How do I stop pixel blurring on Windows image viewer?

[Sketcz]

You know how when you double click on an image it loads it in that Window gallery viewer thing, and you can rotate and enlarge it?

Well, for years I've been using Windows XP and it blurs the hell out of images when I enlarge them. It anti-aliases the pixels - which is infuriating when I'm trying to zoom in on a retro sprite (pixel art) for a game article I'm working on. I have to load it in an art package to have a crisp enlargement.

Thing is, I used a friend's Windows Vista PC the other week, and his windows image viewer enlarges images without blurring the neighbouring pixels. There's no anti-aliasing, and it's SUPER SHARP. Perfect for zooming in on NES or SNES screengrabs.

Is this unique to Vista? Or is there a setting in XP where I can tick the "Stop being ****" box and have images enlarge normally? My Windows is French, so a step-by-step guide would be handy.

Thanks!

---
Otherwise...
I swear, if I find the computer engineer from the 1980s who invented the concept of anti-aliasing, I am going to break all of his fingers with a hammer. Vaseline-vision is like a virus that has infected the technological world. Windows has it. Macs have it. Retro emulators have it. The X360 has it as mandatory for all its games. The PSP has it. My PS3 has it as an option for some things. I demand visual fidelity! Down with anti-aliasing, etc.

[Tetsuo]

You've probably answered your own question, unfortunately.

It may be related to the hardware, but I'm going to guess that it isn't - it's just crappy MS software

[speedlolita]

Irfanview.

[Lyris]

Almost everything I can think of will do linear interpolation to scale - I wouldn't call that ****ty - just not what you need for this task.

Photoshop also lets you resize images with Nearest Neighbor interpolation which is what you want.

[Sketcz]

Could it be the monitor, or the resolution of my set-up? We both have LCD flatscreen monitors, but different makes.

The thing is, I don't see why Vista has crisp enlargement in photo viewer, but XP has blurring, without the option to choose to have it.

[egparadigm]

Because it's free software that came with Windows.

You could try The GIMP – an open source (and free) alternative to Photoshop. There may well be an option in there to scale with Neaest Neighbour.

[Sketcz]

Well, I've got Photopaint, Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. Which I use for cropping and resizing and other stuff. But sometimes, in a pinch, I want to just click on the PNG in my snapshot folder, zoom it in (because it's the size of a postage stamp), and check it quickly without blurring.

Thanks for all the advice. I was curious/hoping there was some kind of obscure tick box in Windows' options menu, somewhere half hidden, that I could untick and it would disable anti-aliasing.

Irfanview.

You're the second gentleman to recommend this. I reckon I'll try it. Maybe I can set it up to be the default program which images are loaded with on my computer when I click on their file icon.

[charlesr]

I was just about to say.... iranview. It's my default image viewer. You can set associations at install time. Or when you go to open a file, right click on it and "open with" and then tick the "always use this app" box and choose irfanview (if it's not on the list, then browse to the program files folder).

It's also a great tool for batch processing.

[randombs]

Bit of a stupid question, but have you tried opening them in Paint? I know it's not ideal but it opens in the same time it would take to open in fax viewer if speed is an issue and the zoom is blocky as flip.

As for charlesr's recommendation, I wouldn't want to risk installing a program called Iranview. It might delete everything in your sexy pics folder

I'm surprised Vista zooms without blurring, though. Maybe people complained? I'd have thought they'd get more complaints about blockiness than blurring...

[charlesr]

lol. typo tastic. irfanview of course.

[Sketcz]

Bit of a stupid question, but have you tried opening them in Paint?

Actually, I do sometimes use Paint, especially with PNGs. Depending on which PC I'm using. On the one I Photopaint which refuses to recognise PNG files, and on the other I have Photoshop and PaintShopPro. If I'm using the Photopaint PC I use Paint to convert PNG to BMP.

But I reckon I'm going to take everyone's advice an Infranview, would save me a lot of time.

Cheers guys.

[randombs]

Bit of a side-story, but someone put Irfanview on the PC used by one of the publicity women at work(does a lot of Photoshopping, etc) and she was annoyed because it couldn't edit EPS files(long story, not going to get into it but it involves file association takeover). Bear in mind this particular hotel has a lot of Indians working there, especially in the office.

Manager walked in, heard our conversation and demanded to know who Irfan was and why he'd installed some random picture viewer on the PC