As in most anti-aliasing techniques of reasonable performance, ImagerSmooth makes some compromises that will show up in extreme cases. Users who care should be aware of these limitations, and choose the method for drawing the picture accordingly.

First of all, ImagerSmooth does not keep any partial-pixel coverage information in the sampled image buffer; the new colors are simply blended into the pixel in proportion to the mask coverage. This will normally not show if the mask boundaries are uncorrelated with each other, but if, for example, two masks abut with each other, some of the background will show through the joint.

Area averaging is used instead of a fancier weighting function.

Oversampling is used to calculate pixel coverage, so very high frequency components in the mask may still cause aliasing.

Sampled colors are sampled using bilinear interpolation. If the pixels of the sampled color are smaller than the output pixels, the sampled color is first filtered with a simple box filter. For best results, the original sampled color should not contain any frequencies greated than one-half of the sampling frequency.

Stipple colors are not supported; they will show as a uniform gray.