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Disable sub-pixel smoothing


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I'm having an extremely difficult time doing pixel editing which I believe is due to sub-pixels smoothing, that is when a pixel is dragged off alignment the opacity changes to reflect the offset. The screenshot below is resizing a block of pixels but I'm having this problem with pasting and many other areas.

Can I disable this somehow? I've been tried to enable snapping but it doesn't seem to make any difference. I basically just want the same behavior I would get in Photoshop.

first.png

second.png

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Welcome to the forums.
I could easily be wrong but I don’t think you can stop this when you are stretching a pixel layer. I asked about this a while back and, if I remember correctly, it’s because of how it has to stretch the pixels in the layer to the new size. The software doesn’t ‘know’ that all of the pixels in the same line should be the same colour.
However, you can duplicate the stretched layer a few times and merge the original with the duplicates. That sometimes works but it’s a manual process.

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It's a problem of the filtering method used and sub-pixel sampling which determines opacity. Here's another screenshot of the same issue. Affinity will not let me select pixels on the actual grid lines which is extremely annoying and hen it uses sub-pixel sampling when dragging around the layer so the opacity on the edges gets altered. There must be a way to turn this off so we get 1 to 1 mapping and nearest neighbor filtering.

Screen Shot 2020-01-24 at 6.29.56 PM.png

Screen Shot 2020-01-24 at 6.30.16 PM.png

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I don’t really understand this area very well, so I’m probably not the best person to give a good answer.
However, while you wait for an expert, you can change the View Quality to Nearest Neighbour in Preferences / Performance, which might help a little bit (see attached video).

Note: I have no idea how this affects exports.

Edited by GarryP
Added note.
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Thanks Gary, changing the filtering does work. This is a hack though which should be handled differently. You can see in the screen that now the sampling is correct but the selection still shows being at 50% of the pixel because it's still using sub-pixel locations. There probably needs an option to which doesn't allow any locations that are not integers. I'll see what the developers have to say about this.

Screen Shot 2020-01-24 at 8.10.22 PM.png

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10 hours ago, GenericPtr said:

You can see in the screen that now the sampling is correct but the selection still shows being at 50% of the pixel because it's still using sub-pixel locations.

It is just using the center of each pixel location as a visual reference for the object's extent. There are many logical possibilities for that (the center, each of the 4 corners, & the center of each of the edges), but unlike some other apps, Affinity does not try to dynamically choose among them depending on the assumed context of how users want to move or otherwise edit the document's pixel, vector or text objects. So for example, in Affinity if "Force Pixel Alignment" is enabled & a vector object is moved, it is left to the user to take into account the width of strokes because even & odd pixel width stroke can't both align on pixel centers, nor of course can non-integer stroke widths.

View quality has nothing to do with the document's objects themselves, just how they are displayed (thus "view" in the name).

Smoothing is the result of anti-aliasing. There is a way to control that on a per layer basis (but AFAIK only for vector objects) using the Blend Ranges option accessible from the gear menu in the Layers panel -- in the Blend Options window that opens, click on Coverage Map & modify it, for instance creating a stair-step curve like this one:

739457609_coveragemap.jpg.b9d2f8f9f406c43ef13eaf62f24cf12c.jpg

Obviously, this is less than ideal for pixel based artwork, so for that other apps are a better choice.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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I didn't have problems with this using Photoshop so I think Affinity is just missing some options and in my opinion should default to PS behavior since so many of us are migrating from Adobe. Is this a feature request I can make? I'd like to use Affinity to replace Photoshop but I think I'll have to go back because pixel editing doesn't appear to well supported.

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9 minutes ago, GenericPtr said:

 Is this a feature request I can make?

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/52-feature-requests-suggestions/

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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I'm also having problems merely selecting a block of 8x8 pixels because of the sub pixel accuracy (no, holding down shift doesn't work as expected). I've never had a graphics program be so finicky and it's honestly hard to believe a product as mature as Affinity doesn't behave normally. I should have tested more before I purchased but I'll make a feature request anyways.

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3 minutes ago, GenericPtr said:

I'm also having problems merely selecting a block of 8x8 pixels ...

What kind of layer (curve, pixel, image, etc.) are you trying to make the selection on, & what tool(s) have you tried to do this with?

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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