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Making brush radius not be so badly quantized


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When drawing with Affinity Photo, I often run into issues where the brush pressure causes what looks like quantization in the brush radius:

 

image.thumb.png.4607294f34ef645ef1eb76d18c9f8a60.png

There's a distinct lack of tapering and smoothing between the various steps on the brush size, which are all being rounded to the nearest pixel radius. I'm using a Wacom Intuos which hasn't had problems like this in other drawing software, and it particularly happens on the standard round brushes set with pressure-based size jitter:

image.png.902e2cfb9b55cbd6bf18c4024eb90e1e.pngimage.png.f404d8cd33c893d35b89c6fed9a3ba61.png

Is there a way to get smooth brush tapering (with subpixel sizes) like what most other drawing programs support?

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Could we see a screenshot of the Performance section of your Photo Settings, please?

Also, how zoomed-in are you in the screenshot you already gave us?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

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Sure, here's the performance section:

image.thumb.png.a4156667543b7a8b68df717928676caf.png

And I'm zoomed in pretty far, and those jumps are a single pixel at a time. But even zoomed out it's pretty bad-looking, and other drawing tools (such as Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, heck even GIMP) don't have this issue since they support some amount of subpixel brush sizing.

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2 hours ago, cgidesign said:

There is no bug-number assigned to it. I guess, it is not something that will be optimized in the forseeable future.

Actually, there is, though it's an "old-style" number: AFP-5701.

Good catch. 

When the Serif team gets to this topic, they may be able to confirm it's related, and give us a new bug number.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

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Ah thanks, I'd done a search figuring others had experienced this too, and I didn't expect it to be that far back! Hopefully someone on the dev team takes a look at it now.

It does seem like a workaround is to set the brush to 99% hardness, at least.

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