Art51

@Callum As noted in my other thread (linked above) this setup works well for RGB/8 bit documents only. When I tried to work with a RGB/16 file (same A1 size at 300dpi) the brush strokes are rendered wonderfully but are laggy and eventually result in regular beachballs to the point the system is unusable. When I revert to using OpenGL and the CPU (i.e. disable my GPU), the RGB/16 painting experience is flawless. It seems I can also use Metal with the CPU in RGB/16 with great performance. Is there a reason my Affinity Photo doesn't play well when doing raster tasks with my system? Is there something I can tweak to improve performance?

@Callum@NotMyFault Just wanted to let you know I spent quite some time fiddling with RGB/16 to assess the painting/drawing experience and see if it is better than working with RGB/8. When working in RGB/16 (A1 file at 300dpi) and Affinity Photo is set to use Metal and Hardware Acceleration (as noted in my comments above) my pencil strokes render really well (no artefacts) however the lag on strokes is very noticeable and eventually the beachball makes a prominent return and the system bogs down. It quickly becomes unusable. However, when I switch the performance settings to use OpenGL or Metal and use the CPU only the RGB/16 painting experience is great! No lag at all AND there are no artefacts present in the pencil strokes like there were in the RGB/8 documents. So it seems the 16bit workspace solves the artefacts problem present in the 8bit format, just as NotMyFault suggested. What a pity my GPU can't be used for 16bit raster painting/drawing! I can't seem to tweak settings any further to improve the situation. Is there a reason my GPU Metal performance is so poor?

Indeed. A palette of swatches... So it might make more sense to have the "swatches" panel titled "palette" or "palettes" as one can choose which palette they are using from the drop down menu within the panel. It might keep naming conventions a bit more consistent? Just a thought.

I have created a bunch of System Palettes with colours that I have renamed meaningfully so that I'm not looking at RGB or HEX values when I hover over them. For instance I have replicated the Prismacolor pencil range as System Palettes that match the pencil sets. When working on a new project I create a new Document Palette and include colours from System Palettes, however the colour name isn't honoured in the new palette / swatch. When I hover over it I see only the RGB value. It would be great if the Affinity programme could recognise the system colour values (RGB etc.) and display the name on hover when these colours are present in other palettes / swatches. Also, why are there two titles used? Is it a Palette or a Swatch?

These are my Affinity Photo and macOS settings which might be helpful for anyone looking to improve their own system performance. I've found the RAM can be lowered much further and the Undo Limit increased and performance remains solid. I keep the system's Automatic Graphics Switching off regardless of using Battery or the Power Adapter.

And sometimes it's helpful to have a creative ad symbolic effigy to stand in one's place.

Cheers Callum

Thanks so much for letting me know. That's very helpful, especially to know that I can export in the legacy format. Cheers mate!

G'day NotMyFault, No, I haven't tried that. I'm working in RGB/8. As it happens, right now, I've been drawing for about 40mins without a single beachball. I had a feeling there was something being cleared by the system every few minutes and so as a test I changed my RAM usage and disk warning limits from 32GB to 22GB each and I also upped my Undo Limit to 500 (it was 131 beforehand). I don't want to jinx things, but this seems to have worked. I reckon if it was going to stall or beachball it would have done it by now. If anything changes I'll post again. Hopefully this might be helpful to folk in a similar situation.

Okay, so after using these settings for a bit I'm finding the beachball starts to make an appearance during painting (using various brushes). It's starts intermittently after several minutes then becomes more frequent, like it's getting harder and harder for the system to keep on top it. So I restart Affinity Photo and begin again... same result, all is good for a while then the beachball begins again. The Activity Monitor shows the Affinity Photo CPU and GPU usage flicking around. The app goes from the top of the list to the bottom as the beachball appears and disappears (it appears for about 5 secs following a stall when rendering a stroke). I wonder if the rendering is still switching from CPU to GPU and back for some reason... I really hope this can be sorted out. The Activity Monitor shows the usage as follows:

Okay, so after using these settings for a bit I found the beachball started to make an appearance during painting. It's starts intermittently after several minutes then becomes more frequent, like it's getting harder and harder for the system to keep on top it. So I changed my RAM usage and disk warning limits from 32GB (my system max) down to 22GB each. This is probably still way more than needed. I also changed my Undo Limit to 500 (it was on 131 before). And this seems to have done the trick. Fingers crossed. I've been drawing for 40mins without a single slowdown, stall or beachball. See the above thread for more info.

So for the time that I have been using Affinity Photo (version 2) I have been working with Performance Settings set to OpenGL and turning off the Hardware Acceleration option. This was necessary to improve performance as - counter intuitively - performance was terrible with these turned on, despite having a high-end MacBook Pro with AMD Radeon Pro 5600M GPU. I have been searching for a reason for some poor brush performance discussed in this thread: I inadvertently discovered that it was the macOS Auto Graphics Switching that was causing the Metal and Hardware Acceleration to suffer. When I turned off this option I saw the performance I hoped for AND noticed that my brushes rendered more pleasingly. I have no idea why the CPU would render the strokes differently to the GPU but there you have it! I have noticed that there is a lot of mention in the forum of people on macOS being advised to turn off Metal and Hardware Acceleration but there seems to be no mention of the Auto Graphics Switching. I came to Affinity Photo after using other programmes such as Krita and Pixelmator Pro etc. and all of these exhibited great performance and utilised Metal... so it seemed most odd that Affinity performed worse with Metal activated! Perhaps the devs could include a note in the Performance Settings panel to prompt users to turn off Auto Graphics Switching in order to maximise performance. Just a thought. My system specs: Monterey 12.6.3 2019 MacBook Pro 16" Intel i9 2.4GHZ 8-Core AMD Radeon Pro 5600M with 8GB 32GB RAM

