Poor image quality in Storyline 360

Hey Barbara,

I appreciate you taking the time to share the additional information and the images.

We do have an issue reported to our team about some blurriness in the Storyline 360 program when users have their scaling set about 100%.

Does this fit your display settings as well?

Hi Webby,

It looks like Tom reached out in a similar conversation with a great explanation here. Just wanted to link it for anyone following along.

I am using Storyline 360 v3.20.16814.0

My image is a png with these dimensions 537 x 176 px.

In storyline the image is 225 x 73 px.

 EDIT : I get better results when I try tonot scale my image indeed. But it's sometimes hard to know first the correct size of an element in the scene. Everytime I change my mind in creation I have to change the initial image.

Hi Gillian,

Thanks for sharing your experience with us. I'm glad to hear you do get better results when you don't scale your image up or down in Storyline.

If you have a specific image file that's giving you trouble, we're happy to take a look! You can send it over by clicking here. 

I have had the best luck due to these issues with using the built-in screen capture tool. MUCH LESS than ideal given that I usually use Snagit and can annotate...but the quality is better... Articulate just needs to fix it. 

The main question for me is: IS Articulate going to "fix" this? The answers by the staff here all state something like "It works like this, so you should do this and that to get the best results".
I have yet to find a statement saying "We're going to rework image handling to improve results".

Thanks Alyssa for your reply.

Even if I get better results, all the time I spent on it didn't give me satisfaction : images are not as sharp and crisp than texts. It's not an image in particular : it's all elements.

@Katelin and Patrick,

I don't think that they could do something for this old problem. Every imported element is blurry, even when we follow all recommandations (dpi, size, manipulations). The strategy is to say that we are always responsible for the poor results we obtain. The fact is that the software is. Today, it's still not possible to create a simple arrow from the native tool in the ribbon without exposing yourself to blur... Solution : create an arrow with adobe illustrator and import it. Problem : all imported images are blurred. Conclusion : in one way or another, it's not possible to see a crisp arrow in a storyline project... 

Gillian,
 >>Today, it's still not possible to create a simple arrow from the native tool in the ribbon without exposing yourself to blur...  

-- I have experienced this issue too and after trials from the support side of the Articulate it was submitted as a bug, hopefully will be resolved.

 I do think that the problem should be solved of the software side, no matter how old it is.
Solutions like creating arrows in other programs are time and effort consuming.

I think what you say is a good start for the software developers to take care of it.
Articulate product has a remarkble usability and interaction mechanics, however the end result with bad Images in Storyline and Rise compromises all the hard work we are doing and all the brilliant possibilities of the Articulate product.

I totally agree with you. :)

Hi all,

We agree - there is still work to be done on the image quality, and our team has two specific issues we're continuing to investigate:

• HTML5 output that shows blurry text, images and player elements compared to Flash output while viewing in Chrome. 
• Dashed lines or lines with custom end types are blurry.

With both of those, it's still important to look at where images and other shapes were imported from and how the player is set to scale or not. All that will have an impact on overall quality and crispness in addition to the browser, browser sizing, and screen resolution. 

We'll let you know here as soon as we have updates on either of these and if you have any other issues with blurriness or image quality we'd like to take a look at those examples. Providing more examples allows our team to have additional testing scenarios and confirms that we'll fix an issue for the most authors possible. If you have any to share, please feel free to send directly to our Support Team. Thanks! 

Thank you Ashley.

Hello everyone.  

This is a continuation for 360.  I've attached screen captures hoping someone may be able to point me in the right direction.  It doesn't seem to matter what I do, (96dpi) but something causes a great screen capture to look blurry in the player.   I have worse examples. 
Is there anything new on this front from Engineering?   

Of course the locals say "It looks greate in .PPT why so horrible in 360?"  I'd like to provide an intelligent answer. 

Thank you. 

Hi Tom,

Thanks for sharing these images here with us. Do you have the .story file in question too so that we could look at the differences there? If so, that would be really helpful so that we can see more about your story size, the scaling that's done when inserting the image, and then any other player settings. Also, was the screen capture created in Storyline or an external tool?

If you need to share those files privately, you can also reach out to our Support Team directly here. 

Good Morning and thank you for the quick reply.

We use SnagIT 2019 for the screen captures. The .story file has been uploaded.
Please let me know if you need any additional information.

Case Number: 01636184
Reference ID: ref:

Hi Tom, thanks for the case number! I see you're already working with my colleague Renson, and he shared some insight into why you're seeing blurry screen captures. We can keep the conversation going in your case!

So frustrating the fact that we have bought a product that doesn't work properly in a crucial aspect like this. 

I have been trying to find a solution the past 2 days and nothing works for me. I have made dozens of testing attempts and the only conclusion is that in some projects images appear properly while in others, they don't.  Besides if I adjust the projects resolution from the normal 16:9 to something like 1920 x 1080 images work correctly although the project doesn.t 

Hi Teo,

I just responded to a similar post here, but it looks like you may be sharing some additional information.

We do recommend in our best practices documentation here to use images that do not need to be scaled up or down for the best quality.

As I mentioned in the other conversation, we'd be happy to take a look. You can even share here privately if needed.

Thank you for your time Leslie. I am submitting a case at the private link you gave me. 

I have been able to resolve some of my issues by saving as TIF instead of PNG or JPEG. 

Thanks for sharing what worked with the community, Katelin! I'm certain folks will find this pointer very helpful. ⭐️

Also, make sure you are boosting the image quality to custom levels when you publish if you have any issues with your images. And, hopefully, everyone is using HDMI as opposed to VGA (better image quality). 

What I'm really missing from the staff here is some kind of feedback like "we're working to resolve this once and for all in our next major update". You're trying to help people back and front here on their individual cases - which is nice - but the main issue remains unsolved. I in my personal case am unfortunately not able to share my files and was unable to resolve the problem, even after following all the different suggestions in this thread. Some screenshots just keep on coming out blurry while others - taken in the exact same way - appear crisp.

I think it's obvious by the sheer number of complaints and opened threads that Articulate is handling imported images in a way that causes blurryness in some projects and that's an issue that - to my knowledge - other authoring tools (I've worked with Captivate and iSpring without such issues) do not have.

Maybe the development team should shift their focus on that instead of adding one new feature after another to Rise. Don't get me wrong, Rise is a nice addition to the Articulate package, but Storyline is still the main software and selling point, isn't it?

Hi all,

Here is the reply I received about this issue on the 2018-10-25. Maybe this potential bug is still in a debugging process depending on its priority. No news since then.

Hi Gillian, 

Thanks so much for letting us know about this issue. I’ve logged it as a possible software bug. 

From here, I’ll meet with my team to take a closer look so we can determine next steps. Sometimes my team catches errors in my logic and we don’t have a bug after all. Of course, if that’s the case, I’ll let you know! 

Depending on priority and risk, some bugs can be fixed quickly, while others take longer to resolve. Here's more information on how we identify and tackle bugs: https://articulate.com/support/article/How-We-Tackle-Bugs

I’ll let you know as soon as we have an update on this issue. Thanks so much again for letting us know about this, and I’m sorry if it’s slowing you down.

Let me know if you need anything else!

Renz Sevilla
Customer Support Engineer 
Articulate Support - http://www.articulate.com/support/

Hi Gillian! For those who are following along here, I wanted to add that the bug Renz and the team are investigating is related to WMF images appearing blurry in HTML5 output of Storyline 360. 

We've also identified another issue in this discussion where text and images can appear blurry in Chrome. 

We're monitoring both of these issues for impact and looking at next steps for reaching a solution. As soon as we know more, we promise to update you. Thanks for sticking with us on this!