image. When you flatten an image, transparent areas are filled with white. Any pixels that are partially transparent (set to an opacity less than 100%) without an opaque background behind them will change in appearance.
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