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Affinity Photo angled lines have stepping/ jaggies on edges?


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I have the latest version of Affinity Photo but I've noticed an issue. When I click the 'rectangle' tool and create a rectangle and fill it with colour and then add a stroke of say 4 to 20 pixels, when I grab the 'rotate' handle on the rectangle and rotate it left or right, say 15.0 degrees, the black stroke line has jaggies/stepping, going down it, instead of a clean line. When the rectangle is perfectly horizontal/virtical the stroke line is fine, but when I rotate it a bit all the jaggies/stepping come and it looks rubbish.

Any way I can stop this happening?

Screenshot 2021-03-03 at 8.59.53 am.png

Edited by MrWriter
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Welcome to the forums @MrWriter

Photo displays everything ‘at the level of pixels’ rather than as cleanly as possible so what you see – pixel-wise – is what you will get in the exported result. i.e. What you see is what you get.
You cannot change this, but you can get used to it, and come to like the idea that the exported result will be less of a surprise because of it.
You can mitigate the effect in various ways but someone else should be able to help you with that – it can get a bit tricky and I’m not an expert.

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As I said, Photo shows you what the pixels in the image will look like after exporting (unless you set the export options to manipulate it further).
Since there is no such things as a ‘partial pixel’, every part of an angled line will have to pass through multiple pixels at various points and, therefore, the software needs to calculate which pixels to ‘fill in’. Sometimes this looks nice, sometimes it doesn’t.
You could try changing the View Quality setting in Preferences / Performance (and maybe other settings) to see if that makes much of a difference but you will normally have some jaggies somewhere in your image.

Maybe one of the experts will be able to describe this better than me; one may spot this soon and reply.

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I didn't have this issue when I used Photoshop. Only reason I am trying Affinity Photo is my Photoshop was CS5 and only ran on older Mac operating systems. The other day I had to upgrade my OS to Catalina, which only runs 64 bit and I didn't want to get into an Adobe subscription model hence trying to find a good alternative to Photoshop. I tried Pixelmator Pro, but that does horrible stepping too, Affinity Photo is the latest for me to try, but still having stepping issues :( 

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I’ve not used Photoshop since the very early days so I don’t know how that displays things and can’t compare the two.
It sounds like you might need Designer which displays vectors without pixelating them, but it will still pixelate things when exporting to raster formats.
Personally, when working purely with images, I find it better to see how things will look before I export rather than keeping my fingers crossed that the export will look right.
(Using Photo is a bit like using Designer with the Pixel View Mode permanently switched on.)
If most of your work is with vectors then Designer is probably a better fit to what you are doing, otherwise you may just need to get used to how Photo pixelates everything on-screen.

One of the experts may be along soon to contradict me, so don't take my word for this just yet.

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9 minutes ago, MrWriter said:

I don't work with vectors much and I always export as a 72dpi JPEG file at a size of 1920x1020.

1920 px × 1080 px is 1080p, or ‘Full HD’. Since it’s a video specification, the DPI/PPI value is irrelevant.

As for the ‘jaggies’ in your screenshot, it looks as though the antialiasing is somewhat lacking.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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It does look as if there is some anti-aliasing going on. I do wonder if you have rotated this line at all. This would exacerbate any jaggies.

John

Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Designer 1.10.5 and Publisher 1.10.5 (mainly Photo), now ex-Adobe CC

CPU: AMD A6-3670. RAM: 16 GB DDR3 @ 666MHz, Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630

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35 minutes ago, John Rostron said:

I do wonder if you have rotated this line at all. This would exacerbate any jaggies.

... Please, insert source *.afphoto file. 

Edit: this is my rectangle after rotated 15°
image.png.62c4d854e70fffd876bf31f3c4886617.png image.png.ecc5ca4ed70d219f72a6f132a16fe9f7.png image.png.0858393806b2dc29deb621de035dd353.png

Edited by Pšenda

Affinity Store (MSI/EXE): Affinity Suite (ADe, APh, APu) 2.4.0.2301
Dell OptiPlex 7060, i5-8500 3.00 GHz, 16 GB, Intel UHD Graphics 630, Dell P2417H 1920 x 1080, Windows 11 Pro, Version 23H2, Build 22631.3155.
Dell Latitude E5570, i5-6440HQ 2.60 GHz, 8 GB, Intel HD Graphics 530, 1920 x 1080, Windows 11 Pro, Version 23H2, Build 22631.3155.
Intel NUC5PGYH, Pentium N3700 2.40 GHz, 8 GB, Intel HD Graphics, EIZO EV2456 1920 x 1200, Windows 10 Pro, Version 21H1, Build 19043.2130.

