Varstahl

As I said, if I place it perfectly, with or without "Move by whole pixels", I can still move it by half pixel, but after some more testing I think only if the zoom level is past a certain percentage? After some fiddling, keeping move by whole pixels enabled or disabled, moving the anchor point to an integer and with a resolution lower or equal to 800% it seemed to be working. That's probably exactly as intended, it's just not specified anywhere I read, so I didn't know initially. Select the layer, select the Move tool, drag the layer around with the mouse. As I said above, it works if the zoom level is within the 100-800% range. At this point I'm just curious about what does "Move by whole pixels" do, as it doesn't seem to do anything at all in all my tests, but that's beside the gripes I initially had with AP, and not really an issue.

I can understand what you're saying but I don't think it actually work as you are describing? Unless I'm misunderstanding something, of course. So, let's say I enable snapping and force pixel alignment, I then place an image on the canvas and make sure every pixel is where it's supposed to be. When I move it, regardless of "Move by whole pixels" is enabled or not, and regardless of whether or not it was enabled before placing the image, I still move the images by fraction of pixels. Am I misunderstanding something here? I noticed now that when I place an image I can select any pixel center point to make sure that the layer is centered perfectly where it's supposed to be. Past that, even with "move by whole pixels" enabled, I can still move it by half pixels. As I'm testing though, it seems that it is also dependant on the zoom level? (Past 800% free movement is allowed?) Also, while testing, it seems like rotating the object from a corner isn't really necessary, it's enough to move the anchor point out of the center of a pixel and rotation works perfectly. Maybe the half pixel anchor point movement could also be done automatically as a sub option of "Force pixel alignment", as it would speed up the process when working with multiple assets. On a different note, I also realised that clone sampling from all layers isn't really needed in AP, since it supports the non destructive "Merge visible", which is absolutely sweet. I just need a way from within AP to select PDF pages from thumbnails, and I can drop Adobe once and for all. Thanks again to all of you guys, I can't stress this enough, you're awesome. You helped me figure out these minor quirks so that I can now work better and faster with AP, I really appreciate it. I've been loving my time with AP so far, much more than any other similar tool I ever used (including Photoshop and Photopaint), and I'm looking forward to buying it after a bit more trial testing.

I did make sure of that, but still doesn't work, unless there are other snapping settings I should disable/enable. Attached snapping settings below. This works perfectly for the rotation, thank you, I just tested moving the anchor point. Well, at least it's making sense. I still find it odd there's no way to force movement by whole integer pixels, but if anything I know what to look for, now. Thanks

Hello, @GabrielM. Sure thing, you can find a minimal sample with two graphical assets attached in this reply. I've duplicated the assets for convenience so that you can test separately in Pixel and Image format, although in my tests it didn't bear any difference. I'm using stock settings except for snapping, which is enabled together with "Force pixel alignment". "Move by whole pixels" also didn't quite make any difference whatsoever. My problems so far: if you move any Image/Pixel layer with the mouse, depending on where it lands or where it's dragged, it gets blurred/unblurred. "Force pixel alignment" doesn't help in the slightest. placing an image, opposed to drag & dropping, seems to work better but not necessarily always. Regardless of the method you chose, unless it's pixel perfect you have to move the asset around like an idiot, until AP shows you the correct un-aliased version, and from there move it exclusively with key arrows, otherwise it gets blurry again. as the assets in the attached document show, if you rotate the right chairs by 90°, they get extremely blurry. That doesn't happen with the ones on the left. I've tried both to rotate manually and with Transform > Rotate left/right, same result. For convenience I've also attached a screenshot taken within AP of the document attached, to show what's happening when I move it by mouse. PixelTest.afphoto

Thank you for your answer, but "Move by whole pixels" seems to bear no effect on the outcome. What I found out though is that these kind of problems only appear when one side of the asset is odd and the other is even, so if I try to 90° turn a 50x50 or 51x51 it goes well, when I rotate a 50x51 it gets blurry, regardless of "Move by whole pixels" being active or inactive. At least I can now pinpoint the problem, but this is extremely weird and counter intuitive.

