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Blurring everything


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Once again, after a long time working on a collage, I note that the image becomes more and more blurred. I set a person over a background, and worked to make the cutout integrate better with the background. When I now copy paste the original person again into the background, the original is clearly much less blurred. I even have "move whole pixels" activated all the time. Why is Affinity so immensely destructive????

See the example, below is the person after I was working on it, on top I placed the original again.

AfPhoto really it totally unreliable. I am thinking about moving over to Pixelmator instead.

 

Bildschirmfoto 2020-04-25 um 11.38.23.png

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5 hours ago, Thomahawk said:

I even have "move whole pixels" activated all the time.

Keep in mind that this option may not ensure placement exactly on whole pixels. It only ensures that it shifts by a whole pixel, ie from 18,435 to 19,435, for example.

Recommended is "Force Pixel Alignment", and disable "Move By Whole Pixels".

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In my mind bitmap layers should never ever be affected by non-decimal movement/placement. Bitmap pixel information must be maintained, and Affinity's behaviour is somewhat unacceptable. The user should not be forced to turn on pixel alignment to prevent the blurring of bitmap information.

With vectors and text this behaviour is understandable, and it is correct to have adjustable options how to render the pixels.  Not when editing bitmap layers, however. Pixels must be absolute, and not be affected by such settings.

Pixel alignment ought to be the 'default' behaviour, just as it is in pretty much any other image editor.

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Bitmap pixel information must be maintained,

Exactly, Bones!

I have had this problem several times now, after working on pixel layers, after some time I noted the images are not as sharp as they were in the original scan and I had to place them again and repeat the work. 

It is also not the first time I mention this destructive blurring behaviour to Affinity, but nothing has changed since a year ago.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 4/26/2020 at 8:01 AM, Thomahawk said:

Yes, I have always activated both.

This can actually cause problems if an image layer winds up starting misaligned because the "move by whole pixels" can override the "force pixel alignment" for some cases and if something starts on a non-pixel boundary can cause it to stay that way...

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1 minute ago, fde101 said:

the "move by whole pixels" can override the "force pixel alignment" for some cases

For what little it’s worth, I’ve never encountered a scenario where ‘Move By Whole Pixels’ doesn’t override ‘Force Pixel Alignment’ (so it’s always seemed odd to me that we need to enable the latter setting before we can toggle the former).

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On 4/26/2020 at 3:59 PM, Medical Officer Bones said:

bitmap layers.

I would tend to agree that pixel layers should always force pixel alignment and be at the document resolution.  It doesn't really make sense for them to do otherwise.

Image layers however need to offer more flexibility, as they are essentially vector objects which happen to contain potentially raster image information.  They may be placed at a completely different DPI level than that of the document (and maintain all data when scaled) so it doesn't always make sense for those to be pixel-aligned.

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5 minutes ago, Alfred said:

always seemed odd to me that we need to enable the latter setting before we can toggle the former

Yes, I think "Force" pixel alignment should override "Move by whole pixels" and disable that checkbox.

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  • Staff

No, it shouldn't. There's cases where while working with Force Pixel Alignment enabled as a general rule, you may need to retain decimal values/position (usually half pixels) for specific objects/elements to get more control over antialiasing in particular when working with small images like small logo optimizations, icons etc. If Force Pixel Alignment would override Move by whole Pixels all elements would end up pixel aligned and that's not desirable in very specific use cases as the examples i mentioned.

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15 minutes ago, MEB said:

There's cases where while working with Force Pixel Alignment enabled as a general rule, you may need to retain decimal values/position (usually half pixels) for specific objects/elements to get more control over antialiasing in particular when working with small images like small logo optimizations, icons etc.

For those cases, what’s wrong with disabling ‘Force Pixel Alignment’, moving the objects by a whole number of pixels and then re-enabling FPA? It seems to me that the two options are mutually exclusive (except for the trivial case where an object starts on a pixel boundary).

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On 5/7/2020 at 8:18 AM, Alfred said:

It seems to me that the two options are mutually exclusive (except for the trivial case where an object starts on a pixel boundary)

Bingo.  Logically, if an object starts on a pixel boundary and is moved by whole pixels, it will stay on a pixel boundary.  Similarly, if it starts on a pixel boundary and is forced to stay on a pixel boundary, then it will always be moved by whole pixels.

The option to force pixel alignment as currently implemented has no effect when "move by whole pixels" is enabled; when moving by whole pixels takes priority, then anything which is not on a pixel boundary is forced to stay on a non-pixel boundary.

On the other hand, force pixel alignment mostly implies moving by whole pixels when the pixels are aligned to begin with - and if they are not, then that is the entire point of the option - to force them to be aligned after they are moved.

Using both of these options at the same time is completely pointless.

 

On 5/7/2020 at 7:55 AM, MEB said:

you may need to retain decimal values/position (usually half pixels) for specific objects/elements

For those cases the option to "move by whole pixels" should be a property of those specific objects and override the global setting.  It should not be a global or document-wide setting that imposes on everything as this defeats the purpose of "force pixel alignment".

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1 hour ago, fde101 said:

Using both of these options at the same time is completely pointless.

But you cannot set "Move by whole pixels" unless you first set "Force pixel alignment", because it's a suboption.

And having set both, if you turn off "Force pixel alignment" then "Move by whole pixels" has no effect except when nudging an object using the arrow keys.

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25 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

it's a suboption

I don’t think it should be. As I see it, ‘Move by whole pixels’ should be presented as an alternative to ‘Force pixel alignment’, thus allowing the user to retain decimal values (as @MEB described) rather than having each pixel coordinate rounded to the nearest whole number.

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