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5 hours ago, MrWriter said:

I have the latest version of Affinity Photo but I've noticed an issue. When I click the 'rectangle' tool and create a rectangle and fill it with colour and then add a stroke of say 4 to 20 pixels, when I grab the 'rotate' handle on the rectangle and rotate it left or right, say 15.0 degrees, the black stroke line has jaggies/stepping, going down it, instead of a clean line. When the rectangle is perfectly horizontal/virtical the stroke line is fine, but when I rotate it a bit all the jaggies/stepping come and it looks rubbish.

Any way I can stop this happening?

What size was the rectangle?
What was the zoom amount when you took your screen shot?
Can you post a screen shot of your Edit->Preferences->Performance settings?

Intel i7-10700 Gen10 CPU, 32GB RAM, Geforce GTX 1660 OC 6GB
Windows 10 Pro 22H2, 1x 1TB M.2 NVMe, 1 x 2TB M.2 NVMe. Affinity APh, APu, ADe

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@Greyfox Can you take care when creating your posts so that your own text is not added into any quoted text?
It’s confusing otherwise as it looks like you have just quoted something wholly and not made any comment, and you have essentially misquoted the original poster.

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@GarryP

I just used "Quote" which in other forums puts the quoted text on a different background color. It obviously doesn't do that here, so how do I achieve what you are asking?

Edit: OK, I know what went wrong. Have edited the post so it should now be OK

Intel i7-10700 Gen10 CPU, 32GB RAM, Geforce GTX 1660 OC 6GB
Windows 10 Pro 22H2, 1x 1TB M.2 NVMe, 1 x 2TB M.2 NVMe. Affinity APh, APu, ADe

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16 minutes ago, Greyfox said:

@GarryP

I just used "Quote" which in other forums puts the quoted text on a different background color. It obviously doesn't do that here, so how do I achieve what you are asking?

I use Chrome  both on my desktop PC and on Android. In each, when I use Quote, as here, my cursor is placed just after the quotes text (as here).

John

Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Designer 1.10.5 and Publisher 1.10.5 (mainly Photo), now ex-Adobe CC

CPU: AMD A6-3670. RAM: 16 GB DDR3 @ 666MHz, Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630

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7 minutes ago, John Rostron said:

I use Chrome  both my desktop PC and on Android. In both, when I use quote, as here, my cursor is placed just after the quotes text (as here).

John

Thanks for that.  I'm using Firefox.  I think this should post should be OK, but as far as I recall I haven't done anything different to what I did with the other post.

Edit: Actually I think the problem might have occurred because after using the Quote, I deleted the screen shot that came with it.

 

Intel i7-10700 Gen10 CPU, 32GB RAM, Geforce GTX 1660 OC 6GB
Windows 10 Pro 22H2, 1x 1TB M.2 NVMe, 1 x 2TB M.2 NVMe. Affinity APh, APu, ADe

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1 hour ago, Greyfox said:

Actually I think the problem might have occurred because after using the Quote, I deleted the screen shot that came with it.

A better way is to select the text you want to respond to directly, and select "Quote selection".
image.png.f412d489b2883fc3208134cf41fa4e1d.png

Affinity Store (MSI/EXE): Affinity Suite (ADe, APh, APu) 2.4.0.2301
Dell OptiPlex 7060, i5-8500 3.00 GHz, 16 GB, Intel UHD Graphics 630, Dell P2417H 1920 x 1080, Windows 11 Pro, Version 23H2, Build 22631.3155.
Dell Latitude E5570, i5-6440HQ 2.60 GHz, 8 GB, Intel HD Graphics 530, 1920 x 1080, Windows 11 Pro, Version 23H2, Build 22631.3155.
Intel NUC5PGYH, Pentium N3700 2.40 GHz, 8 GB, Intel HD Graphics, EIZO EV2456 1920 x 1200, Windows 10 Pro, Version 21H1, Build 19043.2130.

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2 hours ago, Greyfox said:

What was the zoom amount when you took your screen shot?
Can you post a screen shot of your Edit->Preferences->Performance settings?

... and maybe OS scalling?

