"Refine Selection" Poor Performance?

[antonparas]

I bought Affinity Photo yesterday. It's been pretty good so far, but I'm having a lot of problems with cutting objects out of photos.

 

Here is a video displaying the issue. Notice how the refined parts become frayed and messy. (Also notice how slow it is)

 

I have seen both of the in-house tutorials on cutting objects and refining selections.

I have also looked at the information in the "Help" menu in Affinity Photo.
 

 

Here are my machine specs:
 

• Macbook Pro Retina - Early 2015 

• Processor: 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5

• RAM: 8 GB 1867 MHz DDR3

• Graphics: Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536 MB

• Operating System: El Capitan 10.11.2

 

Am I doing something wrong?

[crabtrem]

Wow. Your's is really slow. I have never had the refine tool take so long. One thing I would suggest, is that notice near the bottom where it says adjustment brush. In addition to changing your brush size, which is in the tutorial, and has a great effect on the accuracy of your selection. You will notice selections for matte, foreground, background, and feather. So when you refine matte, that is the default, and where you were at. As you look at your selection, the areas that you want to refine, but just cover the black area (background) select background and just run you brush over areas that you want to be black. This will again reanalyze your selection, but only work on the background (black) area. Do the same switching to the foreground (white) area. Run your brush on areas you want to be white, it will again reanalyze that section, but only work on filling in the white area. The feather will blur areas of your selection. I find that by changing my brush size often to meet the need, and switching between those adjustment brush areas, I get a very nice result. I do not know about why your system seems so slow, but adjusting the brush size might help? Anyway, I have never seen anyone cover the adjustment brush section, and I live by it. It has really made my selections much better.

[Madame]

I have the same mac (late 2013 though) and the refine edge performs like a charm.

 

I use much smaller brush and shorter strokes. I accidently used a big brush, and the behaviour was like yours in the video.

[JCook]

I'm using the same mac early 2015 and I've had quite a lot of issues with various tools and functions on affinity running very slowly and it often crashing. I wonder if it's simply a case of this particular spec of processor not coping with the demands of editing using affinity?

 

However, I have noticed that performance is improved if you go to Preferences > Performance  and bump up the RAM Usage limit. Maybe try that if you haven't already and see if it helps.

[barninga]

i found that setting the view quality to "nearest neighbour" (preferences -> performance -> view quality dropdown menu) helped a lot with AP overall performance, and especially eliminated some choppiness. keeping the brush size limited also helps a lot, like madame and crabtrem pointed out.