Working pixel perfect is a huge pain in Affinity products! Also in Photo.

[pixelworker]

I know the force pixel setting. But I still get so often a non integer representation of shapes. Even in Photo. I can understand that in a vector application like Designer, but I think Photo should really be about pixels.

https://affinityspotlight.com/article/hi-res-iconui-design-can-be-pixel-perfect/

I see the idea to work with pt sometimes instead of pixel, but sometimes you really want to be pixel perfect.

Creating a simple 1px line with a 2px border on each side is really a point of failure in Affinity Photo.

For example...

Create a shape in Photo and add a Stroke width.

I always have to check visually what's going on on px level. I often the get a different color for the border, just because the pt setting is not fitting the px raster and is aliasing (2px instead of one displayed with a shaded color).

Is someone else experience this kind of problems? I just had a project were pixel perfection was necessary and it made me almost switch to another program.

Is there a way to use just px instead of pt in Photo? Super frustrating stuff.

[kaffeeundsalz]

Just uncheck Preferences > User Interface > Show Lines in points.

[Old Bruce]

There is a Preferences setting in User Interface which will allow you to switch from Points to Pixels (or whatever you choose as the units of measurement) for the Text and Lines.

[pixelworker]

Thanks, I did miss this option. I preferet it a lot this way.

 

But I still have pretty much the same issue,

 

Create a rectangle with 3 px height. Add a 1px stroke with black. I expect the result below. But the top/bottom stroke is just grayish with 1px stoke width. It's getting black at 1.9px. And all steps in between just change the color of the stroke (I guess because sub-pixels can't be rendered).

----

1px STROKE (black)

----

1px Fill

----

1px STROKE (black)

----

 

 

 

 

[pixelworker]

I think I got it know. I forgot to set the Align to Outside in the Stroke setting this time. Seems to work now. 🙏

 

I wish the slider was restricted to integer values, the width slider isn't usefull in this form. But I can enter the values directly via keyboard as a workaound.

[pixelworker]

New problem. As said, I have Force pixel aligment + move by whole pixel is enabled, but I still get sometimes x.5 values on the y-axis when I move a rectangle with the mouse. It's super strange that his happens just sometimes, for certain values. For example, it's showing for Y in the Transform box: 94px, 95px, 96.5px. 

This looks distorted, which isn't unexpected for a sub-pixel position value. But this should never happen with the settings I have.

Any idea why it can moving with sub-pixel precission with these settings?

[pixelworker]

Found the reason. It's the snap options like Snap to bounding boxes, Snap to shap e key points, Snap to object geometry.

This seems to override the Force pixel setting in some cases. Maybe there are even more Snap settings that override it.

I'm a bit dissapointed to lose so many snap settings just to be able to work on a forced pixel grid.

[kaffeeundsalz]

Not only snapping overrides force pixel alignment, proportional scaling does, too. This means that if you have e.g. a rectangle at the size of 6x10 pixels and proportionally scale the shorter edge up to 7 pixels, the longer edge will scale to 11.7 pixels (rather than 12 pixels). There are probably more operations that undesirably introduce decimal places to pixel values, but this is a very common one to keep in mind.

[NotMyFault]

12 hours ago, pixelworker said:

As said, I have Force pixel aligment + move by whole pixel is enabled

Never activate move by whole pixels, except temporary (to be immediately deactivated again) when moving objects who are perfectly pixel aligned.

For any other case, it could cause more harm than any good, as misaligned objects stay misaligned forever.

There are other settings you need to consider and master:

1. Resample method: set to nearest neighbor.
2. Anti-Aliasing: may need to be off (depends), otherwise you get partially transparent edge pixels for angled edges
3. View quality: set to best (slowest)
4. Export: resample to NN
5. Resizing objects: always use numeric input, and check all values (x y h w angle sheer)
6. strokes: if you need 1px (or odd integer) stroke, you need to position the object to .5 instead 0.0, or use inner/outer instead of center stroke. Inner/outer does not give identical results co center depending on shape.
7. you may completely forget strokes, instead, duplicate objects, increase size, and place behind. More effort but full control and avoid 1px stroke issue.

Do you use bitmap (pixel layer) or vector layers? The exact work style for pixel art will differ.

[Old Bruce]

1 hour ago, NotMyFault said:

Never activate move by whole pixels,

Excellent advice. Not sure why it is active by default. In my experience cases where it is necessary are quite rare. Most likely I have never actually needed it.