Blurry Images in Preview and Published
Jun 12, 2017
By
M. Bosscher
I've noticed this for awhile, all of my images I insert into this Storyline 3 course appear quite blurry everywhere - on the Storyline development screens, when previewed and when published (either as HTML5 or Flash).
The images are all smaller than the maximum size, they are at 100% scaling, have no effects applied to them. My Publish settings is set to 100% quality. I've tried bitmaps, pngs, jpgs, all identical blurry results.
I've searched these forums and seen a couple other threads on it , but never found a solution or real explanation for it. I can't send this course over to my client - it's embarrassingly bad.
190 Replies
Hi Logan,
No apologies necessary, as I know this discussion has been ongoing and full of concerns and fixes connected to blurriness. I did want to clarify one more piece with you, and for any others here in the community.
The issue you've worked on with our support team, in that images added to existing shapes as fill are blurry, was only reported approximately 4 months ago. The larger issue discussed here where everything on a slide was blurry in the Chrome browser was fixed in an earlier update to Storyline.
We know there is more work to do on a number of these issues, so we're focused on those fixes and will continue to share updates as they're available.
Hi Ashley,
Thanks for the reply. I actually first submitted a case for this issue back in September of 2018 - no resolution was found. It has always bugged me and so when I recently began work on another project that used a similar look/feel, I reported it again. I just wanted to clarify that this issue has been brought to Articulate's attention (at least once by me) 9+ months ago, not 4. If you'd like my original case number from 9/2018, please let me know.
Thanks!
Logan
I see you say it's been fixed for storyline (in general, is how I read that) but just to be clear, it's not fixed for SL3. I know what you meant was it's fixed for SL360, but not for SL3.
Hi Ashley,
I sent back an email to you last week when i received it, but haven't heard anything back since I sent it. I'm more than happy to schedule some time to talk. Please reply to my email from last week and we can get it moving in the right direction. I appreciate you taking the time out to contact me directly. Here's to hoping to hear from you soon!!
Evan
Hi Evan,
Hm, I never got a response there! I'll try sending another email to you
again to figure out a good time to chat. Keep your eyes peeled for an email
from Articulate!
I sent another email and forwarded the reply i sent on July 15. I'm hoping we can connect soon!
Thanks, Evan! I see that Victor sent you a follow up last night too. Make sure when you respond to his email you don't change the subject line to remove the case ID # as I think that's what occurred with your earlier emails.
Again. Look at this screen image. This jpg hasn't been reduced in photoshop. It hasn't been shrunk or enlarged on the screen. Its as it is. In photoshop it is crisp and clean but imported in Storyline 360 it looks like garbage and its making our modules look very unprofessional. This should be a very high priority for your engineers to be working on.
This shouldn't be chrome, firefox, ie or any other issue. It should work perfectly and look crisp and clean on ANY browser. Lets get this fixed please!
Just so there isn't any confusion on my publish settings. Yes. I have all my settings set to the highest quality UNLESS there are some other settings that I am not aware of that are buried in your software somewhere. If there are any other settings you should have them at eye level so you aren't digging around trying to figure out where they are. Just a suggestion. Please for the love of all that lives on this planet. Fix this.
Is the image being brought into Storyline a JPG?
What you might want to try is to use the Classic Player and keep your course a fixed size to prevent any scaling. If you can get your captured image about the size of your course screen and then have the image be an EMF you might get good results. The key is to prevent the least amount of scaling.
No scaling going on here. Its a 100% jpg. No compression and as I stated earlier. Looks perfect in photoshop and every other photo imaging product with the exception of Storyline 360. My display size is 720x540 and the jpg that goes in the background is that size. This is so frustrating. This thread was started 2 years ago without resolution. Why is this so hard to fix? Why are people still commenting on here after 2 years without a resolution to the problem?
Instead of a JPG, try it as a EMF image file and see if it makes a difference.
I'm having this issue, but none of the conversations are related to my issue though. When I insert a screenshot, it's crisp and readable. When I go to preview the slide it is completely blurry and unreadable. Publishing has the same effect.
Hi, I'm having this issue. I'm knee deep into adding screen shots and they are all blurry. At 160% they are super clear, but blurry otherwise.
Any solution on this problem?
Ok, so I spent some time reading other posts. I found that if I set my Story Size larger than what I need, the images end up being pretty much crystal clear, not blurry at all. I made the story size 2047x1200 (Design tab) Lock aspect Ratio and then scaled when I first changed it...simple fix, but it worked for me.
