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Posted

Hi All,

I brought uncompressed tiffs into publisher and exported my design to uncompressed Tiff using Bicubic and Bilinear options. I put these exported files into Photoshop to use in a Mockup and noticed the image quality was not good enough. So I compared them to scaled down images in Photoshop found there was noticeable loss of detail.

I wonder what's going on here, have you guys noticed this too? How do you export your images from Affinity apps?

Thanks

Posted

I did another test, I got a the bicubic resampled tif in photoshop and applied an unsharp mask with the settings Amount: 25 , radius: 1, Threshold: 0. That rendered a practically identical image to what Photshop was showing me.

 

Is there a way to sharpen an image on export from Publisher? Maybe going to the Photo persona then applying an unsharp mask and exporting with bicubic resampling from Publisher?

I don't own Photo but I may have to get it if solves this issue.

Posted

If you have Photo installed on the same PC, you can use Photo (by switching to Photo Persona in Publisher) to add an unsharp mask live filter to the images.

This is a manual process per image, independent form export. But once you have a filter layer within the Publisher document, you can copy/move it to any other object, e.g. image frames on master pages. It is possible to double-click on the layer and adjust sharpening settings, too, without leaving Publisher.

Another option would be to batch-process multiple images and apply sharpening with Photo, before importing them to Publisher. If using the same sharpening settings is ok for multiple images.

For simplicity, i attached an otherwise empty file containing a unsharp mask live filter.

Just try to use this, filling in own images and see if it helps. It should work independent from Photo installed on your PC.

Sharpen Publisher.afpub

Mac mini M1 A2348 | MBP M3 

Windows 11 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5 | Dell 27“ 4K

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

I use iPad screenshots and videos even in the Desktop section of the forum when I expect no relevant difference.

 

Posted

WOW, thank you so much!

Yea it worked independently from Photo. This should come standard with Publisher, It's ridiculous...

Again, thank you so much, now I just have to figure the equivalent between "Factor" ( affinity) and "Amount" ( Photoshop). 

 

 

Posted

Besides applying unsharp mask filter to the image, Lanczos separable has similar result to Photoshop's bicubic.
Because 
apparently Photoshop applies unshapen mask filter automatically to the image when resizing.
Lanczos sharpen edges of the image. Lanczos non-separable is little too strong on sharpen effect.
So you could do this on export without using a filter.

Posted

By the way, this recent thread, respectively its posts with sample images about Affinity sharpness in different resample methods on export might interest you, e.g. here

affinity-70-bilinear.jpg.31e7466e380e342fc9981660f1059cb1.jpgaffinity-70-lanczos3s.jpg.4a67d8b3051d948b0bc5ab519e970d1a.jpgaffinity-70-lanczos3n.jpg.8be64d6562b628c74a147ba85fc005e8.jpg

… or in this post with a more detailed comparison:

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

Posted
8 hours ago, ashf said:

Besides applying unsharp mask filter to the image, Lanczos separable has similar result to Photoshop's bicubic.
Because 
apparently Photoshop applies unshapen mask filter automatically to the image when resizing.
Lanczos sharpen edges of the image. Lanczos non-separable is little too strong on sharpen effect.
So you could do this on export without using a filter.

Thanks, I actually compared all sampling options to what photshop does and while I liked the result with Lanczos separable, I found it a bit soft. I didn’t try to use an unsharp mask with it though so I’ll give that a try.

what I did find though is that applying an unsharp mask live filter to the images within Publisher with 0.35 factor and 1px radius in combination with tiff bicubic export renders a pretty much  identical result to what Photoshop does under the hood.

Posted
19 hours ago, DGee said:

Is there a way to sharpen an image on export from Publisher?

I wish there was a way. I posted a request a while back: 

This routine would be a real timesaver in project that have large amount of images of equal quality (and those of differing quality can be corrected manually).

Posted
On 11/30/2021 at 10:33 AM, Fixx said:

I wish there was a way. I posted a request a while back: 

This routine would be a real timesaver in project that have large amount of images of equal quality (and those of differing quality can be corrected manually).

Yea its definitely a must have. And I think ideally this should happen under the hood just like in Adobe Products because most times it makes no sense to make any decision there. 

Posted
5 hours ago, ashf said:

Yep, I did request that too.

 

I still haven’t figured wether if I’m going to need different sharpening settings for each image depending on their final raster size, but if that is the case it is going to be hard to get consistent results and it will involve a lot of extra work.

I’m also seeing color & gamma shifts for every image I import, I need to figure a safe workflow for images with Affinity apps otherwise I’m not sure I’ll be able to use them confidently.

Posted

If you use the live filter, you have to adjust the setting depends on the export size.
Because resizing on export happens after live filter is applied.
Means the order is different from what it should be.

