Image smoothing cannot be turned off

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Timur Born
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Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

In 319 and 320 image smoothing is permanently turned on, regardless of what is set in Preferences -> Page Display -> Rendering.

I also think that its strength should be toned down a little. While it does a good job at blurring away compression artifacts it also blurs away quite a lot of detail. Something between its current strength and the rather weak smoothing of Acrobat DC should be sufficient.

And of course it should be possible to turn off image smoothing entirely. ;)
Timur Born
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

Is there any registry key or text configuration file where I might be able to override the current behavior? I'd like to turn image smoothing off.
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Will - Tracker Supp »

Hi Timur,

Would Edit --> Preferences --> Page Display --> Rendering --> Image Smoothing do as you need?

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Timur Born
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

No, unfortunately that option does not work. This is what I reported here in the first place. But maybe only the GUI is bugged and I can change the corresponding value manually in the Registry or some config file until it is fixed?

I also wonder why Editor uses such strong smoothing, especially compared to Acrobat? It seems a bit over the top to me, even though it blurrs away JPG compression artifacts nicely.
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Willy Van Nuffel »

The best thing you can do, is post an example PDF.

So, everyone can clearly see that activating/deactivating the smooth option actually does not make any difference.

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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

It's so easily tested that I didn't think I had to post an example. :P

But here you go: Screenshot using Windows' Magnify function showing a B/W bitmap image PDF viewed in XChange Editor and Acrobat Reader. Both have been set to turn image smoothing off in Preferences, Editor does not comply to the setting.

Curious extra-information: Acrobat uses a half-transluscent hand mouse-cursor. Never noticed that (too small anyway).
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Timur Born
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

I checked the Registry, "b.SmoothImages" is set to 0 (zero). So it is not only a GUI bug, but the setting itself seems to be ignored by Editor (Viewer works).
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Will - Tracker Supp »

Sorry Timur, this slipped under the radar - Passing this along to the Devs..
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

Perfect, thanks! :)
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Patrick-Tracker Supp »

:)
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

Not fixed yet in 321. I'll wait for the next build then.
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hi Timur,

I've made a ticket:
#3854: Editor 321: Image smoothing option not respected.
So that this can be queued up in the list of tasks.

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Stefan
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

Great, thanks!
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

:)
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

Unfortunately this isn't fixed properly yet. Image smoothing can be turned off, but as a result the rendering of images is seriously broken. Here is a comparison:
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Will - Tracker Supp »

Hi Timur,

Thanks for that - This looks to be a stroke adjust issue, to myself and my colleagues. I've added this to the existing ticket (RT-146), but please note that this is a long-term fix, as it's quite complex.

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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

It's noteworthy that it doesn't happen with all images, but when it happens it always seems to compress the image to half its width to the left side and then just display noisy lines on the right half. I have full page size images where the whole right side is made up of those lines while the image is compressed to the left.

Overall image rendering still seems to be Editor's biggest weakness. I am running a 8 core / 16 thread behemoth, but still have to wait for image to be displayed in Editor. This becomes most apparent when quickly flipping pages in synchronous mode. Mind you, it still seems faster than Adobe Reader, even more so in asynchronous mode.
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Will - Tracker Supp »

Hi Timur,

The images that this affects can very greatly and to people such as myself (i.e. not a developer), it's not always clear what the difference really is. The Dev. Team are working to fix this, but it will unfortunately take time.

I'll pass the comments along and will see if there's any way that issues with the rendering engine can be further expidited, but I suspect that they are already seen as a very high priority and are likely being fixed as quickly as is possible.

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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

Turns out that the current bug with turning off image smoothing not only causes visual problems, but also leads to irregular crashes (mostly when zooming in on such an image).
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Will - Tracker Supp »

Hi Timur,

I'm not able to reproduce the crash with the files here. Is there a different file that you're seeing the crash with?

