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Brushes in Photo have jagged/pixelated edges


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Hi all,

I'm evaluating Affinity Photo (I'm a long time Designer user and absolutely love it) using the free 90 days trial before deciding on the purchase.

I have an issue where a simple brush stroke in Photo will have jagged edges, it's most noticeable on certain stroke angles but it's generally very present.

I am using a very simple brush, 80% hardness and 1% spacing. The problem does not seem to be affected by the stabilizer, or by using a tablet vs. a mouse.

I tried searching the forums and I already made sure that my 'View Quality' is set to 'Bilinear (Best Quality)'.

I drew a comparison using Krita, which displays a much smoother edge using an equivalent brush and stroke direction.

Is there anything I can try to smooth those jaggies?

Thank you.

1624150853_AffinityPhotoJaggedBrush.png.6de9135171757db871b85a0181da8c24.png

 

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Try increasing the DPI to 300

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
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1 hour ago, firstdefence said:

Try increasing the DPI to 300

Thanks for your input! Unless you're talking about some other setting that I'm not familiar with, increasing the document DPI does not change the result, AFAIK it just affects the physical size of the document.

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22 minutes ago, Valerio said:

Thanks for your input! Unless you're talking about some other setting that I'm not familiar with, increasing the document DPI does not change the result, AFAIK it just affects the physical size of the document.

You can have a document the same size with differing DPI but the DPI doesn't appear to affect the quality of the brush. I did a similar compare with Krita and Affinity Photo and the quality doesn't appear to be that different, I'd say Krita was a bit cleaner on the corners. Both of these documents are 96DPI 8bit

image.png.f986dcde1351da3c9f1539cd466566ff.png

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
B| (Please refrain from licking the screen while using this forum)

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23 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

You can have a document the same size with differing DPI but the DPI doesn't appear to affect the quality of the brush. I did a similar compare with Krita and Affinity Photo and the quality doesn't appear to be that different, I'd say Krita was a bit cleaner on the corners. Both of these documents are 96DPI 8bit

image.png.f986dcde1351da3c9f1539cd466566ff.png

The jaggies get more evident the closer the stroke angle is to horizontal/vertical. Around 45 degrees, edges are pretty nice and there's barely a difference.

Zooming in on the strokes, it looks like Photo's anti-aliasing tends to be less aggressive, which results in jagged/sharper lines for steeper angles. I'm assuming this is the default behaviour, but I'm wondering if there's any workaround to this.

91340135_AffinityPhotoJaggedBrush(zoomed).png.69041772b20d2a861ff924fba17644d4.png

Edited by Valerio
Forgot the attachment
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Which Operating System are you using?

After a bit of reading there are a few things to note...

  1. Disabling Windows Ink seems to have a beneficial affect for the majority of people, although some have noted a less smooth line.
  2. Drawing at 100% zoom or greater also seems to yield better results

Just out of curiosity I enabled stabiliser and set it to 1 (One) and I don't know if this is just subjective or me clutching in desperation to find an answer but it seems to draw smoother lines with it set. Can you try it out and give your opinion.

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
B| (Please refrain from licking the screen while using this forum)

Affinity Help - Affinity Desktop Tutorials - Feedback - FAQ - most asked questions

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1 hour ago, firstdefence said:

Which Operating System are you using?

After a bit of reading there are a few things to note...

  1. Disabling Windows Ink seems to have a beneficial affect for the majority of people, although some have noted a less smooth line.
  2. Drawing at 100% zoom or greater also seems to yield better results

Just out of curiosity I enabled stabiliser and set it to 1 (One) and I don't know if this is just subjective or me clutching in desperation to find an answer but it seems to draw smoother lines with it set. Can you try it out and give your opinion.

I am running Windows 10.

  1. I did read that as well, but turning Windows Ink on/off in my tablet driver does not seem to make any difference
  2. Zooming in didn't work out either

I am already using the stabiliser, tried both settings and with different length but the issue persists.

Using a mouse seems to be somewhat smoother, but the jaggies are still present, just more blurred.