The order of the process should be resizing then sharpen. not sharpen then resizing.

Posted
2 minutes ago, ashf said:

If you use the live filter, you have to adjust the setting depends on the export size.
Because resizing on export happens after live filter is applied.
Means order is different from what it should be.

The order of the process should be resizing then sharpen. not sharpen then resizing.

Agree, but I raster the image then apply an unsharp mask, then export.

Posted
1 minute ago, ashf said:

@DGeeOk, if you don't resize on export, live filter would be fine without changing the setting each time.

Oh I see what you meant before …yea I wasn’t resizing on export but downscaling images in Publisher and exporting at 1:1 scale. If downsizing on export also requires sharpening, then I guess you cannot export a JPEG without ruining your image. You’d have to reimport the image then resharpen etc…. My god…

Posted
Just now, DGee said:

Oh I see what you meant before …yea I wasn’t resizing on export but downscaling images in Publisher and exporting at 1:1 scale. If downsizing on export also requires sharpening, then I guess you cannot export a JPEG without ruining your image. You’d have to reimport the image then resharpen etc…. My god…

Yes that's the problem. same goes for Photo's Batch Job.
That's why I and Fixx requested the option for sharpen on export.

Posted
1 minute ago, ashf said:

Yes that's the problem. same goes for Photo's Batch Job.
That's why I and Fixx requested the option for sharpen on export.

Right… wow , this is way worse than I anticipated man. Need to figure a manageable workflow for this along with the gamma shifts I’m experiencing.

Posted
26 minutes ago, ashf said:

I think resizing and sharpen are inseparable operation.
So they should be in single place to setup and work together.
 

Absolutely!

Posted

I ran a few more tests as I wanted to get to the bottom of this issue.

Got a 24 megapixel image and downscaled it by 50% in Photo, Publisher and Photoshop. I rasterised after downscaling and exported using default tiff settings (8bit  tiffs with billinear sampling). Finally, I compared the results in photoshop and this time the differences in sharpness among them were absolutely negligible also Colors were spot on with zero gamma shift.…

I’m quite confused right now as previous tests with the exact same image showed noticeable detail loss and gamma shift compared to Photoshop and I was able to replicate them. Even the Affinity Staff were able to replicate it…

Anyway, I’m happy… I would still like to know what caused these issues but at least I got some hope.

🤞

 

 

 

 

Posted
6 hours ago, DGee said:

I would still like to know what caused these issues

Possibly subpixel alignment of the affected images?

  1. Preferences > User Interface > Decimal Places > Pixels: 6
  2. change rule units to Pixels
  3. select the image
  4. align its position and size to full pixels
  5. also make sure that under View > Snapping Manager, Force Pixel Alignment is checked, and Move By Whole Pixels is unchecked
On 11/30/2021 at 4:08 PM, DGee said:

ideally this should happen under the hood just like in Adobe Products

It does:
Export dialog > More button > Downsample Images > Resample options

Having stopped upgrading at CS5.5, I can only compare to those "antique" versions. in my comparisons, Affinity's Resample options are the equivalent of e.g. Adobe's Save For Web / Save As > Quality options. The Lanzcos 3 Non-separable resample apparently includes kind of an unsharp mask. It's not always the "best" option though; usually it's a Good Idea™ to make a few export variants with different settings and then pick what works the best, case by case.

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

Posted

Both Lanzcos 3 Non-separable and Lanzcos 3 separable have sharpen effect.
But I feel Non-separable is too strong. It kinda spoils the image.
I compared with Photoshop CC and separable is the closest to PS.

 

Also regardless of subpixel alignment, Affinity's bicubic is fuzzier than PS's.
Apparently PS applies sharpen effect to the image automatically.(though there's no mention on UI)

 

Posted

@ashf To which exactly resampling method in Photoshop you're comparing all those Affinity options? There are multiple options for Bicubic available in Photoshop. As far as I know, "Bicubic (best for smooth gradients)" is the most neutral as it doesn't bring in any kind of extra sharpness or blurriness to the final image.

Posted
31 minutes ago, Alex M said:

@ashf To which exactly resampling method in Photoshop you're comparing all those Affinity options? There are multiple options for Bicubic available in Photoshop. As far as I know, "Bicubic (best for smooth gradients)" is the most neutral as it doesn't bring in any kind of extra sharpness or blurriness to the final image.

Even with the smooth gradients, still PS is slightly sharper than Affinity's bicubic.
if you use an image that has text, you will notice it.

Posted

So now it's more of a question - which particular Bicubic resampling implementation is closer to its original math algorithm, Serif's one or Adobe's.

I remember I did a thorough comparison a couple of months ago where I compared various resampling methods of both programs. And I used screenshots from this forum as source images exactly for the reason you've mentioned in your last post.

There's definitely a slight difference, I agree.

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