See my note above.
Hi, how would this work? Set larger size, and then change it down again?
For me, it's all blurry in preview and publish. I think IE displays it sharper, but not crisp. Chrome is dull and blurry.
Thanks for tagging me. Will try this out. But that would mean I have to open up all of the previous 60+ live productions and do the scaling up/down, republish and reuploading...
Can you clarify again how you did this?
I don't want the launch-window to be fullscreen, and I need it scalable.
Thanks :)
Hello Stian,
So my screenshots were blurry no matter what I did. But I noticed, when I used the slider and zoomed to 160% the pictures were actually really nice. Then when I went back down to 100% it was blurry again. So I looked around and someone posted about changing the size to be bigger.
At 202%
So I set my Story Size to this:
And nothing is blurry anymore when I publish.
I know about republishing. I've got about 50 I have to now redo myself. And if you have callouts or borders, they might shift as well...more work...whoo-hoo.
Let me know if you need any help.
Kelley this sounds great - but we can't see your images.
Strangely, now I can see them! Sorry for the red herring!
I can see the images. Thanks for the explanation.
I would have to alter the display size from the LMS launcher to achieve this. And even if this would work, all my current assets are created 1:1 to be sharp. Screenshots of systems for example, are not scaled down. They are 1:1, but I've moved and cut away dead-space to make them fit. Changing the size would render all my assets useless, and would require way too much work. And we can't be planning on over sizing every asset in our production as a workaround.
I really do appreciate your workaround and explanation, but it wouldn't work for me :/
Articulate should have fixed this. It worked fine in SL2, then we upgraded all our licences and projects to SL3, and we've had this issue ever since. There where one period where courses was not blurry but most of the versions of SL3 makes it blurry... I'm sick of having to explain to all my clients that unfortunately, I can only produce blurry outputs.
Might have worked in SL2 because I was using flash as publish. Cant use that now, as its disabled on all systems we use. And HTML output should work as intended.
I'm wanting to check out other development tools, as I'm really not a fan of being left in the dark for this long...
I didn't so anything special with my images. I sized the screen down to 50% when I worked and just put them in like normal. I didn't have to do anything with them when I converted the Slide Size.
But, you are right, I use 360 and this thread has been going on for 2 years and there is still an issue.
Recently, I also get the same issue and I tried a lot to fix it. Only solution I find out is given as follows in few steps:
1. Do not crop or scale your image in articulate.
2. If you want to resize the image. I better suggest you to use Adobe Photoshop for cropping and scaling.
3. Export the image from Photoshop as JPEG or PNG format and Import the image in Articulate Storyline.
4. I repeat.. please do not scale or crop (if you are facing above issue.)
Thanks & Regards
Saurav
Ok, this is going too far. Articulate, why are you not fixing this issue? It's been a known bug for way, way too long now. Can you please upadate us on the progress? Are any developers looking into this at all? Or are we ignored, left in the dark?
This is not right at all. For the price we paid for licenses, I'd expect bugs to be fixed quicker than 2-3 years. At least deal-breaking bugs like this.
There are so many known bugs in SL3, and non have been fixed as of now. I have several major bugs that needs to be handled.
I will list some I remember right now, though I've forgotten (learnt to live with, using workarounds, for a lot of other issues):
-Hotspots. Buggy, unless you remove border which is added as default.
-Padding in text in master, messes up value when going back to the slide.
-Previews is blurry, difficult to do detailed work.
-Published results are blurry, which degrades our products. Not good for me at all.
-Objects snapping to align will often be placed "between" two pixels, messing up borders and font. Only way to fix this, is going into position/size settings for the object, and move it 1px left/right, 1px up/down. Cant do this within the stage, with the 1px movement. Has to be done in position/size settings. Time-consuming, and can easily mess up fine details.
-Deleting "title" from master slide will prevent the use of "title" in layouts under the master. This in turn messes up text-boxes. If I have two textboxes, but "title" is deleted on master slide, then text will swap places within my slides if I create more layouts under the same master. Had to remake all my templates, hiding "title" instead of deleting. Unticking the "title" box also causes this issue, so it have to be there, but hidden in layers.
Theres more, but I think I've proven my point again. These issues have existed for way too long, and I feel we are completely ignored.
Can you give us an update on the issues reported? What priority do they have? Will we get a fix for any of these at all?