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59 minutes ago, RNKLN said:

I noticed that reducing the hardness from 100% (right) to 99% (left) already makes a big difference. 100% gives an ugly result.

16px brush

image.png.3cda18519ee90ac83d3b6d67cb0e9b7f.png

64px brush

image.png.ffbd925624e3882730d934d6ce524532.png

That's pretty huge!  Is that the answer then?

Thanks for posting this RNKLN !  

 

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4 hours ago, cutout3 said:

Is that the answer then?

Maybe the answer, but not the (real) solution. I hope that it will be addressed by the Serif team. Still there in 1.9.2.

Affinity Photo - Affinity Designer - Affinity Publisher | macOS Sonoma (14.2) on 16GB MBP14 2021 with 2.4 versions

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Change Hardness. Affinity has much harder looking brushes compared to Photoshop and Krita. Also, the smoothness does not scale with the size of the brush, so depending on the size the results of Hardness can vary a lot. Down below is an example of a typical 30 pixels round brush with various levels of Hardness.

250264574_BrushHardness.thumb.png.8ceeb1463bb8246891763755a9a9932d.png

A good rule of thumb I have is that small brushes look the best with around 99-80 Hardness.I always use 99 Hardness brushes because my canvases are already high res to the point where the extra smoothness barely matter (also large brushes still look pretty good with this setting), but at least it's something to bear in mind. 

In all honesty, if there is one thing Serif could improve, it would be actually adding better default standard brushes. The ones packaged in have really poor defaults and do not feel right for those who have come from other softwares like Photoshop and Krita.

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On 3/28/2021 at 6:57 AM, Valerio said:

Hi all,

I'm evaluating Affinity Photo (I'm a long time Designer user and absolutely love it) using the free 90 days trial before deciding on the purchase.

I have an issue where a simple brush stroke in Photo will have jagged edges, it's most noticeable on certain stroke angles but it's generally very present.

I am using a very simple brush, 80% hardness and 1% spacing. The problem does not seem to be affected by the stabilizer, or by using a tablet vs. a mouse.

I tried searching the forums and I already made sure that my 'View Quality' is set to 'Bilinear (Best Quality)'.

I drew a comparison using Krita, which displays a much smoother edge using an equivalent brush and stroke direction.

Is there anything I can try to smooth those jaggies?

Thank you.

1624150853_AffinityPhotoJaggedBrush.png.6de9135171757db871b85a0181da8c24.png

 

 

On 3/30/2021 at 6:22 AM, RNKLN said:

Maybe the answer, but not the (real) solution. I hope that it will be addressed by the Serif team. Still there in 1.9.2.

 

On 3/30/2021 at 6:50 AM, Frozen Death Knight said:

Change Hardness. Affinity has much harder looking brushes compared to Photoshop and Krita. Also, the smoothness do not scale with the size of the brush, so depending on the size the results of Hardness can vary a lot. Down below is an example of a typical 30 pixels round brush with various levels of Hardness.

250264574_BrushHardness.thumb.png.8ceeb1463bb8246891763755a9a9932d.png

A good rule of thumb I have is that small brushes look the best with around 99-80 Hardness.I always use 99 Hardness brushes because my canvases are already high res to the point where the extra smoothness barely matter (also large brushes still look pretty good with this setting), but at least it's something to bear in mind. 

In all honesty, if there is one thing Serif could improve, it would be actually adding better default standard brushes. The ones packaged in have really poor defaults and do not feel right for those who have come from other softwares like Photoshop and Krita.

OK so it looks like you guys found the problem, the default Affinity brushes are too hard? 

So who is going to report this to Serif?  One of you guys posts this in the Affinity Photo Bug forum?

Anyway, thanks for the info and solution!

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  • 2 weeks later...

I also noticed inconsistent aliasing in ap. Generally speaking the brush/zoom engines has some flaws;

in this post I also mentioned the aliasing issue:

later I found other details that might give some insight into the stroke behaviors issues
 

 

 

 

 

 

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