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You can choose your own blend gamma and antialiasing ramp on a per-object basis by clicking the little cog icon in the Layers panel with your object selected. You should be able to get any effect you desire through there, but I appreciate it might be nice to have some presets available from a dropdown for the sake of ease of use?

 

Let us know if that gives you enough control over your text rendering :)

 

Thanks,

Matt

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You can choose your own blend gamma and antialiasing ramp on a per-object basis by clicking the little cog icon in the Layers panel with your object selected. 

 

Oh my!  Thank you for the tip.  Very power curves indeed.  I wouldn't want to spend hours trying to exactly recreate Photoshop's "Smooth, Crisp, etc" settings, but I do see that the Coverage Map curve gives me power to strip all anti-aliasing away completely, simply by pulling the curve to one of the far corners (making it 90° rather than a curve).

 

Thanks.

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Yes, that ramp is useful - but the blend gamma slider to the left is probably the simplest way to control sharpness of text 

 

Very strange.  I am testing WHITE text atop a dark gray background, and moving that Blend Gamma slider has no affect whatsoever on the text.  But the Coverage Map does have a visible affect.

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  • 7 months later...

What is the equivalent to text antialiasing : none using the blend options?

I want to get pixel fonts to display exactly as they were designed and I'm having trouble using the coverage map to accomplish this.

 

Love the fine grained detail you can get with these blend options, but they are too time consuming to play with for most applications.

Would love to see presets added to this features with some basic sharp/strong/smooth/none options for starters and ability to save your own too.

 

Thanks!

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Oooo - I see that "coverage map" has "save profile".  That's great.

 

Yes, that ramp is useful - but the blend gamma slider to the left is probably the simplest way to control sharpness of text

 
I'm also not seeing any change at all with text using the gamma slider - just the coverage map changes the text anti-aliasing effect.
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What is the equivalent to text antialiasing : none using the blend options?

 

The answer lies earlier in this thread.   But here it is more plainly, using steps:

 

1. New document, say 800x600 for Web.

2. Type sample text using "BitDust One" or similar bitmapped font that looks best with no anti-aliasing. Make it 60pt, for a test.

3. With your text selected, click the "Layers" tab at right.

4. Click the "cog" icon (inside the Layers tab).

5. Click "Coverage Map" in the upper right.

6. Drag the middle square tab all the way to the upper left.

 

But this is still not the same as Photoshop for 2 reasons:

 

A. Photoshop's text anti-aliasing settings are more readily accessible (faster to use)

B. Photoshop's "None" anti-aliasing setting makes text look its best.

 

If you have Photoshop and duplicate Steps 1-6 above (the equivalent of them), you will understand what I mean in point {B} above.  More specifically, in Affinity Photo (AP), dragging the Coverage Map curve to the upper left makes the text a tad more bold than what it is in its optimized state.  But more worrisome than that is that the dots (squares in the bitmap) don't line up perfectly in AP.  They do in Photoshop.  What I mean is, say you have 2 squares.  You want to make them align with each other at 45°.  So you put the top-right corner of the lower square up against the bottom-left corner of your upper square.  That is perfect alignment.  That is how your fonts look in Photoshop with no anti-aliasing.  But in AP, you cannot achieve that via the "Coverage Map" curve.  The bits (squares) are not in perfect alignment.  You can make the text look bolder, but again, the alignment is not perfect.  

 

AP ScreenShot: http://cl.ly/0f2Q1n2u3h3G/Image%202016-03-11%20at%209.09.32%20AM.png

PS ScreenShot: http://cl.ly/2x0l3w0o1r33/Image%202016-03-11%20at%209.12.13%20AM.png

 

Also note how AP screws up the inside of the "O" in "ONE" in my screenshot.  Bug?  Or hopeless limitation of the Coverage Map feature?  I don't know.

 

Moreover, if you pull AP's "Coverage Map" curve to the bottom-right corner, the font will have a thinner look.  But the caveat is that there will be GAPS between the corners of your bits (squares).  That may not be desirable.

 

I like the power that AP offers, but I also want the SAME TEXT ANTI-ALIASING SETTINGS as Photoshop.  Once we have BOTH, then we will truly be all powerful!  :-)  Until then, I must continue to use Photoshop.

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Hi JDW,

 

I haven't tried it yet as I'm replying to a number of posts having just got to work, so my apologies if this is not the case, but I would imagine that if you set the coverage map so that it had a sharp transition around the mid-point from 0 (bottom) to 1 (top) that you will get what you're looking for. Photoshop's antialiasing options will almost certainly be doing exactly the same thing, but offering it up as a preset from a drop-down. We can obviously look to add this in the future, but you should be able to access the functionality in the meantime.

