I am working on a project that involves pixel art. Due to the nature of the project, it is important that assets exported by Figma are unaltered from their original source images. Until recently, there were no problems: Figma exported PNGs identical to the assets originally uploaded.
However, today we have discovered the any new file uploaded to Figma is being exported with pixelated results.
Here are screen shots showing the difference between the source image and the one Figma exports.
As you can see, the Figma-exported file appears to have been anti-aliased or gone through some other image processing that has generated a large number of new pixels in new colours/transparencies. If you look at the palette on the right, you can see that the original image only contains a handful of colours, while Figma’s new image contains many, many more. These differences might not be apparent when exporting, say, a photograph--but they are very obvious on these small pixel art PNGs.
At first I thought the problem was that the images were not aligned to the pixel grid on the canvas (as this is a known issue that can result in imperfect exports). However, this was not the case. I verified that all images were aligned to the pixel grid, and the issue persisted.
In trying to determine the root of the problem, I discovered if I exported an image originally added to Figma in June of 2024, the image exported correctly--while newer images, including the same files re-uploaded to figma today, exported wrong. However, when I use “Dev Mode” to download the source image from Figma (instead of exporting it), the image is always correct.
To recap,
- PNGs newly uploaded to Figma export with pixelation
- Images uploaded months ago do not seem affected
- Images downloaded via the dev mode source image method are not affected--only those exported using the “export” feature.
- The problem does not appear to be related to the known issue where images not aligned to canvas’ pixel grid are exported with pixelation.
Given that older images are not affected, I wonder if this is a bug (or change) that has been introduced in how Figma processes images as they are imported and exported.
