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@Nita Reed

Yeah, I kept trying to break it but failed. The Reset button is bottom left on the More panel that I cropped off.... but I think it's a red herring. I had assumed that it reset to factory default but it seems to only reset any changes you have made whilst the dialog is open

Anyway, it's a crude tool that I rarely use, there are better ways of blurring

Glad it worked even if it's a bit slow

Microsoft Windows 11 Home, Intel i7-1360P 2.20 GHz, 32 GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Intel Iris Xe
Affinity Photo - 24/05/20, Affinity Publisher - 06/12/20, KTM Superduke - 27/09/10

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Just now, Nita Reed said:

Nope...back to not working

Try this:

  1. Make sure you have a "(Pixel)" layer selected
  2. Select the Blur Brush Tool
  3. Select a simple round brush preset from the Brushes panel
  4. (Optional) Set the brush width to a largish value, say 10% of the document width
  5. On the context toolbar click the "More" button
  6. Set the Spacing slider all the way to the left (to 1%) & the Flow slider all the way to the right (to 100%)
  7. Make sure Blend Mode & Wet Edges are set to 'don't set'
  8. Drag the brush over any part of your pixel layer that has at least some detail

You should see a very strong blur effect.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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17 minutes ago, R C-R said:

[...]

You should see a very strong blur effect.

Yes, you should and you will, except if you are using a Mac and "Metal compute acceleration" is enabled in the app preferences, in which case the blur effect is extremely subtle and the brush preview is like an eraser brush revealing the underlying composite. It's a known bug that was introduced last year and the workaround is to disable "Metal compute acceleration".

Edited by anon2
grammar
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19 minutes ago, anon2 said:

Yes, you should and you will, except if you are using a Mac and "Metal compute acceleration" is enabled in the app preferences, in which case the blur effect is extremely subtle and the brush preview is like an eraser brush revealing the underlying composite. It's a known bug that was introduced last year and the workaround is to disable "Metal compute acceleration".

Thanks. I never would have known about the bug because "Metal compute acceleration" is not available on my old iMac. 

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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51 minutes ago, anon2 said:

Yes, you should and you will, except if you are using a Mac and "Metal compute acceleration" is enabled in the app preferences, in which case the blur effect is extremely subtle and the brush preview is like an eraser brush revealing the underlying composite. It's a known bug that was introduced last year and the workaround is to disable "Metal compute acceleration".

NOPE

I noticed something rather odd, too.  I select a brush and the cursor shrinks...teeny tiny...and the brush is deselected.

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3 minutes ago, Nita Reed said:

That's just wrong.  Wrong, I say.  lol

Don't give up, just keep on clicking everything in sight!

Maybe it's the heat?

Anyway, my very last attempt. Duplicate a Brush of a reasonable size, rename it NitasFavouriteBlurBlush, adjust the parameters as before and only use it for blurring.

Set the Associated tool to Blur Brush Tool

Adjust the size with the [  ]  keys and nothing else

Hope for the best

MyFavouriteBlur.png

Microsoft Windows 11 Home, Intel i7-1360P 2.20 GHz, 32 GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Intel Iris Xe
Affinity Photo - 24/05/20, Affinity Publisher - 06/12/20, KTM Superduke - 27/09/10

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5 hours ago, Nita Reed said:

I wrote "NOPE" because my blur brush still does not work.

Hi @Nita Reed. If we are still talking about your screen grab on the first page, I think your blur brush is working fine.
With what you have selected in the Layers Panel you are blurring the girl only. Looking at that image, the part nearer the bottom edge is much blurrier than above it (See below).
If you want to blur the edge between the girl and water you need to select and blur (or erase with a soft brush) just the mask 🙂 👍

Edit: I suspect there might not be much more of her to reveal.... (https://www.pickpik.com/fashion-beautiful-woman-woman-hat-covering-hidden-face-2925).
So instead, since she is already blurred (which I think is the case.... and if you don't mind that), you might just need to erase the bottom edge of the mask. If you don't want her blurred at all and only want a blurred transition, you will need to redo the mask with the bottom edge a bit higher so as to give yourself some room for the transition.

308359358_ScreenShot2020-08-07at4_44_30PM.png.c9efe2caa60ef1a076dc883433aecf83.png

 

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5 hours ago, JimmyJack said:

Hi @Nita Reed. If we are still talking about your screen grab on the first page, I think your blur brush is working fine.
With what you have selected in the Layers Panel you are blurring the girl only. Looking at that image, the part nearer the bottom edge is much blurrier than above it (See below).
If you want to blur the edge between the girl and water you need to select and blur (or erase with a soft brush) just the mask 🙂 👍

Edit: I suspect there might not be much more of her to reveal.... (https://www.pickpik.com/fashion-beautiful-woman-woman-hat-covering-hidden-face-2925).
So instead, since she is already blurred (which I think is the case.... and if you don't mind that), you might just need to erase the bottom edge of the mask. If you don't want her blurred at all and only want a blurred transition, you will need to redo the mask with the bottom edge a bit higher so as to give yourself some room for the transition.