 

Again, my apologies if this is not correct, but it really should work.

 

Thanks,

Matt

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I haven't tried it yet as I'm replying to a number of posts having just got to work, so my apologies if this is not the case, but I would imagine that if you set the coverage map so that it had a sharp transition around the mid-point from 0 (bottom) to 1 (top) that you will get what you're looking for. 

 

Not true, unfortunately, Matt. When you have time, please view the 2 screenshots in my previous post.  That clarifies exactly what I was saying.

 

To test it yourself, using the same font I mentioned, download the font here:

 

http://www.dafont.com/bitdust-one.font

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What MattP means is that you should drag the top right corner handle to the top middle position and the left bottom corner handle to the bottom middle position so that you get a vertical line in the middle.

 

I cannot accomplish that via the "Coverage Map" curve.  The upper right handle only moves VERTICALLY.  Ditto for the lower left handle.  It is therefore impossible to get a vertical line in the center of the "Coverage Map" curve that I can see.  And a Horizontal line only makes the text partly gray and partly black -- a mess.

 

Our back-and-forth is also laughable for one big reason -- it emphasizes why we really need an easier method in Affinity Photo, something akin to what Photoshop has.  More power is great unless it's impossible to figure out or time consuming to implement.

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… but the blend gamma slider to the left is probably the simplest way to control sharpness of text :)

 

 

Joking aside, professionals don’t want to change the weights. The real Affinity solution would be a sharpness slider, that generates constant weights.  :wub:

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Well you have to add two nodes and you can save it as a preset.

Hope that helps

Thank you, but I'll stick with Photoshop until this is improved in AP. (I say this as someone who bought Affinity Photo and Designer, mind you.)

 

This thread is all the proof Serif needs on why adding a Photoshop style text anti-aliasing pop up to Affinity Photo is a MUST. The existing functionality is fiddly and slow and you have to be trained to use it. No... Just NO.

 

Serif, please just add a text anti-aliasing pop up quickly, and then let's move on to even more important improvements.

 

Thanks.

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Totally agree, that Affinity needs something with usability like a professional sharpness slider.

 

But more worrisome than that is that the dots (squares in the bitmap) don't line up perfectly in AP.  They do in Photoshop.  What I mean is, say you have 2 squares.  … in AP, you cannot achieve that via the "Coverage Map" curve.  The bits (squares) are not in perfect alignment.

 

AP is not easy to use here, but it can. Made with AP and BitDust One:

 

24848858zq.png

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Totally agree, that Affinity needs something with usability like a professional sharpness slider. AP is not easy to use here, but it can. Made with AP and BitDust One

I'm glad we agree, and thank you for the screenshot. There's much power in using OS X's Terminal too to accomplish various tasks in OS X, but arguably, it is a less intuitive and sometimes a slower approach that using the GUI. In like manner, fiddling with curves in AP only to eliminate text anti-aliasing is ridiculous.

 

Serif, please add a text anti-aliasing pop up to AP at the earliest possible time. Thanks.

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  • 3 months later...
  • 2 months later...

I too was looking for a version of Adobe Photoshop's Text Anti-Aliasing feature, as I needed 8pt font in a graphic to be readable when displayed online. I had tried the suggestions here, but it still didn't quite look right. After spending about an hour playing around with the curves, I found the following to best mimic Adobe's "Crisp" preset. Hope this helps anyone looking for the same (not the vertical line is to the left of center):

 

post-36199-0-70648400-1472834541_thumb.png

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After spending about an hour playing around with the curves, I found the following to best mimic Adobe's "Crisp" preset.

Mark, thank you.

 

Serif engineers, let us reason together. Should Affinity app lovers be forced to fiddle for one hour to create just the right curve to anti-alias text? Or should there not rather be a simple pull-down menu command that takes all of one second? Logic dictates the right answer to that question. Please address this important issue in the next update. Thank you.

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  • 1 month later...

I also want a standard anti-aliasing types for texts like a

  • None
  • Sharp
  • Crisp
  • Strong
  • Smooth

Curves is a great feature for playing with the anti-aliasing settings, but in most cases it is not so convenient as default presets like a in the PS. I look forward to the appearance of this feature in the future updates, but in the meantime because of this still has to go back to the PS for working with texts :'(

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  • 1 month later...
  • 1 month later...

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