Blurry unsharp photos

[RoelBego]

Hi There,

 

I have been using Photo for a while now.. Every single time I open a RAW photo and develop it appears to be blurry and unsharp. I am 100% sure that the photo is sharp, when I go to the export screen it appears even more blurry and unsharp. Exported images are sharp tho. But at this point I feel like I cannot be sure that it is indeed sharp inside Affinity Photo. Is this problem familiar and is there a fix for this?

 

Sincerely,

 

Roel

[James Ritson]

Hey Roel, there are a couple of things to point out that may be causing a lack of sharpness. The first is that no sharpening is applied by default when developing RAW files (most RAW development software adds a small amount of sharpening, as RAW images tend to be slightly unsharp by nature). Therefore you might want to add some sharpening using Detail Refinement under the Details panel.

 

The second is that you might be looking at a "mipmapped" preview - what is your zoom level at? Unless you're at 100% zoom or larger, you're not looking at the full resolution version of your image. Photo displays smaller resolution copies at various zoom levels to improve performance, especially during heavy editing (this is known as mipmapping). The downside of this approach is that some filters - sharpening, blurring, noise reduction etc - may not appear accurate unless viewed at full resolution. Generally speaking, filters should be previewed at 100% for accurate results.

 

The mipmapping may explain why your exported result appears sharp but your previews inside Photo don't. Could you also check Preferences > Performance and see what View Quality is set to? Additionally, if you're on Mac, check the Retina Rendering setting. Could you let me know what these options are set to for you?

 

If you try previewing some of your images at 100%, you should generally find things look more accurate. A good test is if you open a RAW photo in Develop, zoom to 100% and click the Develop button. You should see little to no difference (unless the noise reduction rendering hasn't updated).

 

Hope that helps.

[Kellyboe]

I am on a Mac and have tried what you suggested above with a trial version of Affinity. When saving the new image it is always much less sharp then the original RAW. Any other ideas.