It's a feature provided by the OS, but that doesn't mean applications
have to use it. I rather doubt serious imaging apps would enable this
AA, at least for images. In fact, I'd be surprised if Adobe used any
features provided by Quartz 2D, other than possibly some basic "draw
to screen" bits.
robert
On Feb 14, 2008, at 18:01 , karl shah-jenner wrote:
I've spoken to a few more people about the methods used by both
Vista OS and now the Apple OS and was pointed to this page:
<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/OSX_Technology_Overview/GraphicsTechnologies/chapter_4_section_2.html
>
which explains:
"Quartz 2D Features provides many important features to user
applications, including the following: Anti-aliasing for all
graphics and text"
more on anti-aliasing is to be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-aliasing
now that is downright depressing!
"Anti-aliasing for all graphics and text"
*all*
and the mac geeks I've spoken to confirmed this, but I'd like to
know more because this removes the current mac OS from the image
editing ranks for me altogether if that is actually the case
Anti-aliasing basically translates as 'fuzzing up the jaggedy bits
in an image to make them look more realistic'
For the viewer of the screen doing this trick, that makes images
look nice to them - but it's NOT what you'd want as an image
editor! You upsample your image, it looks nice to you, you load it
to the web and to everyone whos operating system diplays images as
2D (75+% of the world) sees jaggies or artifacts that your operating
systems graphics rendering hid from you!
For theWindows users you can easily see an example of this, play any
old 3D game and hit print screen .. finish the game, open an image
editor and hit paste - look at the resulting image .. does it look
at all like it did in the game? no. it IS however exactly all the
information that was being fed through the graphics engine, however
anti-aliasing and other 3D engine tools were being employed to make
it look more realistic - and that's the crux of it - it ('it' being
the actual image data) was being prettied up by the graphics engine.
For the whole operating system to be rendering images in such a way
as to make them look prettier is a nice idea but NOT for people
doing image editing! We need to see what's actually there, not an
interpretation!!
No point using an optmized 2D card under such an operating system
eiter, if the potential benefits are being eliminated by the OS
now seriously, this strikes me as a huge flaw in the apple
(marketing?) design - the backbone of these computers was always
image pros, for the apple industry to have compromised their designs
this way is as bad as the Vista graphics engine design.
karl
