Getting Rid of the Jaggies in Line Art
You can use this little trick to smooth out those jaggies fairly quickly. This tutorial uses the free photo editor Paint.NET, but it works with most image-editing software. Adapt this technique to another image editor as long as the editor has a Gaussian blur filter and a curves or levels adjustment tool. These are fairly standard tools in most image editors. Save this sample image to your computer by right-clicking if you’d like to follow along with the tutorial.
Optional: Using Levels Instead of Curves
Look for a Levels tool if you’re working with an image editor that doesn’t have a Curves tool. You can manipulate the white, black, and mid-tone sliders as shown here to achieve a similar result. We want to increase the slope of this diagonal line so the degree of change between pure white and pure black is reduced. This will bring our image from blurry to sharp, reducing the degree of change between pure white and pure black. We don’t want to make the angle perfectly vertical, however, or we’ll put the image back to the jagged appearance we started with.
