pixelArt image blow up

[liakos]

oks, i am now the proud owner af all 3 affinity products, and i still have to resort to gimp to blow up my pixel art. therefore, i kindly request that there is an option to manipulate image size as gimp does, with optionally no interpolation at all. please do that. i love your products but it seems ridiculous that i don't have the option not to interpolate when i change size. imagine having to do that after color correcting 2000 gifs for an image sequence. imagine colorcorrecting it in APhoto, but needing to blow it up elsewhere, cause it auto-interpolates the crispness of the pixel art... you're killing me.

 

[MEB]

Hi liakos,
Have you tried to change the Resample dropdown from Bilinear to Nearest Neighbour when upscaling them (using Document > Resize Document command)? Or are you trying to scale them up on canvas dragging the corners of the bounding box? This last method will not work since Affinity apps use Bilinear when resampling them on canvas.

[liakos]

44 minutes ago, MEB said:

Hi liakos,
Have you tried to change the Resample dropdown from Bilinear to Nearest Neighbour when upscaling them (using Document > Resize Document command)? Or are you trying to scale them up on canvas dragging the corners of the bounding box? This last method will not work since Affinity apps use Bilinear when resampling them on canvas.

it still distorts, we need "NONE"

 

[MEB]

Hi liakos,
Do you mind posting a sample affinity file showing what are you trying to upscale and to what size please? It's possible i'm misunderstanding your request but would like to double-check what's going on. Thanks.

[Medical Officer Bones]

I think the OP means that up-scaling pixel art at values other than 2x, 3x, 4x, etc. Affinity Photo will introduce soft interpolated anti-aliased pixels when viewed. This destroys the intent of pixel art.

Here is an example. The original is 20x24 pixels. Up-scaling to 150x180px results in fuzzy edges in Affinity's viewport. The same operation in Gimp, Photoshop, PhotoLine, Krita, ColorQuantizer, etcetera, creates a clean upscaled version in the viewport.

Yet when the upscaled version is exported with nearest neighbor, the result is correct without any soft edges.

In short, the result as shown in Photo does not match the exported version. Internally the image is fine, yet it is displayed interpolated.

A work-around is to close the original document after up-scaling, and open the new exported version: it will display correct.

As far as I can tell, this behaviour is caused by Affinity Photo's internal decimal pixel handling. No other image editor behaves like this, and I feel it is a bug. I was bewildered by this myself during testing, because it is completely counter-intuitive, and I haven't ever experienced similar behaviour in any other bitmap editor.

I tried fiddling around with the pixel snapping options to see if this behaviour could be avoided, but so far no luck.

Anyway, definitely room for improvement. Very confusing.

*Edit* Weird, I had one last try, and now it seems to work. Must be a combination of settings...

[MEB]

Hi Medical Officer Bones,
If you try to upscale the object/layer directly on canvas it will end up antialiased/blurry because Affinity uses Bilinear resampling to upscale it. There's no way to control the algorithm used here, but if you go to Document > Resize Document... dialog, set the new size (must be a multiple of the original value so 2x, 3x etc to keep proportions correct) and change the Resample to Nearest Neighbour it should give you a correct output (no antialiasing/no distortion of any type). Same as Photoshop.