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Terrible Text Rendering after updating Mac Book Pro (m1) to Mojave 12.5


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Yesterday I updated my MacBook Pro (14", 2021, Chip: Apple M1 Pro) to Mojave 12.5. 

After the update the text rendered in Photo (and in Publisher and in Designer) looks edgy and blurry on all zoom sizes. It looks as if the anti-aliasing does no longer work. Changing settings (rendering options) in Photo do not have any effect. Before the update of the macOS all Affinity apps displayed text not only crispy and sharp but even without any rendering delay. What I see today is very disappointing. Photo Version: 1.10.5

Any help and advice will be very much appreciated.

 

Edited by Renate RS
typo.
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Hi Lee,

thanks for your support. I hope the screenshot shows what you are asking for. I am using the German UI.

All fonts that are required have been installed correctly,  e.g. the (MS) office apps on the same machine do not show this rendering issue. In addition: I did not change neither the Affinity documents in question nor the Affinity settings after updating to macOS 12.5.

Renate 

Bildschirmfoto 2022-08-01 um 18.20.47.png

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22 minutes ago, Alex M said:

@Renate RS

You have zoom level set to 113.2%. This is exactly the reason AP shows jagged/distorted image. Just change it to 100%.

Unfortunately, AP doesn't use precise quality resampling and instead roughly upscales cached mipmap of 100% canvas for any zoom level between 100% and 200%.

 

I cannot confirm that observation. What happens if you merge visible, does it differ in rendering (at the same odd zoom level)?

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@NotMyFault

Merge visible or rasterize have no visible effect on perceived rendering quality when viewing at such odd zoom levels.

Seems to be a global thing for AP and how it renders the canvas.

Btw, both Designer and Publisher always use Bilinear at all zoom levels in vector mode but their raster personas behave similarily to AP.

Probably a performance optimization or something like this.

Just to illustrate this a bit better I prepared an image comparing the canvas shown at different zoom levels.

100% and 200% are properly and evenly resampled while any intermediate ones are a rough upscales of a previous (100%/200%/..) mipmap without any resampling.

ap.thumb.png.e0c28fc68ce19de4a22837add33ded3c.png

 

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2 hours ago, LeeThorpe said:

It looks like you have altered the render quality in your settings, change this to automatic/best and it should resolve it.

Lee

image.png

Thanks Lee, 

for trying to support me. Unfortunately  your tips do not work.

The settings you are referring to seems to stem from a PC, I am on a MacBook Pro. There is a similar setting page, but with different options in detail (see screenshot). Unfortunately and nevertheless changing the options you are referring to do not alter the situation at all. I had the setting already set to BEST quality and before the update it worked perfect with a beautiful rendering of text.

Regarding  @Alex M and @NotMyFaultI am not sure, if I understood your suggestions. Compared to my jagged text display your image looks sharp enough at any zoom level to me, @Alex M . My problem is that the text that was previously sharp and crispy at any zoom level is now jagged and distorted after the macOS 12.5 update.

I would be glad, if anyone out there could confirm my observations. Again I am convinced that  there must be a relation between my observations in AP and  Mojave 12.5. I assume that Affinity must have sitting somewhere a Mac with M1 chip running Mojave 12.5. Could it be worthwhile to give AP a try on this machine?

Thanks for your effort.

Renate 

Bildschirmfoto 2022-08-01 um 21.12.59.png

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@LeeThorpe I have also checked my Publisher and Designer apps on the very same MacBook Pro. 

Believe it or not: Both render the text perfectly at any zoom level as I was used to it before the Mojave 12.5 update. It is only a problem with Affinity Photo.

I attached the setting screenshot for Designer - it is the very same setting as I use for AP! The AP problem must lie somewhere else - not in the settings.

Strange. But I hope that Affinity will provide a solution soon. 
Renate

Bildschirmfoto 2022-08-01 um 21.42.39.png

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2 hours ago, Alex M said:

@NotMyFault

Merge visible or rasterize have no visible effect on perceived rendering quality when viewing at such odd zoom levels.

Seems to be a global thing for AP and how it renders the canvas.

Btw, both Designer and Publisher always use Bilinear at all zoom levels in vector mode but their raster personas behave similarily to AP.

Probably a performance optimization or something like this.

Just to illustrate this a bit better I prepared an image comparing the canvas shown at different zoom levels.

100% and 200% are properly and evenly resampled while any intermediate ones are a rough upscales of a previous (100%/200%/..) mipmap without any resampling.

ap.thumb.png.e0c28fc68ce19de4a22837add33ded3c.png

 

Probably a Windows only issue. Cannot reproduce on Mac or iPad.