308359358_ScreenShot2020-08-07at4_44_30PM.png.c9efe2caa60ef1a076dc883433aecf83.png

 

Well, that is interesting.   Thank you for showing me...

I'd say the blur brush is, quite possibly, :blurring" but, if one must zoom in 50X to see it, I'm not sure that qualifies as "working fine".

 

I appreciate the advice.

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  • 2 months later...

I am a newbie when it comes to photoshop and I am in need of help. I am trying to blur the background of a headshot (but leave the person clear) and I am having the same problem listed in this thread. The blur button does nothing for me. I have selected the layer on the righ side and still nothing. I tried reading to solve it but i am confused. Can anyone help?

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  • 1 month later...

The blur tool is just plain terrible. The mere fact that there is such a significant online discussion of the situation,  and one has to go through so many non-default gyrations in order to effect what amounts to little or no usable blur editing is testimony to the problem. All that being said - I would hope that such an important tool will be reworked (read that corrected) in future iterations of the software. So far, our migration from Adobe™ products entirely to Affinity™ software has not been without these discomforts...  but who in their right mind would expect anything else? Kudos to Affinity for offering reasonably priced products not chained to the nightmare of cloud applications.

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  • Staff

Hi @bcrtech,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
Thank you for your feedback/support. The issues you are experiencing with the Blur Tool are due to a bug we weren't able to fix yet. I've bumped the bug report yet again and will try to bring this up to dev team attention internally. I'm sorry for the inconvenience this is causing you.

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In my view the blur tool is just fine. In most cases, you could use better techniques like blur filters and masks instead of the more basic blur tool.

YouTube will provide tons of good training videos to learn a more elegant workflow. Most important for beginners, and highly decorated veterans switching from Photoshop, as you need to get rid of legacy thinking workflows first. 

There are a lot of traps a beginner can fall into, like not selecting a pixel layer, using wrong settings, or simply trying to use Photoshop Workflows which will lead to hell in Affinity Photo. 
 

If you really want to use the blur tool, you might want to start with “merge visible” first.  This will guarantee a fresh and usable pixel layer and thus sorting out a lot of complications. 

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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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  • 1 month later...

I've been creating blur layers and erasing the parts I want sharp for years. Thanks to the tip above - Preferences > Performance, deselect hardware acceleration - the blur tool now works, hooray!

I'm a creative artworker... "Enable metal compute acceleration" is utterly meaningless to me unless I Google it, but in the context of wondering why a brush doesn't work how would a person know what to look for? :)

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  • 1 month later...

Hi,

Win10, latest version of affinity photo (as of now)

The blur tool does next to nothing. I pulled spacing down, the other values up like advised above, use it on a pixel layer, there's no masks. I have brush preview enabled. I drag and drag and drag and drag and drag and after a while the slightes amount of blurring becomes visible. Or maybe it's just eye strain and wishful thinking, lol.
Is this still an unresolved bug?

As I am using it to do digital painting, blurring the whole image is no feasible workaround. I have to apply a huge variation of blurring in differing amounts. Slowly de-masking a single blur layer is not the same thing

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8 minutes ago, h_d said:

It's knackered in Big Sur too.

Have you tried using it with Metal compute acceleration disabled? I am running Catalina on my iMac with AMD Radeon Pro 5700 graphics. If I disable that in Preferences > Performance, the Blur too has a much stronger effect, & there is no transparent checkerboard overlay.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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2 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Have you tried using it with Metal compute acceleration disabled?

Just tried that (Big Sur, AMD Radeon Pro Vega) and the Blur Brush works as it should with Display set to OpenGL. It's not a tool I use very often, though, so I'll switch Metal back on and hope Serif fix it :10_wink:

Affinity Photo 2.0.3,  Affinity Designer 2.0.3, Affinity Publisher 2.0.3, Mac OSX 13, 2018 MacBook Pro 15" Intel.

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1 minute ago, h_d said:

Just tried that (Big Sur, AMD Radeon Pro Vega) and the Blur Brush works as it should with Display set to OpenGL. It's not a tool I use very often, though, so I'll switch Metal back on and hope Serif fix it :10_wink:

I did not change the display mode from Metal to Open GL, just disabled Hardware Acceleration at the bottom of the preference ("Enable Metal compute acceleration" box unchecked).

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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4 minutes ago, R C-R said:

did not change the display mode from Metal to Open GL

I was fiddling. Doing what you did works for me too.

Affinity Photo 2.0.3,  Affinity Designer 2.0.3, Affinity Publisher 2.0.3, Mac OSX 13, 2018 MacBook Pro 15" Intel.

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