The canvas and brush strokes being blurry for a moment

[mike abysilia]

I'm starting a new topic because I couldn't find any on the forum or google. 

Whenever I use Affinity photo or designer and I use the brushes it will get blurred for a couple seconds before being sharp and the delay depends on how heavy and big the strokes are. It doesn't happen with photoshop or krita. Is there a setting I'm missing so that when I apply a brush stroke It isn't blurry for seconds before I see it sharp or is it only a windows 10 problem? 

It also happens when zooming in and zooming out but is quicker and doesn't hinder your workflow much. Does anyone else experience this?

[Dan C]

Hi @mike abysilia,

Welcome to the forums

On 2/1/2021 at 11:13 PM, mike abysilia said:

Whenever I use Affinity photo or designer and I use the brushes it will get blurred for a couple seconds before being sharp and the delay depends on how heavy and big the strokes are.

I can confirm this is the 'smoothing' process which happens in the Affinity apps. Unfortunately there's no way to control/disable this currently, my apologies.

Other users have previously requested that the option be added to Affinity, and this is something we may implement in the future!

On 2/1/2021 at 11:13 PM, mike abysilia said:

It also happens when zooming in and zooming out but is quicker and doesn't hinder your workflow much.

What you're seeing when zooming in and out is likely a result of Affinity using 'mip maps' in order to speed up rendering time for a document. Essentially, when viewing the file at above or below 100% zoom, Affinity will generate lower resolution 'tiles' and use these to display your document, rather than the full data itself.

Unfortunately this can occasionally cause perceived blurriness when zooming in and out of documents, as the rendered document may not 'catch up' as quickly as your zoom.
We'd certainly like to reduce/remove this blurriness, however as mip maps are intrinsic to the Affinity engine, this has proven to be a larger task than first expected.

We've implemented Hardware Acceleration into our latest Windows beta version, which was already support on the Mac - we hope that this will, among other things, help reduce any blurriness from mip maps

[lepr]

This linked thread helped a Mac user, but I don't know whether it will help for Windows: 

 

[mike abysilia]

On 2/3/2021 at 7:28 AM, Dan C said:

Hi @mike abysilia,

Welcome to the forums

I can confirm this is the 'smoothing' process which happens in the Affinity apps. Unfortunately there's no way to control/disable this currently, my apologies.

Other users have previously requested that the option be added to Affinity, and this is something we may implement in the future!

What you're seeing when zooming in and out is likely a result of Affinity using 'mip maps' in order to speed up rendering time for a document. Essentially, when viewing the file at above or below 100% zoom, Affinity will generate lower resolution 'tiles' and use these to display your document, rather than the full data itself.

Unfortunately this can occasionally cause perceived blurriness when zooming in and out of documents, as the rendered document may not 'catch up' as quickly as your zoom.
We'd certainly like to reduce/remove this blurriness, however as mip maps are intrinsic to the Affinity engine, this has proven to be a larger task than first expected.

We've implemented Hardware Acceleration into our latest Windows beta version, which was already support on the Mac - we hope that this will, among other things, help reduce any blurriness from mip maps

Thanks for info. Hope the new update improves this a little.

[mike abysilia]

On 2/3/2021 at 10:45 AM, anon2 said:

This linked thread helped a Mac user, but I don't know whether it will help for Windows: 

 

That totally helped! I changed Retina rendering under performance settings to High quality(slowest) instead of Automatic(best) and I no longer see smoothing while drawing with brushes. I double checked it twice and that was the problem, at least on windows. Thank you very much for the tip.