And I didn't get such issues when still on Windows (until Dec. 2021).

Can you share the exact afphoto file, and a screenshot of Performance settings?

 

To be clear: I don't say the problem does not exist. I only say Ii'm unable to reproduce the issue on 6 different devices (2 Windows PCs, 1 MacOS, 3 iPad).

I had occasional issues on Windows where the rendering froze in "rough" state, and never concluded to "fine" state. But I always get nice rendering of test fonts when I try today. Letter A, Arial, 162,1pt, 108x116 px seems your 100% size.

 

left my 137,9%, right yours.

 

 

Screenshot 2022-08-01 at 22.51.11.png

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

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.

 

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@NotMyFault 

Thank you very much for your time taking these tests for us.

Now I'm finding this strange as I'm also on macOS right now and I'm experiencing exactly the same issues as @Renate RS

As far as I can remember, AP canvas preview always was a bit jagged and distorted for me at any odd zoom levels between 100% and 200%.

Very first time I noticed this was the moment I created a new document and you know... this default AP behaviour of fitting the canvas to the window instead of showing 100%. That was the moment I felt something is not quite right with the image quality.

I started to dig down the problem and found that for any zoom levels below 100% AP runs one pass of Bilinear resampling. That's typically enough for getting an ok image quality. Somehow it doesn't happen between 100% and 200%.

That's how I teached myself to forget all these odd zoom levels and work strictly at 100% and sometimes go to 200% or 400% to better handle small details if needed.

I should also mention that I'm using 27" 2560x1440 display at its full native resolution and don't have any display scaling enabled in macOS.

I'm attaching the sample document so everyone could try open it and see if letters are a bit distorted. For me it opens at 107.9% by default and I immediately see that overall document canvas is unevenly distorted as there's no Bilinear filtering applied to it. 100% is obviously crisp and sharp and 200% has proper Bilinear filtering.

universi.afphotoap-zoom-test.png.d3a8804dce290359370b6d353b630353.png

Also, for comparison, there's another document (photo this time) opened in AP and Photoshop at the same 137.9% zoom level.

ap-ps-137.png.659700a57e67f5d85d062acfde3e4667.png

Edited by Alex M
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@Renate RS

Designer and Publisher render text perfectly at any zoom levels because they are vector editors. Photo is a raster editor and can't do it the same way as vector editors.

In your last screenshot with Performance Settings window I can clearly see that letters behind have better rendering than in your initial posting.

So could you please set your zoom level once again to 100% (Cmd+1) and let us know if image quality is all good for you now?

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2 hours ago, Alex M said:

@NotMyFault 

Thank you very much for your time taking these tests for us.

Now I'm finding this strange as I'm also on macOS right now and I'm experiencing exactly the same issues as @Renate RS

As far as I can remember, AP canvas preview always was a bit jagged and distorted for me at any odd zoom levels between 100% and 200%.

Very first time I noticed this was the moment I created a new document and you know... this default AP behaviour of fitting the canvas to the window instead of showing 100%. That was the moment I felt something is not quite right with the image quality.

I started to dig down the problem and found that for any zoom levels below 100% AP runs one pass of Bilinear resampling. That's typically enough for getting an ok image quality. Somehow it doesn't happen between 100% and 200%.

That's how I teached myself to forget all these odd zoom levels and work strictly at 100% and sometimes go to 200% or 400% to better handle small details if needed.

I should also mention that I'm using 27" 2560x1440 display at its full native resolution and don't have any display scaling enabled in macOS.

I'm attaching the sample document so everyone could try open it and see if letters are a bit distorted. For me it opens at 107.9% by default and I immediately see that overall document canvas is unevenly distorted as there's no Bilinear filtering applied to it. 100% is obviously crisp and sharp and 200% has proper Bilinear filtering.

universi.afphotoap-zoom-test.png.d3a8804dce290359370b6d353b630353.png

Also, for comparison, there's another document (photo this time) opened in AP and Photoshop at the same 137.9% zoom level.

 

I opened your file, by default it was zoomed to 123%, made a screenshot, placed the screenshot into the file, and made new screenshots without grid, and with 1px grid.

It does not show any issues you are observing.

Full screen view after opening document:

6A392D06-ED3C-4ABB-9D88-7D5C252FB5B4.thumb.png.0910707730f3764aba58cd48ce4b88ce.png

heavily zoomed in, no grid

FC0A9E4E-05FB-4C6D-84F8-3B311103EFC3.thumb.png.a0cdca65264b0f687e9264fe90bcd619.png

heavily zoomed in, 1px grid

3E5DC188-DB62-49B5-A42B-017A86D24B0A.thumb.png.a452434ef7fdf0bbea6275d91fc348b6.png

 

The zoom level is 1090%

ABFF4BB3-7C13-4C4E-A135-E6AA3E77046B.thumb.png.37891a968d472f0031ea48530f8aa5b0.png

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LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

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.

