Search the Community

Hello, I don't know if these are bugs or just limitations of the application and iPad, but I figured I would write a bug report about them since these issues strongly hinder how I use Affinity Designer on my iPad. I am also bundling what I would normally consider two separate bugs because I found them together and they cause mutually exclusive issues for me. If you guys want me to format my report any differently in the future, just let me know. Ok, so the issues I am having stem from the smudge brush tool and specifically how it works when the color space is set to RGB/8. I was experimenting using the smudge brush to create a smooth blend between two colors. What ended up happening, however, is that the colors would become very distorted. When I was trying to blend a burnt orange and dark-ish blue, the blending would eventually smear to pink in stark contrast from what the blend is supposed to make (see first attached image). I tested the same blend in Procreate as a reference and it had no such issues at all. I got the weird smeary brown I expected to get. After experimenting to try to understand the issue better, I found that if I set the color space of the document to RGB/16 instead of RGB/8 that the issue went away entirely. I tried the same blend of colors and got the correct result I was expecting to get from smudging these two colors together (see first attached image again). I also found that blending colors in general via any method seemed to generally work better in the RGB/16 color space (I kept getting a sort of stripy effect in RGB/8) so I was very pleased with the find. So with that, I thought, problem fixed! I can do everything I want now with no issues. I was anticipating a performance hit of some kind for using the higher bit depth, but there didn't seem to be any downside to the change. Well, that held true until I tried to do some hatching. So, what I found is that I can make a singular contiguous stroke of any length at any speed my hand can manage and Affinity Designer responds amazingly quick, almost instantaneously. It is wonderful. However, I also found that if I make a lot of rapid strokes of any length with any brush, Affinity cannot keep up. If I keep making little hatching strokes, the delay can range from 0.5-1.5 seconds to 5-10 seconds. So I can make a lot of marks, then pull my pen away from the screen, and over the next several seconds watch as Designer slowly populates in my brush strokes. This is a fairly frustrating issue because I use hatching a lot and it even hinders normal handwriting. Please see the attached video to see my demonstration of the issue. Also, the delay in fast stroke rendering varies over time and seems to change based on the length of time I have been using my iPad, not with document complexity or resolution. The delay is smallest after I freshly restart my iPad, and is longest after using it for some hours. I also tested these issues in Affinity Photo. I found that the behavior of the Smudge Brush Tool is the same, but there is no delay in rendering fast strokes in RGB/16 mode. With that being the case, I could theoretically just use Affinity Photo for drawing/painting instead of Designer, but the Artboards feature of Designer is just so dang useful that I loath to give it up. For my hardware and software info, I am using the 2020 iPad Pro and the version of Affinity Designer is 1.8.6.1. The version of Affinity Photo I am using is 1.8.6.198. Let me know if you have any questions or if you need any additional information from me. Thank you, Collin Image 1: Demonstration of RGB/8 vs. RGB/16 smudging Video 1: Demonstration of the delay in rendering fast strokes in RGB/16 mode PXL_20201214_215420542.mp4