Actually scratch that last part, even when rasterized in Pixel mode it keeps getting blurry when the layers are moved with mouse instead of keyboard input.

I'm sorry, I should have been more precise. If I open them there's no blurriness involved. If I place them there's no blurriness. If I drag & drop there might be blurriness based on the X/Y coordinates where they're dropped. In all of these cases I'm using them only at 100% their original size. Regardless of the method I open/place them with, and regardless of the zoom (100%/200%/800%) if I move them around they get sharp/blurry. Once they're actually not blurred, rasterizing them into Pixel layers make everything else work as intended as far as I can tell so far.

Thank you for answering. They're all PNGs, opening them in AP work fine just as when placing them in the document. I've also noticed something even stranger: when I move the assets around with the mouse, they also get blurry or sharpened, depending on where I place them. With the pixel alignment turned on to fix the other pixel art related problems, if I move the assets after dropping them on the canvas they eventually get back to their crisp state, and then I must only drag them around using arrow keys, or they'll get blurry again. AP is revealing itself as quite quirky in that regard. The fact that they just get placed as top layer while dragging them in feels like a bug/oversight, unless it's a specific design choice to fix some issues I didn't consider.

Hey Callum, while I can't answer for the original poster I was experiencing the same thing and your solution fixed the problem on my end. Additionally, it also solved one of my other problems, which is the added blur when rotating 90° left/right (it still feels wrong, but at least I can now work with it).

I've just started the trial for Affinity Photo, having heard a lot of good things about it, and I've been loving it for the most part except for the fact that in several areas it's destroying my workflow and efficiency, so I wanted to ask if I'm doing things wrong being used to Photoshop and all that. I'm working and testing Affinity Photo on an 8MP pixel art image, and I've noticed that compared to the file import on Photoshop the result is quite blurry (see attachment). After some fiddling around I found out that on AP the problem comes from drag & dropping the image on the canvas: if I drag & drop the file it turns out like the chest in the right half; if I place the file it turns out like the one in the left half. Both are at their native resolution, and both are imported as Images. Opening the menu and selecting place for every single asset is quite lengthy and workflow destructive. Is there a way to emulate the placement while drag & dropping from the file manager? Shouldn't it work the same way? Am I doing something wrong or is it a bug? The 2nd most damning problem I have is with the clone tool: I'm working on a very structured file with hundreds of layers and subgroups, and one of the feature I used the most in Photoshop is the clone tool mode that allows selection from all layers, both above and below the currently active layer. Is this a feature that can be added in AP? Addendum 2: while working on it some more I noticed another pretty damning issue while working with pixel art. Applying a rotation to any object it starts getting blurry due to the diagonal approximation, but the ridiculous thing is that in 90° the image doesn't get back to crisp, only 180°. So, while in theory a turn left/right shouldn't involve any resampling, it actually does, which is quite problematic. (Solution to this seems to be View > Snapping Manager > Enable snapping and Force pixel alignment, though it still feels kind of wrong to interpolate on simple 90° turns?) Addendum 1: is there a way, while drag & dropping files into the canvas, to automatically place it in the current group/subgroup instead of automatically place it as the top layer? That's another thing that works while Place'ing, but doesn't while dragging files from Explorer (didn't test it on a Mac yet, I don't know if the behaviour also happens with Finder). Finally, not really related to pixel art, is a question related to PDFs. In Photoshop while importing from a PDF you have a thumbnail preview of the pages where you can select them and then import those pages only. I see that AP can do mostly the same but has no thumbnail available, so the user must know the page range beforehand. Is there a way to do it on the fly while visually scanning the document or do I have to stick to CS6 for that? I'm loving AP so far, with these couple exceptions: it runs butter smooth, is very efficient, tries to stay out of the way during creative work… everything I was looking for!