 

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@Alex M  @NotMyFault 

Thank you so much for taking the time to investigate this odd behaviour of my Affinity Photo on macOS 12.5. 

At first I need to apologize (🙈🙈🙈). I am dreadful sorry,  that I mixed up the macOS names Mojave & Monterey. We are not talking about  macOS Mojave, but macOS  Monterey 12.5 - which was released only a couple of days ago.

Now let me again emphasize the issues I am observing:

Affinity Photo did not show this mediocre rendering of text before I updated to macOS Mojave Monterey 12.5. Before the update - running on Monterey (yes, Monterey) 12.4 - every text (font) rendered perfectly in Affinity Photo. Yes, Publisher and Designer are focussed on vector images. Nevertheless since decades we are using vector fonts in any application and I am not concerned about scaling of raster images which might be better or worse depending on a lot of factors.


@Alex M The text you saw behind the setting screenshot had zoom level 100%.  And yes, at zoom level 100% the rendered fonts look good. But I am definitely not always working at zoom level 100%. Again: Up to macOS 12.4 the rendering of fonts worked perfectly - no jagged edges at any zoom level. Even MS Word is rendering the fonts at any zoom level perfectly - even after the macOS update to 12.5.

@NotMyFault I already have shared my settings for Photo and Designer (see above). No, I am not on Windows but on macOS 12.5. Which macOS version have you been using to verify the behaviour? I can reproduce the odd rendering of text/fonts in any Affinity Photo document. Just  open a new document, place a text frame, enter some text and play with different zoom levels. I immediately see the poor rendering at zoom levels above 100%. (see screenshot). There is no relation to a specific file or document or font. Alls fonts do not render as they rendered before macOS 12.5.

Cheers,
Renate
 

 

Bildschirmfoto 2022-08-02 um 11.30.39.png

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Just one additional remark:

When I open the very same afphoto file in Affinity Publisher - either using the Publisher or Photo persona - the text is rendered perfectly. No jagged edges, just like it was before the macOS 12.5 update in Affinity Photo.

Any explanations? What am I doing wrong?
Renate

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@NotMyFault 

Thank you for the screenshots provided. It's clear to me that iPad version of AP doesn't have this issue. I suppose resampling routines working a bit differently here, considering the Retina display and that everything is rendered at 2x. So it's more of an issue of regular density screens with PPI ~110.

I'm wondering if you're by the chance running your LG34WK95 at any HiDPI mode or at its full native resolution?

Could you please post a couple of screenshots of the same document from your Mac mini system with an external dislay? Would be very interesting to see if there's any relation between screen resolution (HiDPI mode on/off) and how AP resamples the canvas.

@Renate RS

That's actually very interesting case. Because in Publisher its Publisher persona is vector view mode and its Photo persona should behave the same way as AP does.

Could you please try opening the sample document from my post above universi.afphoto and post some screenshots?

Also — are you running all these apps on your Macbook screen or have any external screens attached?

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I just updated from 12.4 to 12.5 last night and will test on MacOS later today, and share the results. I have a good old Dell 2409 FullHD display in storage, and may try this non-retina display, too, besides my 4K and 5K displays.

Unfortunately, MacOS does some arcane „retina“ math with my 5K display and shows apps not the native resolution. Let’s see.

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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.

 

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i don‘t know if OS preferences, Font smoothing is still relevant. You may give it a try - even if Affinity uses own font rendering engines.

https://osxdaily.com/2018/09/26/fix-blurry-thin-fonts-text-macos-mojave/

 

OS updates tend to occasionally reset or change user preferences without informing users.

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

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.

 

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56 minutes ago, Alex M said:

@NotMyFault 

Thank you for the screenshots provided. It's clear to me that iPad version of AP doesn't have this issue. I suppose resampling routines working a bit differently here, considering the Retina display and that everything is rendered at 2x. So it's more of an issue of regular density screens with PPI ~110.

I'm wondering if you're by the chance running your LG34WK95 at any HiDPI mode or at its full native resolution?

Could you please post a couple of screenshots of the same document from your Mac mini system with an external dislay? Would be very interesting to see if there's any relation between screen resolution (HiDPI mode on/off) and how AP resamples the canvas.

