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(Photo) Loosing quality after rotating, even for elements added after that


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Hi,

I couldn't find an existing topic about this problem that is really bothering me...

I'm trying to draw on Photo, did a few illustrations for now and I often need to adjust, resize, rotate some elements as I'm used to with the Photoshop's transform tool.

But rotating something is a really big problem here ! Any rotated layer kind of loses quality forever. Not only the existing drawing on it is altered, but also any stroke that I would draw then. It also applies if I merge this layer with another one : the non-rotated one will loose all his "smoothness" too.

Here's a quick demonstration of the problem.

I really hope it's something I can fix, or I won't be able to continue on Photo... Thanks for your help ! 🙇‍♀️

 

 

Annotation 2020-02-25 170923.jpg

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Can you attach a screen grab of the Performance panel of your Preferences please?
Also, would you be able to attach a video of what you are doing?
There are so many ways that you could be doing what you are doing that it’s difficult to advise without knowing the exact sequence of events.

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Hi Garry,

Here's my "Performance" panel.

About the exact sequence, well it's quite simple :

- I'm in the middle of drawing something, and I need to change the angle of some part of my drawing

- I make sure the active layer is the one I need to rotate

- I click on the move tool, the blue frame appears around the element(s) of the layer

- I get my cursor near a corner of the frame so the rotate icon appears, I rotate to the angle I need (may it be 10 ° or a lot more..), I confirm.

- From now on, what already was on the rotated layer get very "jagged" edges (sorry I'm not sure about the meaning in English but I think that's the appropriate word), and whatever I would add on it get this problem as well. I mean even if I draw a straight, horizontal or vertical line (see my example above), it gets these weird jagged edges. If I merge another layer with this one, everything's altered. If I make a rectangular selection and start colouring inside it, until I fill it, the same thing will appear : jagged edges right outside the selection edges... I really don't get it.

 

Thanks for trying to help.

 

 

Annotation 2020-02-26 124408.jpg

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You have View Quality set to Nearest Neighbour which, from my little experience, isn’t usually the best for general work. Try setting it to Bilinear instead.
Dither Gradients is also switched off. This probably isn’t relevant to what you are doing but I generally find better results with it switched on.
Can you try these two things first – switch to Bilinear and set Dither Gradients ON – and see if that makes a difference before we look into other possible solutions?

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Unfortunately, I can't see much difference... but I'll keep in mind your advice about these settings.

(I forgot to mention, obviously my screens are taken while zooming in, but the problem also appear on the jpg or png export).

Also I tried playing with the pixel alignment settings, but no difference either...

1310795820_Annotation2020-02-26154219.jpg.d9f233f07027ab4df2c75526818cf7ad.jpg

Do you yourself get this loss of quality when trying to rotate anything like a simple square ? You can even see how the arrow I drew after is quite ugly...

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Photo will, normally, display everything according to the document DPI setting so, when you’re zoomed in (and/or have a low DPI), everything will look at least a little bit pixelated. (One exception to this is Image Layers.)
Without being able to play with the actual file it’s difficult to know what’s happening or whether it’s actually doing anything wrong.
I’ve attached an example image of a few things on an 800×800 pixel 72DPI document that’s zoomed-in to 200%. This is how I would expect to see the various things being displayed.

Annotation 2020-02-27 092121.png

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I am struggling to replicate this in the same way as you are showing in the OP. I'm not sure quite how you are adding to an existing layer that is rotated. Certainly if I create a rounded rectangle, duplicate it, rotate one to get some aliasing on the edges and then merge that with the other using 'merge visible' in the layers panel, then the one that isn't rotated looks exactly the same as it did before the merge.

However, I'm thinking this may be down to the non-destructive nature of the Affinity products, and the nesting of layers etc. but even nesting a few things I'm struggling to end up with that same level of distortion that you show in the OP.

Depending on what you are doing you may find Designer a better package to work with as it is much more vector based meaning you don't get any pixellation until you export to a raster format at the end of the creation process. If you are working with a lot of flat colours and graphic shapes then certainly designer will be a much better choice IMHO. Plus with Affinity Designer you still get the luxury of having pixel layers to add texture etc. to those graphic shapes so for illustration it's a great choice.

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@GarryP I meant I knew by zooming in I was showing the problem in an "exaggerated" way, but I can see the quality loss at 100 % and on the export, and that's the problem...

I get the problem with any file, any resolution, and on two different computers so I can't figure out what to do... I'm simply not able to make a square and keep it as neat as yours after rotating. 

So for example if I'm drawing a character's outlines, and realize half-way I made it not standing straight enough, I'll want to rotate it... not only the existing lines will get blurred, but when I go on with the rest of his body, I'll get these jagged edges on my brush (or any drawing tool) like in my OP. The only thing I can do then is redrawing everything on a new layer I'll never rotate...

 

Hi @Dazzler,

Well you seem to be indeed doing the same steps but don't get the same results... I don't know if it gives me hope or confuses me even more ^^" 

I'm already familiar with vector illustrations, doing it on a daily basis for work, but Designer wouln't be appropriate for the kind of drawing I talking about. Here I really wanted to replace Photoshop with Photo. 

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Hmm... Unfortunately I think I’ve exhausted my small diagnostic bag of tricks on this one.
It’s the ‘fuzziness’ you showed in your first image that’s throwing me.
That doesn’t look like normal antialiasing, which I would expect.
It’s almost as if some kind of ‘blur filter’ has been applied.
If I could stand in front of your monitor and see the effect first-hand then I might get some inspiration but I just don’t know what to suggest next, sorry.
Hopefully someone will see this and be able to tell you exactly what the problem is. Maybe the cause is something so basic that I’ve simply dismissed it as a possiblity without thinking about it properly.

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