Ever wondered which interpolation method you should use in Procreate? The truth is there is no one size fits all answer! Otherwise they wouldn’t give us 3 methods to choose from! In this video I’ll tell you which methods I use and why and compare the 3 interpolation methods side by side to show the different results you get with different brushes, so that you can decide which one is best for you and your art style.
Video Transcript: Which Interpolation Method Should I Use in Procreate?
Hello. This week we are looking at interpolation methods in procreate. The tips I’m going to give you might surprise you if you’ve ever heard any of the popular advice about interpolation methods.
First up though, I mostly try and avoid resizing “high res/finished/important/final/however you want to refer to it” artwork. Because whatever method you use, you’re always going to get some loss in quality and resolution. I always want to keep everything as crisp and clear as I can, so I mostly stick to resizing things in my sketch layers only. For final illustrations, if I need to redraw something a bit bigger or smaller or a different angle, then I will just redraw it.
However, there are some occasions where I might resize things if I’m making a social media post or some onscreen graphics or filling a canvas with a repeating pattern. But even then I’d only use it to make things smaller. I wouldn’t ever upscale an image.
So the controversial advice here is that I use the nearest neighbour interpolation method when I’m resizing tiles or motifs. Nearly all the advice I will tell you to use bicubic or bilinear because they give the best results. But it all depends on what results you want. I use lots of textures and fuzzy crunchy brushes in my work and I want those crunchy outlines to hold when I reduce the size.
The reason people advise you to use bicubic is because it gives the smoothest results. But if you don’t want smooth, then that one isn’t going to be the best for you and your artwork.
Let’s do a side by side comparison. I’ve got the same circle here with my tracing crayon brush, and on each of these layers I’ll reduce the size by the same amount, but using a different interpolation method. As you can see, this one here, which we transformed with nearest neighbour, has done the best job of holding that crunchy texture. The other two have gone a bit soft and fuzzy and that’s why I use this one for transforming my artwork. You can see here with these two pattern tiles, the one I did with nearest neighbour has the most definition in there compared to the smoother bicubic one.
But what if you don’t use textured brushes, and you use snooth lines. Well, then you probably will want to use either bicubic or bilinear. With these three stars here. I’ll do the same thing again and we’ll compare them. So you see with these, the nearest neighbour version looks the least like we originally intended it to look. It;s quite jagged compared to the smooth lines we drew and these other two have done a better job.
When you first open Procreate, nearest neighbour is going to be the default method. So if you’ve never looked at this before and you normally use mostly smooth brushes, you might want to go in and change that setting and see if you get better results.
The truth is, there’s no one size fits all right or wrong method here. Otherwise, they wouldn’t give us three options to choose from! It’s down to us to experiment and try all three and use the one which gives the best results on artwork style and preserves the look that we wanted. Thank you for watching. If you have any other questions about Procreate interpolation methods, let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them!
Also, let me know if you’ve got any other topics you want me to make videos about. And don’t forget to subscribe for tips like this every Wednesday and I will see you soon.