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  • 3 months later...

Ok cool, glad I found this. Turning off Hardware Acceleration worked for me. 😀

Still though, the Blur Tool leaves something to be desired. Once you get to a certain point, you can't blur anymore. It would be nice if it had something like a "Spread" setting if that makes sense.

I hate comparing software but I feel I need to explain how I wish the Blur Tool worked in Affinity Photo. Try out the Blender Blur and Blender Basic presets in Krita. Or the Blend Tool in Clip Studio Paint. Or the Smudge/Blur Tool in Leonardo with Smudge set to 0 (it's works as a single tool). Or Grainy Water in Painter. 

Interestingly, Affinity Photo's Blur Tool and Medibang Paint Pro's Blur Tool work the same except with one big difference. Repeated strokes with Medibang's Blur Tool WILL continue blur.

You can sorta create a blur/spread effect with Affinity Photo's Smudge Tool by using pressure with X/Y Scatter but it ends up sorta splotchy and imprecise.

Anyway, those are my thoughts because I don't like importing/exporting images between software for a single tool. If Affinity Photo's Blur Tool worked like any of the above, I could do all my work entirely in Affinity Photo.

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  • 1 month later...
  • Staff

Hi @BV123,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
Sorry the delay getting back to you. Apart from the bug with the hardware acceleration enabled which is already logged (and makes the blur effect way too subtle), the Blur Tool does continue to blur if you keep doing additional passes over the blurred zone. Check the video below. Notice i started to blur the white flowers until they disappear/get lost in the blurring then switched to the darker area on the right until it end up becoming indiscernible all while pressing/dragging the tool a single time from the beginning of the recording up to the end (hardware acceleration is disabled in that video). If instead of pressing and dragging the mouse a single time for the whole process you click and drag multiple times you can use the History panel to see how the blurring effect is being incrementally built step by step over the time. If it still doesn't work as you want feel free to create a new thread/fill with the improvements/requests you'd like to see in the respective section in the forums.

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On 6/17/2021 at 11:36 AM, BV123 said:

I hate comparing software but I feel I need to explain how I wish the Blur Tool worked in Affinity Photo. Try out the Blender Blur and Blender Basic presets in Krita. Or the Blend Tool in Clip Studio Paint.

I gave up on the Affinity blur tool years ago but thought I'd have a play after seeing MEB's post above - been around 4 years but still the same for me (seems to take too much effort then hits a wall) which means I'll continue to use Clip Studio Paint for the majority of digital paint stuf, which works really great - although Affinity's smudge tool can do something similar with some brushes but with less control(my favs are Daub blenders and Frankentoon texturizer brushes)

+ 1 for a usable blend tool

Daz1.png

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Affinity Publisher, Designer and Photo 1.10.5 - 2.2.1

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The big problem for me with the Blur Tool is that the opacity setting doesn't work (it never has!). So the only way to adjust the amount of blur is by using the flow setting which isn't ideal. Sometimes I want to give just a light touch of blur and I find the best way is to add Gaussian Blur to a duplicate layer, then use a mask to add it where I want and adjust the amount of blur. It would be really nice if the Blur Tool worked properly. (FWIW - The Sharpen Tool also seems pretty useless!)

Acer XC-895 : Core i5-10400 Hexa-core 2.90 GHz :  32GB RAM : Intel UHD Graphics 630 : Windows 10 Home
Affinity Publisher 2 : Affinity Photo 2 : Affinity Designer 2 : (latest release versions) on desktop and iPad

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  • Staff

Hi @Dazmondo77,
Thank you for trying and for your feedback. I will have a look to Clip Studio Paint implementation to see how both implementations differ.

Hi @PaulEC,
You're right - it doesn't! Thanks for raising this up. I'm logging it to be looked at.
Regarding the method you are using - if i understood it correctly - you don't need to duplicate the layer, you can apply a Gaussian Live Blur filter, press cmd+i to invert the built-in mask of the filter and paint it with white on where you want to blur the image. Not only you can use the opacity of the brush (which does work here) to control the opacity locally, you can also use the Radius of the adjustment to control the amount of blur as well as the Opacity slider in the Adjustment itself to control de opacity of the mask globally (layer opacity).

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Thanks for that @MEB really useful.  I tend to forget about using live filters, rather than just applying a normal filter. (Just my age I suppose! 😁)

Acer XC-895 : Core i5-10400 Hexa-core 2.90 GHz :  32GB RAM : Intel UHD Graphics 630 : Windows 10 Home
Affinity Publisher 2 : Affinity Photo 2 : Affinity Designer 2 : (latest release versions) on desktop and iPad

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  • 1 month later...

Hi all, I had a big issue with this and I have just found that changing the image from 8 bits to 16 bits made the blur tool work! (and then saving it as a copy to make it jpg after)

I don't generally use layers but sharpen and smudge worked on my background layer & this is my solution.

Hope this helps someone!

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  • 5 months later...
On 8/7/2020 at 11:17 AM, ,,, 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".

THIS WORKED! Many thanks!! Hopefully, Affinity will fix this soon as the workaround is counterintuitive.

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  • 2 months later...
On 8/7/2020 at 3:39 AM, IcyPRO said:

Blur brush is esentially useless at higher canvas resolutions (think 3000px and more), because it's blurring effect is hardcoded to some value, instead of being relative to your brush size.

It's the same as trying to blur your 4000 x 3000 canvas by applying 2px gaussian blur over and over... Nothing's going to happen.
Then try to apply 2px gaussian blur once at 400x300 px canvas and boom, it's completely blurry.

Blur brush needs to be reworked to be actually useful.

I second this motion!! 

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  • 1 year later...

It is now June 2023, and this issue/thread was started in 2016. The issue is still not fixed. I'm running a MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021) with Mac OS version 12.5.1 (21G83). I'm using Affinity photo Version 2.1.0

I have tried EVERYTHING that everyone on this thread has suggested, and NOTHING has worked. I am not a newbie to photo editing, or to computers, and I would consider myself very tech savvy. I switched to Affinity Photo to get away from Adobe Photoshop, as I do not like the company anymore. I am going to switch back to Adobe and I REALLY did not want to. I should not have to waste hours just trying to get a simple and much needed tool to work. The Affinity blur tool literally does nothing for me. I also rarely write on forums, but this issue has got me upset and very frustrated. 

Goodbye Affinity Photo, I'll check back on the updates from time to time since I already spent the money on your software.

Any company which can't resolve a relatively simple issue like this after 7 years, well... I guess goodbye is all I can really say. 

Take care all Affinity users, I wish you all the best.

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  • 3 months later...

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