Valerio Posted March 28, 2021 Share Posted March 28, 2021 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. cutout3 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
firstdefence Posted March 28, 2021 Share Posted March 28, 2021 Try increasing the DPI to 300 Quote 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 (Please refrain from licking the screen while using this forum) Affinity Help - Affinity Desktop Tutorials - Feedback - FAQ - most asked questions Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Valerio Posted March 28, 2021 Author Share Posted March 28, 2021 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
firstdefence Posted March 28, 2021 Share Posted March 28, 2021 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 Quote 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 (Please refrain from licking the screen while using this forum) Affinity Help - Affinity Desktop Tutorials - Feedback - FAQ - most asked questions Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Valerio Posted March 28, 2021 Author Share Posted March 28, 2021 (edited) 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 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. Edited March 28, 2021 by Valerio Forgot the attachment Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
firstdefence Posted March 28, 2021 Share Posted March 28, 2021 Which Operating System are you using? After a bit of reading there are a few things to note... Disabling Windows Ink seems to have a beneficial affect for the majority of people, although some have noted a less smooth line. 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. Quote 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 (Please refrain from licking the screen while using this forum) Affinity Help - Affinity Desktop Tutorials - Feedback - FAQ - most asked questions Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Valerio Posted March 28, 2021 Author Share Posted March 28, 2021 1 hour ago, firstdefence said: Which Operating System are you using? After a bit of reading there are a few things to note... Disabling Windows Ink seems to have a beneficial affect for the majority of people, although some have noted a less smooth line. 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. I did read that as well, but turning Windows Ink on/off in my tablet driver does not seem to make any difference 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moi.cool Posted March 30, 2021 Share Posted March 30, 2021 I also have this problem. The freehand picking tool works poorly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RNKLN Posted March 30, 2021 Share Posted March 30, 2021 I noticed that reducing the hardness from 100% (right) to 99% (left) already makes a big difference. 100% gives an ugly result. 16px brush 64px brush cutout3 and firstdefence 2 Quote Affinity Photo - Affinity Designer - Affinity Publisher | macOS Sonoma (14.2) on 16GB MBP14 2021 with 2.4 versions Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cutout3 Posted March 30, 2021 Share Posted March 30, 2021 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 64px brush That's pretty huge! Is that the answer then? Thanks for posting this RNKLN ! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RNKLN Posted March 30, 2021 Share Posted March 30, 2021 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. cutout3 1 Quote Affinity Photo - Affinity Designer - Affinity Publisher | macOS Sonoma (14.2) on 16GB MBP14 2021 with 2.4 versions Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frozen Death Knight Posted March 30, 2021 Share Posted March 30, 2021 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. 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. cutout3, firstdefence and RNKLN 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cutout3 Posted March 31, 2021 Share Posted March 31, 2021 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. 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. 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! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZufDraw Posted April 13, 2021 Share Posted April 13, 2021 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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