When you’re working on your pixel-perfect artwork in Photoshop, some common functions like moving, rotating and pasting can undo your hard work, resulting in a blurry mess. In fact, if you’re not careful, rotating layers in Photoshop can damage them in a very noticeable, pixel-mashing way – as illustrated below. But with some small changes to your workflow, you should be able to maintain the highest-quality artwork from the start to the end of the project.
Marc Edwards at Smashing Magazine has a great pixel perfection tutorial outlining a few methods that most designers are unaware of that avoids the problem.
One of the easiest solutions that I’ve used for years is to simply change the rotation orientation to the top left axis when rotating objects.
A collection of interesting or otherwise helpful links I’ve come across recently that you may not have seen:
When you’re using Curves, Color Balance, Levels, Hue & Saturation, and other color correcting filters on your Adobe Photoshop image, it’s always best to use an Adjustment Layer (the icon at the bottom of the Layers panel shown at right). Doing so allows you to make further adjustments to your image later on using the Adjustments panel, leaving the original image intact. It also gives you an easy way to adjust only the gray values in your image, thus preventing color shifting.