Quote Originally Posted by arsheesh View Post
Huh, I didn't resize the map, and when I clicked the map link on it I wasn't quite sure what you were referring to, perhaps I'm missing something.
I'm not sure I can express this very well, so bear with me. Anti-aliasing softens the transition between contrasting pixels, and it allows details smaller than four pixels in area to integrate more successfully into their surroundings. It has the overall effect of reducing the digital look of a raster image, as well as smoothing out very fine details. In this particular image, there are places where the rivers are showing artifacts from being too small. This is a very tiny snippet from your map that illustrates what I'm talking about:

aliasing.png

See how the bevel's highlight is choosing alternating pixels to light up? If the river were bigger, the highlight would be continuous. Anti-aliasing slightly modifies the color of the pixels that the highlight covers only partially, giving the illusion that it and the river are continuous, even though the individual pixels may be neither color.

In fact, there is some anti-aliasing occurring in this image, but the details are so fine that it cannot do much without turning the entire thing into mush.