Affinity Store (MSI/EXE): Affinity Suite (ADe, APh, APu) 2.4.0.2301
Dell OptiPlex 7060, i5-8500 3.00 GHz, 16 GB, Intel UHD Graphics 630, Dell P2417H 1920 x 1080, Windows 11 Pro, Version 23H2, Build 22631.3155.
Dell Latitude E5570, i5-6440HQ 2.60 GHz, 8 GB, Intel HD Graphics 530, 1920 x 1080, Windows 11 Pro, Version 23H2, Build 22631.3155.
Intel NUC5PGYH, Pentium N3700 2.40 GHz, 8 GB, Intel HD Graphics, EIZO EV2456 1920 x 1200, Windows 10 Pro, Version 21H1, Build 19043.2130.

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I only zoomed in to exaggerate, make it clear, what the issue was. With a new 1920x1080 72dpi document, stepping occurs on these lines and when I export it at the same file dimensions at best quality JPEG you can clearly see them without even zooming in. Like I said, Pixelmator Pro does it, but Photoshop did not.

 

OS not scalling.

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@MrWriter, it would probably help if you told us the exact steps you took to create the image we see at the start of this thread. Which tools you used, any transformations etc. A screen recording would be good.

John

Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Designer 1.10.5 and Publisher 1.10.5 (mainly Photo), now ex-Adobe CC

CPU: AMD A6-3670. RAM: 16 GB DDR3 @ 666MHz, Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630

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3 hours ago, MrWriter said:

and when I export it at the same file dimensions at best quality JPEG you can clearly see them without even zooming in

Your showed image is JPEG (with jpeg artifacts), or screenshot from APhoto?

 

8 hours ago, Pšenda said:

... Please, insert source *.afphoto file. 

 

Affinity Store (MSI/EXE): Affinity Suite (ADe, APh, APu) 2.4.0.2301
Dell OptiPlex 7060, i5-8500 3.00 GHz, 16 GB, Intel UHD Graphics 630, Dell P2417H 1920 x 1080, Windows 11 Pro, Version 23H2, Build 22631.3155.
Dell Latitude E5570, i5-6440HQ 2.60 GHz, 8 GB, Intel HD Graphics 530, 1920 x 1080, Windows 11 Pro, Version 23H2, Build 22631.3155.
Intel NUC5PGYH, Pentium N3700 2.40 GHz, 8 GB, Intel HD Graphics, EIZO EV2456 1920 x 1200, Windows 10 Pro, Version 21H1, Build 19043.2130.

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Attached is a JPEG saved at "12" (max quality) in PS.  The image was constructed by first making two rectangles in AP - 1) using the vector tool and setting the fill color to cyan and the stroke to 8px black; 2) on a new pixel layer, making a rectangular selection with the marquee tool and filling it with the same cyan color and then using a layer effect to add the outline at 8px in black.  1)" is referenced in the attached JPEG as the "Vector" version and "2)" is referenced as the "Bitmap" version.   I then rotated copies of each rectangle 75° clockwise to induce aliasing and exported the resulting exercise in AP at 90 percent JPEG quality and opened that JPEG in PS.

In PS, I repeated the exercise on a new document but filled the shapes with green.  I copied and pasted a section of the rotated AP results into the PS results for comparison.  The antialiased edges pretty much look identical between the two methods of generating the shapes and across both applications.

I used a 1920x1080 document at 72ppi, per the original post.  The attached doc is a JPEG saved at max quality in PS, as stated previously, but I do not know what the Affinity forum might do to it to compress it.  Obviously you want to inspect it at 100% - doing so makes it clear that the Affinity forum robot compresses the image significantly, as JPEG artifacts are obvious at the black outline, where none exist in the source image that I uploaded.

But you get the point.  I am viewing this on an Eizo ColorEdge 1920x1200 display, so maybe it will appear different on a Retina or other HiDPI device.

kirk

 

testantialias copy.jpg

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11 minutes ago, kirkt said:

The attached doc is a JPEG saved at max quality in PS, as stated previously, but I do not know what the Affinity forum might do to it to compress it.

If you want to protect it from interference by the forum software, attach it as a ZIP archive instead of a JPEG image.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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I think this thread has run its course so I'll thank everybody for chipping in. I like AF for the liquify persona, for sure, that was one feature I used a lot in Photoshop CS5 for my portrait shots, straightening jaw lines and the like so I'm looking forward to getting to know AF as much as I did Photoshop. AF layout is different, for sure, which is probably why I'm finding it hard to learn as I have CS5 in mind all the time so I should try and forget all the CS5 interface stuff and how I used to do things and start blank with AF.

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