Jagged edges when SLOWLY drawing selection using lasso tool (antialiasing is on )

[Valist Codery]

Furthermore,

I tested both the Freehand and Polygonal types once with Antialias off and once with Antialias on

The Freehand doesn't seem to get any Antialias smoothing whether it was on or off while the Polygonal does, could this be a bug?

When I use the Polygonal to get a circler shape you can see that it has smoother selection in the video.

BTW going in Mouse Properties in Windows 10 and turning the Enhance pointer precision doesn't change anything.

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Tested on Windows 10
Affinity version 1.10.1.1142
Using a normal mouse

[iconoclast]

If you watch a pixel image with a zoom factor of 200% and more, it will of course look pixelated. The only meaningfull zoom factor to judge it is 100%.

I'm on Windows 10 too and I use the same Photo version as you do. I can see a difference between activated and deactivated Antialias. You could also try it with a feathering of 1 or 2 pixels, to get smoother edges.

Have you thought about creating your graphic with a vector graphics software like Affinity Designer? In that case you wont get pixelated edges.

[Valist Codery]

39 minutes ago, iconoclast said:

If you watch a pixel image with a zoom factor of 200% and more, it will of course look pixelated. The only meaningfull zoom factor to judge it is 100%.

I'm on Windows 10 too and I use the same Photo version as you do. I can see a difference between activated and deactivated Antialias. You could also try it with a feathering of 1 or 2 pixels, to get smoother edges.

Have you thought about creating your graphic with a vector graphics software like Affinity Designer? In that case you wont get pixelated edges.

In the video, I clearly showed it both in 100% and also zoomed in to show that it is still jagged in 100%, and even if I export the document into an image looking at it in 100% will clearly still look jagged.

Using feathering or smoothing options will not make the selection sharp and may shrink and change the selection and even if it worked it will still take a couple of steps to adjust it for the desired result. 

And no I don't want to use Affinity Designer because I have to buy it and also the art that I would make will not only be just vector.

Why are you trying so hard to avoid fixing this issue for?

[R C-R]

18 minutes ago, Jameel Hakimi said:

and also zoomed in to show that it is still jagged in 100%...

You can't "Zoom in" to show what it looks like at 100%; only the 100% view shows what it looks like at 100%.

20 minutes ago, Jameel Hakimi said:

Why are you trying so hard to avoid fixing this issue for?

@iconoclast is just another user like you or me, not a developer or any other Serif staff member, so there is no way for any of us to "fix" this -- it is just the way zooming works.

[Old Bruce]

34 minutes ago, Jameel Hakimi said:

Using feathering or smoothing options will not make the selection sharp and may shrink and change the selection and even if it worked it will still take a couple of steps to adjust it for the desired result. 

Set it and forget it. You went right past it.

[Valist Codery]

1 minute ago, R C-R said:

You can't "Zoom in" to show what it looks like at 100%; only the 100% view shows what it looks like at 100%.

@iconoclast is just another user like you or me, not a developer or any other Serif staff member, so there is no way for any of us to "fix" this -- it is just the way zooming works.

You didn't understand what I meant, I was pointing that I used 100% view and also zoomed in to look at it, and there is a clear difference between me using the freehand tool and polygonal.

@iconoclast is suggesting stuff that doesn't work for us who wants this feature, and by him saying: try this and that to fix the issue where it doesn't really fixes it may lead the developers to ignore this altogether.

[Old Bruce]

37 minutes ago, Jameel Hakimi said:

Using feathering or smoothing options will not make the selection sharp and may shrink and change the selection and even if it worked it will still take a couple of steps to adjust it for the desired result. 

Set it and forget it. You went right past it.

[R C-R]

2 minutes ago, Jameel Hakimi said:

@iconoclast is suggesting stuff that doesn't work for us who wants this feature, and by him saying: try this and that to fix the issue where it doesn't really fixes it may lead the developers to ignore this altogether.

What feature are referring to? What exactly do you want "fixed"? Antialiasing works as it should; if as in your video you zoom in to greater than 100% then you are not seeing what it actually looks like at 100%, but you should be able to tell the difference between antialiased & not antialiased edges.

[Valist Codery]

18 minutes ago, R C-R said:

What feature are referring to? What exactly do you want "fixed"? Antialiasing works as it should; if as in your video you zoom in to greater than 100% then you are not seeing what it actually looks like at 100%, but you should be able to tell the difference between antialiased & not antialiased edges.

Yes, it actually does have some anti aliasing using the freehand tool on some parts of the selection but not to the point where I would use it.

[R C-R]

23 minutes ago, Jameel Hakimi said:

Yes, it actually does have some anti aliasing using the freehand tool on some parts of the selection but not to the point where I would use it.

What do you want it to do that it does not already do now? Is it anything that you cannot already do with the feathering option @Old Bruce mentioned? 

[Valist Codery]

14 minutes ago, R C-R said:

What do you want it to do that it does not already do now? Is it anything that you cannot already do with the feathering option @Old Bruce mentioned? 

More consistency is what I want using freehand tool with anti aliasing enabled, the feather option helps a bit but the jagged parts are still visible.

[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, Jameel Hakimi said:

More consistency is what I want using freehand tool with anti aliasing enabled, the feather option helps a bit but the jagged parts are still visible.

You should be able to eliminate any stair-stepped edges by choosing an appropriately large feature radius. Remember to view this at 100% to see what it really looks like.

It might help if you uploaded a file here showing what you mean by the jagged parts still being still visible.

EDIT: by a file I mean an Affinity document, not a screenshot or video. IOW, one with the .afphoto extension.

[iconoclast]

@Jameel HakimiI really don't know if other programs use better antialiasing-algorithms or so, but in fact antialiasing works, at least with my Photo-version on my computer. And pixels are pixels - they will cause pixelation on the edges if the resolution is not high enough to hide them. That depends on the image resolution on one side and the screen resolution on the other side. Antialiasing can smooth the effect a bit, but it can't fully negate it in all cases.

And the last point: Photo, as the name says, is made for image editing, not for graphic art. To get the best quality for graphic art, you should use a vector graphics software. If the advantage in quality you would get with it isn't worth the money for you, you shouldn't complain about the lack of quality you get with a software that is not made for things like this. It' a bit like complaining about the laws of nature.

And by the way: if you think that this is a bug, why don't you write a bug report?

[Valist Codery]

Here is a document where I hope it's clear enough to see.

mineral.afphoto

[iconoclast]

What about Antialiasing plus a Feathering of 0,5 px?

[Valist Codery]

14 minutes ago, iconoclast said:

What about Antialiasing plus a Feathering of 0,5 px?

Feathering of 0,5 px, 1 px still shows visible jagging, and 2px almost removes the jagging but it becomes too soft.

You can check the attached file and reveal hidden layers of the feathering tests.

mineral.afphoto

[iconoclast]

20 minutes ago, Jameel Hakimi said:

Feathering of 0,5 px, 1 px still shows visible jagging, and 2px almost removes the jagging but it becomes too soft.

You can check the attached file and reveal hidden layers of the feathering tests.

mineral.afphoto 2.24 MB · 0 downloads

So possibly with Antialiasing on and a Feathering of around 1,5 px?

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, iconoclast said:

So possibly with Antialiasing on and a Feathering of around 1,5 px?

@Jameel Hakimi, are you aware that you can set feathering for the Freehand Selection Tool to any arbitrary value, including ones with small fractional values like this one:

So you should be able to get just about any conceivable level of feathered edge softness or hardness you want.

[Actionscript]

There is a lot of great information in this thread.  Thank you to all who have replied here and offered up your insights.

It seems that the Freehand Selection Tool, as far as I can tell, has always had this issue.  Currently I am on 1.10.4, but as a test I installed version 1.6.5, and the results are identical.

As the OP states, when drawing slowly with the Freehand Selection Tool, you will have jagged edges to the resulting shape when filled or painted in with a brush.  Drawing the selection faster, and by that, I mean extremely fast...faster than you would be able to accurately select your shape, you can achieve a much smoother edge to the selection.  Although this works, it is quite impractical. 

The tips on feathering, especially if you set the value to a fractional amount can definitely help out by smoothing out the appearance of the edge, but with that you will be introducing a small amount of softening to the border.  This will likely be fine in a lot of cases, but may not be the solution that fits your situation.

I took some time today to do some testing and found something interesting.  My apologies if this has already been identified somewhere in this thread that I missed or elsewhere on the forum, but I thought I'd share my findings in case it is able to help you out.  I use this kind of selection tool in Procreate, Krita, CSP, and PS to make thousands of selections on the fly as I am painting or rendering illustrations.  It is a very common workflow so it is quite important that the selection is as clean as possible and free of any jagged edge artifacts.

The test was to make a selection with the Freehand Selection Tool at different document zoom levels, with Antialias enabled, and fill that selection with a color.  You can see the steps I used in each test case below.  The interesting finding was how the Freehand Selection Tool reacts to the zoom level of the document.  When you have a default zoom level set to 100%, the result isn't terrible, but it could be improved.  There are some jagged edges present.  I then zoomed way out to 6%.  Just large enough on my display that I was still able to make a selection with the Freehand Selection Tool.  Zoom back to 100% so you can see what is happening here.  Fill the selection with a color and then deselect to see just how terribly jagged the edges appear.  This is what sparked the thought to make a selection when zoomed way in.  As you can see in "C", I did just that and achieved a much smoother edge to the shape and I don't have to use any feathering or introduce any softening to that edge to make it appear smooth and jagged free.  It is a crisp, smooth shape much like you would get with the other digital painting applications I mentioned earlier.

Now, this is a great workaround to make sure that you get crisp selections with the Freehand Selection Tool every time, but you may run into cases where you need to make a large freehand selection in your document and zooming in will inhibit your ability to make that selection in one stroke.  In this case you can just set the tool to "Add" and create the selection in multiple steps.  Not ideal, but it is a much better result that what the Freehand Selection Tool will give you if you are not zoomed in.

Some may see this as a bug that should be logged and addressed, while others may see this as a feature working as intended.  I do hope that the development team will look at the multiple posts in the forum calling this out as a problem and take a look at this in a future release.

 

 

[pixelyodon]

I'm using Affinity Photo besides Photoshop and I'm currently pretty underwhelmed by Affinity Photo's handling of selection edges. This is definitely an issue.

@ActionscriptI couldn't reproduce your results. The edges are jagged regardless of Zoom-Level and Antialiasing-Setting. AP V1 and V2. V2 looks a little bit better, but still not really smooth. There should be an option like the Stabilizer from the Brush-Tool, which looks pretty smooth.