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Timur Born
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

I sent you two files via e-mail with a link to this thread. This is a single page with background images underneath the text printed from Adobe Reader DC to X-Change Standard. The resulting PDF files includes seriously broken background image areas that make my Editor crash reproducibly when I zoom in on that area while image smoothing is turned off (you can also see the broken image while smoothed images are rendered for the first time).

The same files also demonstrates a font embedding flaws of X-Change Standard: https://www.pdf-xchange.com/forum3 ... m.php?f=39
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Will - Tracker Supp »

Hi Timur,

Thanks for that - I've tested here and can reproduce the crash myself, so I created ticket RT-3975 to track the problem. Sincere apologies for that!
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

Fixed a rendering issue when image smoothing is disabled. (T# 3975)
Thanks for this fix. Curiously I had to disable "Smooth Line Art" at least once in order for "Smooth Images" to be disabled as well (the option was disabled, but image smoothing still happened). Once I did that images no longer are anti-aliased and no more display errors seem to happen.
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Patrick-Tracker Supp »

Hi Timur,

Thank you for reporting that. We will keep our eyes on it, though I suspect it is some cached settings.

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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

I noticed again that image smoothing was enabled in a file. In order to disable it I had to disable "Smooth Line Art" again.
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Will - Tracker Supp »

Hi Timur,

I can't reproduce that - Can you send a sample document? If I already have a sample that you see this with, let me know which and I'll try again.

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Timur Born
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

I don't think that this depends on the specific document. Last time it happened with a newly created (printed to PDF) document. Today I tried all three ways of recreating this, printed via X-Change, via Primo and using the internal PDF creation of the software used. None of these reproduced the issue.

It seems to happen rather sporadically. Next time it happens I will try to find the corresponding registry key to see if Editor doesn't save its setting correctly or maybe the key gets corrupted (wrong security).
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Will - Tracker Supp »

Hi Timur,

It's not so much about how the document was created, but the actual images themselves. It may be that they appear to be standard images, but are actually line art.

However, if it works with e.g. DocA.pdf once, then doesn't work with that same document without disabling 'Smooth Line Art' the next time, then that's unlikely to be the case.

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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

I think you misunderstood. The images are bitmap images and are affected by "Smooth Images". The problem is that sporadically these bitmap images are anti-aliased even when "Smooth Images" is disabled.

When this happens then switching "Smooth Images" on and off again does not do anything, just like before you fixed that in an earlier release. When this happens I have to disable "Smooth Line Art" once in order to make the "Smooth Images" option work again. After that I can enable "Smooth Line Art" again and the "Smooth Images" option will still work as intended and will also adhere to enabling/disabling it again.
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

I just had a case where anti-aliasing happened again, despite "Image Smoothing" being disabled. This file had never been opened with "Image Smoothing" enabled before (created only today). This time I only had to enabled/disabled "Image Smoothing" to fix it, no need to switch "Smooth Line Art".

Unfortunately I forgot to check the registry. Where is that key saved again?
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

Time to return to this thread. I did not specifically test image smoothing in document view lately, but image smoothing still is applied to images that are copied or saved out of XChange.

Adobe Reader does not smooth images that are copied out of it, even when smoothing is enabled via its rendering preferences. Likewise XChange should not smooth images that are copied/saved, but unfortunately it still does, regardless of preference settings.
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

My current workaround is to use PDF Tools for extracting unblurred images, but obviously this is not very convenient when you only need single images out of a large PDF file.
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Ivan - Tracker Software »

The reason why images are copied 'smoothed' because we copy 'transformed' image, not the original one.
For example, when an image is rotated by 45 degrees, copied one will be rotated too.

We will add a command to copy an image as is, as we have for editing.
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

Ah, I understand. In that case it might be enough to just use the same option that is used for save/edit. Until then I will use the EDIT function instead.
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

I hope it helps for the time being! :D
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by Timur Born »

Yes, it's much better than extracting all images via PDF Tools when only single images are needed. Thanks for pointing me to said option.
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Re: Image smoothing cannot be turned off

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

:D
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