I have been able to 'fix' this issue. It seems the artefacts are only present when the Affinity Photo Performance settings are set to OpenGL, Hardware Acceleration is off and macOS is set to use Auto Graphics Switching in the power settings. When I turn off Auto Graphics Switching and force macOS to use my GPU (AMD Radeon Pro 5600M) and turn on Metal and Hardware Acceleration, the pencils don't exhibit any artefacts (see image below). In fact, the pencil renders much more pleasingly. I wish I had discovered this sooner! There must be some kind of Mercurial trickery going on when Affinity uses CPU for raster processes instead of communicating with the GPU. The bonus of this discovery is that I have now found I can indeed use Metal and Hardware Acceleration and get great performance simply by turning off Auto Graphics Switching. I have been disappointed that I was suffering from poor performance with Metal and so have only used the CPU and OpenGL instead. I bought the computer for its advanced GPU and now it seems I can make the most of it!

Thanks so much mate! I really only just scratch the surface of what the programme can do, but it does basically all I need, and does it in a way that fits me.

Just wanted to share a recent alternative movie poster I created for the film, Alita Battle Angel. The poster is completely hand-drawn in Affinity Photo 2. As I've noted before, I enjoy the hand-drawn and coloured posters by the likes of Drew Struzan and contemporary artists like Paul Shipper and Kyle Lambert. This work was completed primarily using the Natural Pencil 2B brush (the underlying sketch) and the Round Soft Brush (colouring over and clouds) with more Natural Pencil 2B coloured pencil over the top for the highlights and detail. There is some use of texture brushes such as spatters and custom dust etc. There are no fancy filters or tricks used. I treat the canvas and drawing as though I were working with real physical media and so start with a scanned 'paper' background. I use an XP Pen pen display connected to my MacBook Pro as my workstation.

Here's a screenshot from the A4 file I uploaded.

Hey Callum, Thanks for getting back to me! So the issue only presents when using the tilt function and is most noticeable when shading lightly (light pressure for a light stroke). I can't replicate this with the mouse or touch pad as there is no pressure sensitivity with either, let alone tilt. I have uploaded two files to the dropbox, one is A1 at 300 dpi and the other is A4 at 300dpi. The artefacts are present in each file size (I created these new files for this experiment). In each document I have shown examples of the strokes with each of the Natural Pencils (H, HB, 2B and 4B) in the default 32px size. The text is written with the stylus held upright/perpendicular to the screen and the shading above is with the stylus tilted and used from heavy to light pressure. The H pencil displays the most artefacts. Hopefully there is a solution as I use the pencils, specifically the Natural 2B pencil, as my default brush for all my work. I'm able to work around the issue by smudging the artefacts (with the soft round brush) when they are noticeable in my work. I rarely use the pencil in large sizes where the issue is most noticeable. Thanks again for having a look into this! PS- Am SO happy to have found Affinity Photo. It's perfect for the kind of raster art I create! It's a pleasure to use and I really can't praise it enough, and I think I've tried all the others.

When drawing with the Natural Pencil H, HB, 2B and to a lesser extent the 4B in Affinity Photo I'm finding digital/pixel artefacts when using my stylus to tilt for shading. It doesn't seem to happen with the stylus upright and so forming tighter lines. In my case, the resultant artefacts are not really noticeable until I zoom in but it seems unusual all the same and would not be pleasing if using the brush at a larger size. I'm using 2019 MacBook Pro 16" intel i9 with 32GB RAM running Monterey 12.6.3 Hardware acceleration off and using OpenGL. Using XP Pen Artist 24 QHD display tablet and also iPad as a graphics tablet via EasyCanvas app (the issue presents in both use cases). This has been occurring in all versions of Affinity Photo 2 (currently running 2.4.1) I usually draw in a 300dpi canvas at A1 size (7087x10004 pixels) In the attached image, the lines on left (sans artefacts) are drawn with the stylus upright. The shading at right (with artefacts) is with stylus tilted to varying degree and pressure. In this case I was using Natural Pencil 2B brush at size of 12px but it happens regardless of the size of the brush.

Mind-blowing. Just fantastic mate.

Thanks SrPx. Very much appreciated!

New forum member here. Just wanted to share some art, specifically an alternative movie poster I drew recently. I enjoy the hand-drawn and painted film poster aesthetic of days gone by. This poster is inspired by the tremendous poster by British illustrator Paul Shipper and so includes a few nods to his wonderful work. It is completely hand-drawn in Affinity Photo. I had been experimenting with other apps (Procreate, Photoshop, Pixelmator Pro et al) and have found that Affinity Photo fits my needs and wants. I had a quick look at the forum and didn't see much hand-drawn raster art so thought I would share. Have included a couple of detail images as well. Chris www.theartofadventure.net