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.

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

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

JavaScript

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

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

const img = new Image();
img.src = "/shared-assets/images/examples/big-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

See also

• The interface defining this property: CanvasRenderingContext2D
• CanvasRenderingContext2D.imageSmoothingQuality
• image-rendering