Blurry pixel images at 200% zoom

[Floor]

Images may become blurry when zooming in at 200%. This doesn't happen always so it's a bit hard to describe and to give the exact steps to reproduce.

See attached sample document — at 200% zoom the middle image (which is not scaled) sometimes becomes blurry. May need to zoom back and forth a bit to reproduce. But the issue does happen when switching to 200%. See screenshot (note that the small square is expected to be a solid grey in Artboard2, since these are half pixels in the original.)

This might be due to View Quality: Bilinear. When changed to Nearest Neighbour the image stays sharp. But Nearest Neighbour has other artefacts if 'Pixel view mode' is enabled (see second screenshot). Therefore not a solution in many cases.

With Bilinear on I wouldn't expect a perfectly zoomed in image to be blurry — there should be no interpolation since every document pixel perfectly matches screen pixels.

• High Quality retina rendering enabled
• Happens on both retina and non-retina screens
• Ventura 13.2.1
• Affinity Designer 2.0.4

 

 

 

pixel-square.afdesign

[Floor]

Hmm I just noticed that the images I uploaded here show the same behaviour in Safari. So the uploaded images themselves are blurry because they're scaled (retina -> non retina). Now I'm not sure if this is expected, and I just don't understand how this works...

[Dan C]

Hi @Floor,

Thanks for your report - I can confirm that in the Affinity apps when viewing documents at anything other than 100% zoom, we use mipmaps to display the canvas and this can occasionally cause objects to appear slightly 'blurry' on the canvas.

If you zoom into the canvas at 100% zoom, I assume this is not shown? If so, as I understand it, this is unfortunately an expected by-product of using mipmaps to speed up the rendering on the canvas which cannot be disabled at this time, my apologies.

[NotMyFault]

Another important factor to consider: 

pixel layers position must be pixel-aligned. If you use artboards, both artboard and pixel layer (relative to artboard) must be pixel aligned (integer values, no fractional positions).

Another factor is Designer using strange factors when zooming and using physical units (this interpretation of Retina screens never made any sense for me personally. Just confusing).

 

https://affinity.help/designer2/English.lproj/pages/GetStarted/zoom.html

When creating a new document, the Document Units define the exact size of your document on screen. For example, if you chose 'pixels', your document will display at its exact pixel size when exported and viewed on screen at 100%. For physical Document Units (e.g., millimeters) you'll get the exact print size at 50% zoom (due to Retina screen). The print size is determined by the dpi set in Document Setup.

 

[NotMyFault]

16 hours ago, Floor said:

See attached sample document — at 200% zoom the middle image (which is not scaled) sometimes becomes blurry. May need to zoom back and forth a bit to reproduce. But the issue does happen when switching to 200%. See screenshot (note that the small square is expected to be a solid grey in Artboard2, since these are half pixels in the original.)

I cant reproduce. Artboard 2 looks like 50% zoom, not 200% zoom.

Can you share the actual affinity document, and another screenshot of the full window including navigator panel and zoom settings?

[Floor]

34 minutes ago, Dan C said:

Hi @Floor,

Thanks for your report - I can confirm that in the Affinity apps when viewing documents at anything other than 100% zoom, we use mipmaps to display the canvas and this can occasionally cause objects to appear slightly 'blurry' on the canvas.

If you zoom into the canvas at 100% zoom, I assume this is not shown? If so, as I understand it, this is unfortunately an expected by-product of using mipmaps to speed up the rendering on the canvas which cannot be disabled at this time, my apologies.

Thanks for the details! I'll take a look at mipmaps. I assume mipmaps are deterministic? If they are, why does this issue happen occasionally, after repeatedly zooming and switching to 200%. It's not *always* blurry at 200% zoom. To reproduce: pinch to zoom, then press Command-2 to switch to 200%. About 50% of the time the image is blurry on screen.

At 100% zoom everything is pixel perfect for this particular document.

The main reason I'm using 200% zoom is because this is a non-Retina document that I'm viewing on a Retina display. In order to get the projected size the same as on a non-retina screen I need to zoom to 200%.

Alternatively I can make the document 144dpi and use points instead of pixels. In that case 100% zoom on a Retina display will show the correct projected size. The document will have more underlying pixels, that's all fine.

Now if I insert a non-retina 72dpi image into that 144dpi document, I'll have to scale that img up to 200% to get the correct projected size. In this case the exact same issue pops up at 100% zoom. See attached document. This is the same doc as before, but it's 144dpi and the image in Artboard 2 has been scaled up by 200%.

pixel-square-r.afdesign

[Floor]

29 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

I cant reproduce. Artboard 2 looks like 50% zoom, not 200% zoom.

Can you share the actual affinity document, and another screenshot of the full window including navigator panel and zoom settings?

Thanks for your reply! The document is included in the original post, see 'pixel-square.afdesign'

I'm aware of pixel-alignment of artboards and objects, which can be annoying as well for UI work. But it's not what I try to demonstrate in this report

Main use case is UI work, so I don't care about physical measurements or print size. The only thing I care about is that the pixels I create are mapped to exact (multiple of) screen pixels. The document uses 100x100 pixels — which is 50x50 screen points on a retina screen. That's too small, so I zoom to 200% to get the correct size.

See attached screen recording for details — I pinch then press Command-2 to go to 200% zoom. This is on a Retina display, but the same happens on a non-retina display.

Artboard1 = original rectangle objects
Artboard2 = 100x100 png of Artboard1
Artboard3 = 200x200 png of Artboard2 (scaled 50%)

[lepr]

6 hours ago, Floor said:

But it's not what I try to demonstrate in this report

Yep, and the inconsistent 200% zoom has been affecting all the Affinity apps for ages.

[Floor]

14 hours ago, ,,, said:

Yep, and the inconsistent 200% zoom has been affecting all the Affinity apps for ages.

Ah apologies if this has already been reported before, I couldn't find similar posts when searching in this AD2 topic. It's indeed interesting that it's inconsistent, looks like some kind of caching issue. And it does also happen at 100% zoom if an inserted image itself is scaled to 200%. Weird!

[lepr]

1 minute ago, Floor said:

Ah apologies if this has already been reported before, I couldn't find similar posts when searching in this AD2 topic.

No need to apologise

I've not noticed a report before, but I've noticed the problem for years. It's particularly annoying in Photo because of its effect on the view of blend modes and live filters. 

Yes, I should have reported it, but many reported issues have been neglected for years so I often lack motivation and just move on.

[Dan C]

Thanks for the further information provided here - in further testing this appears to be an M1/M2 based issue within Affinity, as I was unable to replicate this issue on my Intel based mac with Metal enabled, however with your document on our M1 MacBook Air I'm able to see this issue occasionally when zooming to 200%.

Therefore I will be logging this with our developers for further investigation now. I hope this helps

[lepr]

1 hour ago, Dan C said:

in further testing this appears to be an M1/M2 based issue within Affinity,

Eh? This has bugged me for years on Intel iMac. 

[Floor]

Thanks @Dan C for looking into it, much appreciated!

1 hour ago, ,,, said:

Eh? This has bugged me for years on Intel iMac. 

I can confirm this as well. I can reproduce the issue on Intel (Ventura + retina screen, Monterey + non-retina screen) and on M2 (Ventura + retina screen), using the same sample document. So I don't think it's limited to M1/M2 devices.

[Dan C]

Thanks for letting me know - I can't explain why I wasn't able to replicate this on my Intel based mac during testing but I will be sure to update the development log to include the above information now