Resizing an image in an HTML5 canvas

Question

I\'m trying to create a thumbnail image on the client side using javascript and a canvas element, but when I shrink the image down, it looks terrible. It looks as if it was

Answer 1

I converted @syockit's answer as well as the step-down approach into a reusable Angular service for anyone who's interested: https://gist.github.com/fisch0920/37bac5e741eaec60e983

I included both solutions because they both have their own pros / cons. The lanczos convolution approach is higher quality at the cost of being slower, whereas the step-wise downscaling approach produces reasonably antialiased results and is significantly faster.

Example usage:

angular.module('demo').controller('ExampleCtrl', function (imageService) {
  // EXAMPLE USAGE
  // NOTE: it's bad practice to access the DOM inside a controller, 
  // but this is just to show the example usage.

  // resize by lanczos-sinc filter
  imageService.resize($('#myimg')[0], 256, 256)
    .then(function (resizedImage) {
      // do something with resized image
    })

  // resize by stepping down image size in increments of 2x
  imageService.resizeStep($('#myimg')[0], 256, 256)
    .then(function (resizedImage) {
      // do something with resized image
    })
})