Bicubic and Lanczos as new quality options for View Quality

[Eusebiu Oprinoiu]

There is an old thread in the V1 Archive about this, but with the launch of V2, it might not get the attention it deserves.
Right now, Affinity offers only Nearest Neighbor and Bilinear as quality options under Performance > View Quality.
While decent for basic use, they are terrible options for professional work where precision is essential.
I would like to see both Bicubic and Lanczos as new scaling options in a future Affinity update.

I would gladly sacrifice performance for better canvas fidelity.
I understand that in the past, Bilinear was chosen as a tradeoff between performance and precision, but technology has improved a lot over the last few years.
Powerful computers are everywhere now, and it's a shame that we still have Bilinear as our highest-quality option.

Old thread for reference

[NotMyFault]

While I have sympathy for this request, it is more or less useless without multiple additional requests.

The main issue with Affinity Apps are far deeper: 

• No matter if you claim professional or private / leisure usage, you want to get a accurate preview of the final result of an exported file.
• Result will differ depending on raster or vector export
• In case of vector formats it will differ even more depending on available features of export file format (blend modes) and how unsupported features get emulated (mostly rasterizing, sometimes simply wrong results)
• in case of raster formats, it will depend on format limitations (bit depth, lossy compression, support for alpha etc)
• Affinity needs to fully support RGB/16 rendering on displays capable to render 10/12/16 bit color depth (it doesn’t at least for any V1 and V2.0.0)

The rendering in all Apps is off / incorrect in so many aspects it is difficult to name all:

1. color bit depth is limited to 8 bit for RGB/16
2. gradients get forced dithering 
3. Export differs from rendering
4. view mode / resample 
5. view mode / quality
6. zoom level except 100% render noise and sharpening wrong
7. zoom level < 100% cause severe resampling artifacts, including totally wrong colors
8. zoom level > 100% cause rendering artifacts 
9. compression artifacts (jpeg) not visible in preview or rendering
10. open bugs lead to non-updates in many cases. Need to zoom in/out to trigger re-draw
11. MIP Maps produce wrong results in many cases, especially for sharpening and noise filters
12. CMYK simulation of paper colors is off in many cases
13. Info panel, color picker etc produce wrong color conversions RGB / CMYK
14. soft proof adjustment is almost useless, produces wrong results

Affinity needs to add many features and fix multiple years old bugs to be able to give an accurate preview of documents.

This should not reduce the merits of the product in other areas, or in principle.

Please add your vote to

 

 

[deeds]

These issues are far worse when using stacks of effects in Designer.

 

The refresh becomes a slide show taking up to half a minute to redraw even on a modern machine with a strong GPU.

 

No preview zoom level is an accurate representation of the export. And get much further from accuracy the more zoomed out, to the point where it's almost comical how different the real is versus the representation shown.

Editing "live" becomes glacial at all somewhat useful zoom levels. Faster if extremely zoomed out, but then it's impossible to ascertain what the settings changes are actually doing to the effects.

 

Exports often fail!