Why does the Displace filter rough up layer edges? (Affinity Photo)

[briandrum]

New to Affinity Photo and trying to mock up a design on a photo of a tee shirt. The Display filter warps the contours of my design layer to match the contours of my map file as expected, but it also introduces a lot of undesirable noise in the edges. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a way to get the contours without the edge distortion?

[stokerg]

Hi briandrum and Welcome to the Forums,

 

I'm not sure why this is happening.  The topic of our displacement filter has come up a lot here on the Forums, as it seems to give different results to what's expected.  We have this logged with the Dev team and i've just bumped that log with a link to this post.

[Pedro Soares]

Hi briandrum, welcome to the Forum!

 

Did you use a black and white copy of your image with a slightly Gaussian Bur filter applied to it as your displacement map?
I find this to be the best approach with the best results.
 

I can give a look at your file if you provide it.

[briandrum]

7 minutes ago, Pedro Soares said:

Did you use a black and white copy of your image with a slightly Gaussian Bur filter applied to it as your displacement map?

 

Hi Pedro, thanks for the suggestion. My map is pretty much as you describe, full version attached for reference. The third attachment on my original post showed a crop of roughly the same area as the before and after images above it.

[Pedro Soares]

You're welcome briandrum.

Seems you're doing everything right. My other suggestion is that you play with the Strength value to see if you can minimize the problem.
As an extra you can also use FX effects to get some more realism (I normally use Colour Overlay and Bevel/Emboss).

Nevertheless and as stokerg mention, something is not working as it should. We don't have consistency using the Displace Filter.

Hope you can get the results you need.

[briandrum]

My thanks to both of you for the info. Tee mockups was my primary use case for purchasing Affinity Photo, so it's a bit of a bummer for the filter not to work as expected. I can live without it for now, but I hope to see improvement soon.

[Polygonius]

 

On 14.2.2018 at 3:31 PM, stokerg said:

We have this logged with the Dev team and i've just bumped that log with a link to this post.

 

Nice too hear. For grungy text-fx this behavior is fine, but for subtle texture-"overlay" it would be fine without artifacts.

 

BTW:  I use the DM a lot, in fact its one of my favorite filter. Two small other develops would be fine. The DM remembers its last used folder (independently from all other file-actions) and this open-files-box stays as float-window as long i close it by hand.

I often want skip trough my textures/backgrounds... to see what happens and this always "load map from file" till the box appears = too much uanessacry clicks!

This small developes would fasten up this workflow enorm.

BTW: it would be fine if all tools (using a file-search, like gradient bitmap....) would have this behavior. Take a look to  topaz-textures: the search/replace is dozen times faster and efficiency. Just by implement main-categories and sub-folder for "preset/file" search. 

Your whole preset-system(s) (plural: each tool follows another logic/system)  is the opposite of search/fast access/organize - friendly! 

[firstdefence]

16bit bump maps seem to give a cleaner bump

[firstdefence]

8Bit

 

16Bit

[SrPx]

Would it help to use really large images, high resolution ones ? Even unrelated to the project, just to check how it behaves when it has more data to use... (and also in 16 bits)

[firstdefence]

There is an App for Mac and Windows called CrazyBump that creates good bump/normal maps and also displacement maps, it also has several other maps like a Specularity and Occlusion. Its a great app to compliment the Displacement Filter. Its in Beta so its a bit limited.