Emboss effect fix?

[Medical Officer Bones]

Does anyone know of a method to fix the ugly banding in this emboss effect in Affinity Photo? I don't want to use soften. The emboss/bevel should remain sharp looking.

No matter what I try, the banding persists. It's as if a low resolution 3d mesh is used without normal smoothing applied (to speak in 3d terminology).

I attached the original file.

emboss_ugly.afphoto

[PixelPest]

There´s a "Soften" parameter in the Bevel/Emboss and 3D  section of the layer fx. Have you tried that?

[Medical Officer Bones]

Yes, of course. I mentioned I don't want to use that option because it softens the edges too much, and before the banding sort-of is smoothed out, the entire look is destroyed and far too blurred.

[AlainP]

If you play with the "Light Source" directions you can make it better or worst... the more contrast the worst it gets. I did not find a way to make it look good.

[AffinityJules]

I've had the very same problem with the emboss effect and have never found a solution. It's almost like someone used a chisel to cut out the letters and then forgot to use sandpaper to smooth it all out. I don't know if alternative photo editors have the same issue or if this is unique to AF.

I would suggest that a smoothing option is needed alongside the soften option.

Forward it to feature requests.

[Medical Officer Bones]

5 hours ago, AffinityJules said:

I've had the very same problem with the emboss effect and have never found a solution. It's almost like someone used a chisel to cut out the letters and then forgot to use sandpaper to smooth it all out. I don't know if alternative photo editors have the same issue or if this is unique to AF.

I would suggest that a smoothing option is needed alongside the soften option.

Forward it to feature requests.

Photoshop/InDesign do a pretty poor job too, as does the online PhotoPea. Both Adobe and Affinity generate unusable sharp bevels/embossing.

Corel Painter's "Bevel World" layer effect does a good job, as do the layer effect in PhotoLine and Xara's bevel tool. Xara includes a real 3d extruded bevel effect as well. All are live effects, and look far better when compared to Affinity and Adobe.

Technically it should be achievable then for the Affinity devs to achieve a similar quality effect. The current quality of the sharp bevel effect in Photo is unacceptable, unfortunately.

I hope they will pick up on this and improve the effect.

[Pšenda]

6 minutes ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

I hope they will pick up

Instead of praying, it might be a better write a requirement for the desired function with a demonstration of how it should look right :-)

[firstdefence]

I have logoist 3 and it does the same thing, the only way I can see is to construct the letters and add gradients and overlays to get the smooth bevel effect. You could add a flat bevel and use this as a guide, then construct the letter objects by tracing over them.

Another avenue would be to use 3D software, this will produce much better results and you have much more control over the results.

[DWright]

If you use the soften option and adjust the profile in both the bevel/emboss and 3D effects and then you can remove the banding on the effect as shown in the amended version of your file

emboss_ugly amended.afphoto

[Pšenda]

47 minutes ago, DWright said:

and then you can remove the banding on the effect

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think this is what MOBones demands.
To me he requires sharp edges and sharp transitions/boundaries of individual layers, but it bothers the edges on the curves, see "It's as if a low resolution 3d mesh".

This is correct:

This is incorrect (too jagged):

[Medical Officer Bones]

8 hours ago, DWright said:

If you use the soften option and adjust the profile in both the bevel/emboss and 3D effects and then you can remove the banding on the effect as shown in the amended version of your file

The wanted bevel is a straightforward sharp looking one, not a rounded fuzzy effect.

This is a simplified version in Affinity:

Notice the visible steps. The soften parameter will soften the bevel's edges too much, and cannot be applied.

The following three examples are produced in Corel Painter (Bevel World layer effect), PhotoLine (layer effect), and Xara (bevel tool). Notice the smooth looking transitions of the bevels. I am not including Photoshop's inner emboss layer effect, because it fails in this case as well, and is not worth the effort.

It seems it is possible to achieve a nice looking usable sharp-edged emboss effect in other software. Obviously I could use 3d software (Blender, for example) to create even more interesting looking 3d lettering, but here I just want to create a simple bevel/embossing effect, which seems impossible to pull off adequately in Affinity with its layer effect.

 

 

[firstdefence]

The last one Xara is similar to the effect I get in C4D.

[firstdefence]

This problem was niggling me so I set too trying to either eliminate or at the very least reduce the obviousness of the banding with this bevel effect and I think I've found a way to reduce the banding by quite a bit. see image below. You can still see a bit of the banding if you zoom in on the effect but it's greatly reduced, adjusting the opacity a bit more would likely eliminate the banding altogether.

 

It's also ridiculously simple... just drop the opacity in the 3D or Emboss Fx to 15-20%

There is however a payoff in reduced contrast but that can be brought back by making a duplicate of the letter or words and changing the blend mode to Colour Burn.

Conclusion: This is an almost there project, maybe a few additional creative minds could add to these steps to get something acceptable.

