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Directional Displacement in Affinity Photo


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Having moved over from a different programme I'm trying to fathom if the use of displacement maps is comparable so excuse me if I'm asking a silly question or if this is something that isn't an option, but I can't seem to find any way of applying a displacement map to one axis or in one direction, I can only see the one option to apply in every direction.

I'm trying to apply a displacement map to an image in the vertical axis, preferably just applying downwards. Does anybody know a way to do this?

Thanks in advance.

 

 

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If you can give us an idea of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ images you would have in the other software then we will have a better idea of what you are trying to do.
Otherwise you could get all kinds of replies that are not related to what you need.

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Hope this helps to explain it. The first image shows the before, applying effect and then result of applying displacement vertically down whilst the second image shows how it appears applying the effect in affinity in all 4 directions. 

displace-example.jpg

affinity-displace-example.jpg

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Further to my original question and in response to the request to include example images, usually the concept I've worked to elsewhere was that anything that is 50% grey (128,128,128 in a 0-255 scenario) would be unaffected, anything lighter will apply in one direction, (ie up and left) and anything darker will apply in the opposite direction (ie down and right) and within that you can adjust how much this is affected either vertically and horizontally, the problem I'm having is that using a displacement map of 50% grey with darker blurred vertical strokes it is applying it in both the vertical and horizontal directions equally so I wasn't sure if there was a workaround to this?

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I haven't any experiences with this filter, but I'm afraid it is limited to what you see there. Possibly you will find some kind of plugin that can do what you want. Or you could even give the free GIMP a try. It offers a huge amount of filters for all kinds of fiddling, but is a little limited for professional image editing (no CMYK support, no adjustment layers...). It also offers a filter called "Displace"(menu "Filters", "Map"), which is a displacement map filter. It offers a little more functionality than the one in Photo. You can also adjust the horizontal and the vertical offset separately. But I didn't test it myself. So without warranty.

GIMP is cool software, but for me it's an additional program to Photo, not realy an alternative.

Edit: I would recommend the Windows version of GIMP. The Mac version is not so well developed.

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Hi,

 

to better understand how displacement works please have a look to the doc attached.

It contains 3 layers with horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines of high contrast (black / white), to be used for displacement.

On top you find a text layer with a live displacement attached.

For best results, there should be only 2 layers active (plus curves for later steps):

  1. The test layer (including displacement filter)
  2. One of the 3 layer with lines (choose your angle)

You can then double-click to the displacement to open it, and "load from layers beneath". The lines layer can be deactivated immediately after this step (to better see the result)

You can see that the directions (angle) of the lines directly impacts the displacement effect. In principle, displacement works on lightness contrast: a full 0/1 contrast will displace the pixels by the selected strength, into the direction of contrast transition.

If you activate the curves adjustments, which reduces the contrast by half, the direction stays, but the distance is reduced by half.

Note that the black-on-white lines always have two transitions: 0->1 and 1->0. So you always get alternating swings to both sides. You cannot achieve e.g. swing only to one side (at least with one single displacement filter. It is possible with multiple).

You can rotate the layer with lines by any angle, and will see that the displacement will always follow that angle.

horizontal:

image.png.0a95792d5520cc335e12a4cff6133e18.png

vertical:

image.png.b8c6ce3ebc78c269c0f4e459c0de3618.png

diagonal:

image.png.d7a98ad278b6e16c1a41ce0ee6d6c5e0.png

 

displacement.afphoto

Edited by NotMyFault
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