Member-only story

How to fix blurry shape in Adobe After Effects

David Lindgren
2 min readDec 6, 2021

--

Sometimes, when you scale something in After Effects, it can look a bit unsharp, even if it is a vector shape. This is easily fixed, a lot of times with just one simple click.

To show you some different scenarios, I have created three identical stars in three different ways.

  • We have a Shape layer, created inside After Effects.
  • A composition with a shape layer inside.
  • An imported Illustrator document with a shape in it.

If you deselect all layers and click S, you can see the “Scale”-property for each layer.

Now, when we scale up the Shape layer, it looks sharp.

But when we scale up the Composition and the Illustration, they both look unsharp.

(There is a complicated explanation as to why this happens, but I’m not gonna go into that here because I want to keep this tutorial short.)

So, all you need to do in order to make your blurry shape sharp is to click the box under the icon that looks like a star in the menu.

(If you can’t find that icon, right-click in the menu, go to Columns and click Switches.)

Now, if this doesn’t work for your composition, double click on the composition to open it and make sure this box is selected for the shape layer inside your composition as well.

How to fix blurry shape in After Effects

I hope you liked this tutorial and if you want to see more quick tutorials just like this one, please subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the notification bell 🔔 so you don’t miss out on my next video!

🎞 Watch the tutorial (and all my other tutorials) here!

Thanks for watching, keep learning, and have a great day!

--

--

Responses (1)