[Medical Officer Bones]

5 hours ago, firstdefence said:

There is however a payoff in reduced contrast but that can be brought back by making a duplicate of the letter or words and changing the blend mode to Colour Burn.

The trouble is that duplicating the layer two or three times to increase the contrast again returns the visible banding. It's an original attempt to solve this, but "close but no sigar" comes to mind :-)

No, it should be fixed by the developers.

[firstdefence]

17 minutes ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

The trouble is that duplicating the layer two or three times to increase the contrast again returns the visible banding. It's an original attempt to solve this, but "close but no sigar" comes to mind :-)

No, it should be fixed by the developers.

Agreed

[Medical Officer Bones]

On 10/25/2019 at 1:43 PM, firstdefence said:

The last one Xara is similar to the effect I get in C4D.

I snapped up Xara Designer Pro last year in a Humble Bundle deal for $10, or so. For quick 3d lettering alone it is actually quite useful, and definitely worth it. Can't compare to an actual 3d app, of course, but it still looks "juicy", if somewhat generic, and the speed at which these can be churned out is impressive. This example took two minutes - mostly time spent on adjusting the three point lighting for each. Can't beat that speed!

And it renders to a high quality vector. These are not bitmaps in Xara, which is something to consider as well. Unfortunately, trying to export these as vector for import in other applications will not work (I tried!).

[firstdefence]

52 minutes ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

I snapped up Xara Designer Pro last year in a Humble Bundle deal for $10, or so. For quick 3d lettering alone it is actually quite useful, and definitely worth it. Can't compare to an actual 3d app, of course, but it still looks "juicy", if somewhat generic, and the speed at which these can be churned out is impressive. This example took two minutes - mostly time spent on adjusting the three point lighting for each. Can't beat that speed!

And it renders to a high quality vector. These are not bitmaps in Xara, which is something to consider as well. Unfortunately, trying to export these as vector for import in other applications will not work (I tried!).

I can remember Xara from my time on Windows, but they look neat, such a shame there is always an issue somewhere down the line.

[PixelPest]

MacOS user can check out ArtText for this kind of stuff.

[firstdefence]

9 hours ago, PixelPest said:

MacOS user can check out ArtText for this kind of stuff.

While it makes nice looking text it exports the 3D text as images regardless of the format, it will export basic and 2D text as curves but icons and buttons also get rasterised and exported as an image. 

If you don't want vector export of icons buttons and 3D text then it's a neat tool, also if you don't mind 3D text and buttons and icons being rasterised it's a neat fast and furious tool to knock out some funky raster assets. 

[firstdefence]

Well a bit more of a play with ArtText 3, making custom warping shapes can be a bit hit and miss because it doesn't appear to have any constraints features on the nodes or node handles, it's all by eye, there aren't any guides or rulers either and if you export to the clipboard and paste basic text into Affinity Designer it pastes as a curve clipping mask over a coloured rectangle.  You can pull the curve clipping mask from the colour rectangle and work on that instead and it is much faster than a video I've just seen in another post so for all of it's foibles it's a faster way to get warped text into the Affinity ecosystem.

[mjair23]

just soften the blow on the emboss, and get your shades high.

[Pšenda]

Hi @firstdefence, doesn't your post belong to another thread?

[firstdefence]

3 hours ago, Pšenda said:

Hi @firstdefence, doesn't your post belong to another thread?

No was just going off on a slight detour with PixelPests app option and running a few tests to see how it did with export and import, while the results look good the export options are weak with all but the basic stuff being rasterised and very little precise controls, else it would have been a great external tool. I did release this to another post as well. I'd had an expresso so went a bit feral posting lol!

I think the upshot to all of this is, if you want vector text in 3D or 2D with good clean bevels it has to be done manually. You could I suppose use the export from these external apps as references when making 3D and bevelled text so it's not a total loss.

[Pšenda]

5 hours ago, firstdefence said:

a slight detour

I did not understand the direct connection with "Emboss effect fix?" :-) 

[HuniSenpai]

Method 1: Time consuming but high quality result

Here's a time consuming yet highly effective fix that I came up with. But it takes time and requires you to rasterize the layer (annoying if you need to change the text later): 

 

Method 2: Quicker but far lower quality

If you want a quick fix then you can duplicate the rasterized beveled text, and then apply a blur to that. Then, with the blurred layer selected, click the gear icon at the top right of the layer panel. This will pop up a window. Place a point on the "underlying composition ranges" graph that is equal to the lightness value of your text color (my text was 33%, for example. Double click on color bubble and look at "L" in HSL section). Then drag that point down all the way. Then bring everything else back up on the graph. Then bring white down all the way (this only works on a white background btw). Graph should have a valley at pure white and at the lightness of your actual text face. Should look something like this:

The problem is that the first blur step that you do is accidentally getting some of the front face (since you're not doing any selecting) and it makes the effect not quite as sharp:

Here's how it looks if you use method 1:

And here's how it looks if you don't do anything: