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Freehand Selection Tool aggressive cropping in Affinity Photo


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Hi Affinity team,

 

I'm not very knowledgeable on Affinity photo as of yet but I have chosen it as my choice of software for cropping and repainting layers that will be used for animations for some time now. The issue I have found and have not been able to find a way around it without hurting my selection when cropping with the freehand selection tool, is that the cuts are too 'aggressive', I do not know the correct term for this. This is not an issue when editing a file, but when it comes to animating those 'aggressively' cropped png layers there is a visible distortion in the movement of the cropped bits of the png layer. I used to use pixlr e online as an alternative before getting Affinity, but I always find my way back to it to crop my layers after repainting them in Affinity, which has become very inconvenient. Pixlr e online cropping is a lot 'smoother', again, I do not know the term. I will attach the examples of Affinity photo's cropping and Pixlr e to compare.

Again I apologize if there is an obvious way to fix this and for my inexperience, any help is appreciated.

Finally, Affinity photo is an amazing software and I am very happy with this purchase overall, good job Affinity Team!

image.png.b2d68882938d6b4e709ef80b267492d9.pngimage.png.af0ce5021b2df4a08f5c126eb891531c.png

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The term you are looking for is antialiasing, antialiasing is a method of smoothing edges. In your examples above the top image appears to have no antialiasing.

When you select the Freehand selection tool, there is a context menu bar that appears just above the workspace, on there is a checkbox for antialias, this should give you a smoother selection.
image.png.ef6867deaeecad6c759aa99347281819.png
 

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.4.1, 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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Glad to help, hope the animations go well 🙂

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.4.1, 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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In addition to the earlier advice, if I understand the problem properly, you can alternatively (or maybe together with Antialiasing) add a Feather of non-zero – on the Context Toolbar – before you do your freehand selecting.

Note: Changing the Feather setting after making a selection doesn’t add a feather to that existing selection.

See my attached video to see the difference.

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