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CanvasRenderingContext2D: imageSmoothingEnabled property

The imageSmoothingEnabled property of the CanvasRenderingContext2D interface, part of the Canvas API, determines whether scaled images are smoothed (true, default) or not (false). On getting the imageSmoothingEnabled property, the last value it was set to is returned.

This property is useful for games and other apps that use pixel art. When enlarging images, the default resizing algorithm will blur the pixels. Set this property to false to retain the pixels' sharpness.

Note: You can adjust the smoothing quality with the imageSmoothingQuality property.

Value

A boolean value indicating whether to smooth scaled images or not. The default value is true.

Examples

Disabling image smoothing

This example compares three images. The first image is drawn at its natural size, the second is scaled to 3X and drawn with image smoothing enabled, and the third is scaled to 3X but drawn with image smoothing disabled.

HTML

html

<canvas id="canvas" width="460" height="210"></canvas>

JavaScript

js

const canvas = document.getElementById("canvas");

const ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
ctx.font = "16px sans-serif";
ctx.textAlign = "center";

const img = new Image();
img.src =
  "https://interactive-examples.mdn.mozilla.net/media/examples/star.png";
img.onload = () => {
  const w = img.width,
    h = img.height;

  ctx.fillText("Source", w * 0.5, 20);
  ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 24, w, h);

  ctx.fillText("Smoothing = TRUE", w * 2.5, 20);
  ctx.imageSmoothingEnabled = true;
  ctx.drawImage(img, w, 24, w * 3, h * 3);

  ctx.fillText("Smoothing = FALSE", w * 5.5, 20);
  ctx.imageSmoothingEnabled = false;
  ctx.drawImage(img, w * 4, 24, w * 3, h * 3);
};

Result

Specifications

Browser compatibility

Desktop Mobile
Chrome Edge Firefox Internet Explorer Opera Safari WebView Android Chrome Android Firefox for Android Opera Android Safari on IOS Samsung Internet
imageSmoothingEnabled 30 15 51 11 17 9.1 4.4 30 51 18 9.3 2.0

See also

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Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License v2.5 or later.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CanvasRenderingContext2D/imageSmoothingEnabled