Zoom Picture causing image to get fuzzier

Jul 17, 2012

Diane Elkins
By Diane Elkins

I have some images of documents on a slide.  They are clear, but too small to read the detail.  I click the Zoom Picture button to add the magnifying glass.  The enlarged picture (that the student sees after clicking the magnifying glass) looks great, but the image on the slide is now fuzzy instead of clear. 

I've used the zoom image before successfully, but now I'm having this problem whenever I try to use it.  Has anyone else had this problem?  And if so, any workarounds?

Thanks

22 Replies
Adrian Dean
almost 12 years ago07/17/12 at 12:26 pm (UTC)

Hi Diane,

1.Okay, let me see if I understand. The image when zoomed in is clear but fuzzy on the slide when zoomed back out. Right?

2.Your examples show the picture to be clear although small when not zoomed in, while your zoomed in picture is fuzzy.

If it's the first one, I wasn't able to replicate that myself. Would you mind sharing the file here so that I can take a look and see if I can get it to do what you are having trouble with on my computer.

If it's the second one, it will be that way because the quality of the image doesn't appear to be that great. The higher the resolution, the clearer a picture will be when zoomed in.

Always Happy to Help,

Adrian

Diane Elkins
almost 12 years ago07/17/12 at 1:10 pm (UTC)

Thanks for taking a look at it!

You are correct: it looks fine when magnified, but the regular image is blurry.  Both images shown above are the exact same image.  The only difference is that one has the zoom effect applied.  If I take off the zoom effect, it goes back to being clear.

I cannot share that exact file for client confidentiality reasons, so I made a new one-slide story. (attached)  In the new file, the zoom is working just fine.  So I imported one of the many troublesome slides from my client file into this new story, and it has the same problem.  Just for kicks, I added a new image to the same slide, and there is no issue with the zoom.  

Very strange!

Adrian Dean
almost 12 years ago07/17/12 at 1:33 pm (UTC)

Hi Diane,

I downloaded your file and got the same thing you did. I even took the picture and created a new project with just the one picture that's giving us trouble. It looked fine on the slide, but when I previewed it, the picture was fuzzy until I clicked the zoom picture. I'll continue to play with it and maybe someone else will have an idea in the meantime.

Adrian

Diane Elkins
almost 12 years ago07/18/12 at 7:55 am (UTC)

I thought of that, too.  I tried removing the animations and the rotation, but that didn't work.  Maybe you'll try something I didn't think of.  It is also happening to other (but not all) images in that course.  I don't think its the file type either: some of the problems are with gif and some with png, while other pngs are find.

Christine Hendrickson
almost 11 years ago05/22/13 at 8:10 am (UTC)

Hi there Helene,

Looks like this was happening quite some time ago for Diane. I'm not sure how she resolved the issue.

Are you able to share an image or .STORY file? I'd be happy to take a look, if you'd like. 

One thought did come to mind for a workaround, until we're able to fix this for you. You could mimic the "Zoom" effect by creating a copy of the image and scaling it to how you'd like it to appear. Place that additional image on another layer and have it show when the user clicks on the original image.

Thanks!

Lesley Cashman-Peck
almost 11 years ago06/26/13 at 8:34 pm (UTC)

It's the image resolution! At least that's what I found when I ran into this same problem. I used photoshop to increase the resolution from 72 px/inch to 300 px/inch. Of course this creates a much larger (and grainier) image than I wanted, so I sized the image back down to its original dimensions where it appeared crystal clear again. When I inserted the "new" image and applied the zoom feature, voila, the image was not fuzzy any more when using the zoom effect.  Hope this works for you! If you don't have Photoshop you should be able to use another photo editor to increase the resolution.

Jose Tansengco
over 1 year ago09/08/22 at 5:01 pm (UTC)

Hi Dennis, 

Thanks for reaching out! 

The zoom picture will only work for images that have been resized so they are now smaller than the original. You can check out this article to know more about the usage of this feature. 

With that being said, if you are already scaling down your images and are still seeing them appear blurry when zoomed in, please upload a copy of your project here or in private by opening a support case so we can take a look at what's happening. 

Dennis Brinker
over 1 year ago09/08/22 at 8:01 pm (UTC)

No that's not this issue here. Image looks fine on screen, once the Zoom Picture feature is added to the image it then gets fuzzy, this is before clicking on it in it's initial state. Without the Zoom Picture feature applied the image looks fine. Also looks fine when you click the image and it zooms in to full size as well.

Jose Tansengco
over 1 year ago09/12/22 at 1:56 pm (UTC)

Hello Dennis, 

Thanks for sharing your project file. I was also able to observe the issue on my end. We are currently tracking a known issue where adding zoom to an image affects the quality, and I've added this post to the bug report so we can notify you as soon as we have any updates on the bug. Thanks for raising this issue, and we're sorry for the inconvenience. 

Jose Tansengco
11 months ago05/30/23 at 5:02 pm (UTC)

Hi Everyone,

I have some great news to share! We just released another update for Storyline 360. In Build 3.76.30446.0, we've included important fixes and new features.

One of the bugs we've fixed is: 

  • Applying Zoom Picture to images causes some blurriness.

Launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer to take advantage of this update, and click the Update button next to Storyline 360. You'll find our step-by-step instructions here.

Please let me know if you need additional help!

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