What causes poor image quality in Java JLabel icons?

Question

Java JLabel icons are displaying with distorted pixels in JFrame. This is happening consistently with different png images (all 32x32). I am not sc

Answer 1

First option: Instead of using ImageIcon, you can try to create your own icon class drawing the Image using graphics.drawImage(x,y,width,height,null) controlling rendering quality (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/2d/advanced/quality.html)

an example would be something like this:

public class Icon32 extends ImageIcon {
    public Icon32(String f) {
      super(f);

      BufferedImage i= new BufferedImage(32, 32, 
           BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);


      Graphics2D g2d = (Graphics2D) i.getGraphics();
                g2d.setRenderingHint(
                    RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING,
                    RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_ON);

                g2d.setRenderingHint(
                    RenderingHints.KEY_INTERPOLATION,
                    RenderingHints.VALUE_INTERPOLATION_BILINEAR);

      g2d.drawImage(getImage(), 0, 0, 32, 32, null);
      setImage(i);
    }

    public int getIconHeight() {
      return 32;
    }

    public int getIconWidth() {
      return 32;
    }

    public void paintIcon(Component c, Graphics g, int x, int y) {
      g.drawImage(getImage(), x, y, c);
    }
  }

where the method:

getImage()

is loading your image/icon...

Second option: if you are not happy with the result you can try to use this library: https://github.com/mortennobel/java-image-scaling it claims to provides better image scaling options than the Java runtime provides.