Graphic Design: How to Make Your Images Clean and Crisp

In the graphic design world, clean images are king. Blurry and grainy images look unprofessional and are unappealing to the consumer’s eye. Even the best graphic design can be a complete flop if it has poor resolution. Here are a few quick tips savvy graphic designers should take advantage of when producing crisp, sharp graphic designs.

Choose the Right File Format

The first mistake graphic designers make is saving an image in the wrong file format. File format greatly impacts the quality and characteristics of a graphic design. There are many file formats, but the most popular kinds are JPG, PNG, GIF, and SVG. Each type has its positives and negatives.

Out of those four file types, only SVG is a vector. The rest are rasters. Vector images have the advantage of being scalable without sacrificing any quality. In contrast, raster images are more common because they are produced by cameras or scanners and are composed of pixels. Raster images will lose quality when they get scaled up too much.

Clean the Image Up in the Edit Bay

Any graphic design expert worth their salt should learn a few quick tricks in Photoshop or a photo editor of their choice that will help increase the resolution quality and sharpness of a photo. Sometimes it is necessary to spend time fiddling with the settings and sizes to find a better fit for the image that won’t stretch it out.

Popular photo editors like Photoshop grant you the ability to put special layers over your image and then give those layers image sharpening masks that increase the crispness.

Get Better Rendering Software

Of course, graphic designers aren’t restricted to two-dimensional images. Many graphic designers now work in three dimensions as well. However, the problem is that three-dimensional graphic designs tend to take much longer to render, and they can end up rendering poorly. If this is the case and changing the settings still doesn’t help, it might be time to consider better rendering software.

On the other hand, if the rendering itself isn’t an issue, you might want to try some less intensive programs. There are plenty of accessible options, like the Sketchup rendering plugin or other online programs that will render a design quite quickly and do not require a demanding set-up.

Of course, before following any of these tips, you should ensure that your graphic design uses assets of quality resolution. Many times, the issue with the graphic design comes from outside images or components that are of poor quality. Starting with the right assets helps guarantee a much cleaner-looking final product.