AA rendering with no effect

One way is with FXAA by iFredQC.

Another way is with the attached filter. By default anti-aliasing is turned off. Go to Filter / Anti-Aliasing to set the values you want (number of sample, edges or all) before you Render and save the result. The filter does nothing else. For Filter Forge 7 and above.

No effect - anti-alias only.ffxml

Sorry - not sure how to access this plug as it is not in the library. I put it in the Library folder but it doesn't show up. Could you give me a pointer on that? Thanks again.

Do you happen to know the path to My Filters on the Mac? I did a search for it and got nothing - it's not in the Applications/Filter Forge folder either. ( I also have the Librarian..)

Btw, if I select Show Diagnostics in the AA menu and the screen goes entirely black (or orange for Zones) does that mean FF didn't find any pixels that needed smoothing?

Some would say that there is no way to genuinely "apply" antialias to an image that is already rendered. However various faux methods and gentle low pass filters are often presented with that terminology involved. Aesthethically it may also give you something similar, but more blurry than conventional antialiasing methods though.

Think about what goes on to produce one result "pixel" in Filter Forge: multiple samples inside that pixel square is rendered and the average of the samples produce the final pixel color. This is how the antialiasing "effect" is made. The more samples the better. Thats what you select in the menu.

Several components can predict where jaggy edges may occur, and this allows FF to render subsamples for "edges only", which is alot faster compared to blindly subsample every output pixel. The diagnostics tools gives you insight in where sub samples are actually going to be rendered. If the color is all the same, nothing is sub sampled, or "antialiased".

When you open an external image, the FF "image" is the same size, i.e. the lowest detail level is 1 pixel. So trying to subsample 1 pixel will not give you any new information, hence no antialiasing.

If you image is very large and you don't need all that resolution, you can try scaling it down using bicubic resample in photoshop (FF has no resampling method). The smaller the result the better the antialiasing.

Okay, MB3D... antialiasing has always been a struggle with that program (as with much else in that interface ). I ended up rendering my images 4x the size and then downscale in photoshop afterwards to get a nice result.