AlienAlpaca

Sima, thanks for the linked images. The two of them are very similar, I don't know that I could tell a difference.

Thanks everyone for the help. It seems like there's a lot of ways to do this, and it's not real clear in Affinity Photo how resizing works compared to Photoshop, which is vastly different. If it were, there wouldn't be a good number of posts on the forum about this. To give you an idea of why this has presented itself as a issue, maybe you can see if my workflow (from photoshop) makes any sense at all. A small portion of my job is to edit images for customers.. by edit, I mean crop out irrelevant bits, sometimes fix levels, and almost always reduce the size. They have to be optimized for web publishing as a jpg. PNG is only allowed if we need transparency on a graphic. In photoshop, my employer has us: open an image fix levels if needed and depending on the need of customer, use the marquis tool to select the portion of the image we need and copy/paste it to a new file. Or, crop, preferably using the constrained crop tool with a specific dimension so we don't have to resize the image from Image > Resize Image menu If we cannot crop to a size, then we obviously do as necessary with the tool, and resize the image manually in the image > resize menu, using bicubic resampling. Then, we have to do file > save as a jpg > optimize to a setting of 10. Then file save for web (now a legacy feature) quality 72. Save as same file name as the save you just did with a optimized setting of 10. Personally, I think the first file save is totally un necessary, but for me to use Affinity Photo, they are mandating a similar workflow. I just got stuck as the guinea pig who's barely able to operate the manual settings on my digital camera, let alone work these types of apps. That said, just to test it myself, I cropped the original image of the car (from the onedrive link above), and exported it as jpg in affinity and photoshop elements using the max options for optimization, bicubic resampling, and the results are here.. personally, I think the PSE file still looks better.

Ok, I definitely see it there. Real noticeable on the mgm sign. So, this opens another question. When you do a resize and shrink, you have to resample. Lanczos for example, if you use that. Then - when you need to export the image from Affinity Photo as a jpg, you have to resample again it seems. In Photoshop, you can do save for web and it'll ask you for the quality 0-100. Since the compression in Affinity is different than Photoshop, what would be a comparable option in Affinity to a setting of 72 in Photoshop?

To be honest, the images on the left look better. I'm no pro - but it just looks like a finer image over all than the one on the right. Am I wrong?

That is possible. I'm unsure what the equivalent compression settings are between affinity when exported as jpg and photoshop elements when exported for web as jpg actually are. That disconnect (with me) could be the source of the issue I'm having.

Sorry about that, not sure what happened. Anyway, I've edited the post above yours (MEB) with a microsoft onedrive link that has the photos, which should work just fine. Sorry about that! Thanks for the help everyone, as well.

Soirry for the delay. I didn't have a lot of time to be creative with the way this is laid out, and I wasn't sure I could upload so many comparison images to these forums. Here's a link to a shared OneDrive folder the originals, the ones from affinity, paintshop pro, pixlr, and photoshop elements. Hopefully this link works. There are 4 images, nothing inappropriate, totally safe for work.

I thought of that as well. The issue is opening the image after it's been cropped > resized (down) > exported as jpg. It looks awful even at a actual view zoom. It's very late and I have to be up early. Will post them tomorrow. Thx for patience

I requested a refund from Serif. Honestly, I'm really torn in requesting that, I love their other software and have quite a bit of it installed on my computer. But, this is just bad. I can provide example images cropped, resized (shrank) and exported as jpg from affinity and photoshop (or even other apps like paintshop pro x9, pixlr, paint.net, etc) and affinity exports look awful, distorted, fuzzy, grainy. It seems sampling is irrelevant, one method might look better than another, but they still turn out bad. Not sharp photos.

Hi there I just got Affinity Photo after a bad experience with Adobe. I don't use it for Professional photo editing stuff, just the basics, (which is to say I have no idea how to use 90% of the features in this program) and so far I'm having an issue with resizing images. I know you can't resize something to be bigger without distortion, usually. But shrinking? I had to resize an image earlier and the end result was jagged and fuzzy, the quality suffered. I looked in the help files to see which resampling mode to use and was using bilinear. I even tried to crop to a specific constrained size and the end result was still really bad. Is there a trick to this? When I took the same source images into another app and shrank them, they turned out fine. I can upload the images (before / after) if desired.