@Renate RS

That's actually very interesting case. Because in Publisher its Publisher persona is vector view mode and its Photo persona should behave the same way as AP does.

Could you please try opening the sample document from my post above universi.afphoto and post some screenshots?

Also — are you running all these apps on your Macbook screen or have any external screens attached?

@Alex M

I appreciate your support in this strange case. I have attached a screenshot of your sample file opened in Publisher and Photo. For me the difference in rendering quality of text/fonts is pretty obvious. You  may need to increase the zoom level of the screen shot.

My external main screen is an LG ULTRAGEAR 2560 x 1440, 31,5''  (see screenshot of display settings). But the behavior on the integrated MacBook display is the very same, although not that obvious since it is just a 14'' screen with a huge pixel density.

 

 

Publisher-Photo.thumb.png.fb547d737b51b48157c47c3b786b052f.png

Bildschirmfoto 2022-08-02 um 12.55.16.png

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40 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

i don‘t know if OS preferences, Font smoothing is still relevant. You may give it a try - even if Affinity uses own font rendering engines.

https://osxdaily.com/2018/09/26/fix-blurry-thin-fonts-text-macos-mojave/

 

OS updates tend to occasionally reset or change user preferences without informing users.

Thanks @NotMyFault I came across this article before I open this post. Maybe that's why I mixed up Mojave and Monterey in my initial post. 🤔

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@Renate RS 

Thank you for the screenshot. May we know what zoom level is used there?

The difference you're showing is actually expected. Because APub is able to render text layers as vector objects thus they will remain sharp and crisp no matter which zoom level you've set. AP threats everything on a canvas as raster, pixel data even if it is the same text layer or a shape it will be all rendered as pixels accordingly to document pixel resolution.

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Interesting fact: if I switch my display resolution from default 2560x1440 to HiDPI mode 1280x720 than AP nicely resamples the canvas between 100% and 200% zoom levels providing clean and sharp image. That doesn't happen when working in non HiDPI mode.

Here's a comparison I made at 175% zoom level (so everything is matched in size).

Left — 2560x1440 @ 1280x720 (HiDPI). Right — 2560x1440 (native resolution).

image.thumb.png.d2a4e9c9baa0c633f21abb789b0b6837.png

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22 minutes ago, Alex M said:

Interesting fact: if I switch my display resolution from default 2560x1440 to HiDPI mode 1280x720 than AP nicely resamples the canvas between 100% and 200% zoom levels providing clean and sharp image. That doesn't happen when working in non HiDPI mode.

Here's a comparison I made at 175% zoom level (so everything is matched in size).

Left — 2560x1440 @ 1280x720 (HiDPI). Right — 2560x1440 (native resolution).

image.thumb.png.d2a4e9c9baa0c633f21abb789b0b6837.png

This lets me assume that it is a MacOS thing: MacOS does present a kind of virtual display resolution to apps, hiding the physical actual size.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/03/apple_m1_drivers/

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

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.

 

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36 minutes ago, Alex M said:

@Renate RS 

Thank you for the screenshot. May we know what zoom level is used there?

The difference you're showing is actually expected. Because APub is able to render text layers as vector objects thus they will remain sharp and crisp no matter which zoom level you've set. AP threats everything on a canvas as raster, pixel data even if it is the same text layer or a shape it will be all rendered as pixels accordingly to document pixel resolution.

Dear @Alex M 

I hear what you are saying. All sounds very logical  and comprehensible. I appreciate your efforts helping me.

However: I did not see this rendering issue in Affinity Photo before the upgrade to macOS Monterey 12.5. The difference before and after the 12.5 update were immediately noticeable to me.

Still I am wondering if somebody else can reproduce what I am seeing.

Can you confirm that you are testing on macOs 12.5? If you are not on macOS 12.5 all effort in reproducing my findings might be pointless. 

I am almost ready to think about re-installing macOS 12.4 🤔 .

The zoom level of my comparison Publisher vs. Photo was something around 170%. 

Thanks a lot again
Renate

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@Renate RS

I'm also on macOS 12.5 right now. Before that I was on 10.15.7, 11.6.7, 12.4. The problem you're experiencing is actually a well known. Check similar threads below. They are all about the same software design flaw in AP and raster personas in AD and APub:

However, let's try "one more thing". Could you please try disconnecting your external display and relaunch Photo? Or another way — try closing the laptop's lid and relaunch Photo.

Now try opening the same file and view it at 170% zoom level just like you did before. Does text appears crisp and clean now?

By doing this we may try to rule out any possible issues with multiple screens resolutions conflicting with each other. I've seen such issues before. When app was initially launched on another screen and was moved to another one later.

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