Lots of flickering in the image when editing?

[bonecurrent]

I've been looking for a photo editing software for a while and based on YouTube videos and whatnot was leaning towards Affinity for a long time, and I finally bit the bullet and bought the software today.

I was just trying it out for the first time and noticed a lot of flickering when using tools. Is there anything to be done about this? It's extremely distracting. If it's always like this I'm honestly probably just going to refund the software because I'm finding it downright unusable.

I'm using a Macbook Air M2.

Here's a video of the flickering I'm experiencing (0:07 and 0:19 are the most obvious ones).

[Hangman]

Hi @bonecurrent and welcome to the forums,

Could you confirm which version of macOS you're using?

If you have Hardware Acceleration enabled in the Affinity Photo Performance Settings try switching it off. This will require a reboot of the app but see if that makes any difference to the flickering...

At lower zoom levels, the Affinity apps use a technique known as mip-maps to provide better rendering performance. This means that certain adjustments and filters can give misleading results because the adjustments and/or filters are applied to the zoomed-out data, rather than to the real data.

If turning Hardware Acceleration off makes no difference to the issue you're seeing in your screen recording could you try zooming the image to 100%, Cmd 1 on the keyboard then repeating what you're doing and let us know whether or not the screen flicker is still visible...

[bonecurrent]

Thank you for the response, @Hangman! Sorry for replying a bit late.

I'm running the second latest version of macOS Sonoma, 14.6. The newest version, 14.6.1 came out a little over a week ago -- I'll update to it but I doubt it'll address this particular issue as it seems to be mostly bug fixes and security updates.

I'll definitely give a try at disabling Hardware Acceleration and will soon get back to you about the results! Thank you for the tip. If the flickering persists I'll do a screen recording at 100% zoom level and see if there's still flickering.

Thank you again for your response, it's been very helpful!

Edited August 17, 2024 by bonecurrent

[bonecurrent]

Well -- that was a quick and easy fix. I disabled Hardware Acceleration and there's no flickering whatsoever anymore. Thank you so much! Now if I can only get used to the burn tool behaving differently from Photoshop, I think I can be happy in the Affinity universe...