Wacom Cintiq jittery lines with Affinity Photo

[angrydani]

I installed affinity photo on my windows 10 laptop. When i tested using my cintiq 13 hd the lines were slightly jittery.

I thought it was the same old problem because of windows drivers interfering, so i uninstalled my cintiq driver, and made sure to manually delete any remaining files and folders. I restarted, disabled windows input service (in system manager) and installed the latest driver. It's the standard thing to do when lines are jittery on photoshop. 

When I started affinity and tried again, the lines were 10 times worse :-( I then freaked out and started photoshop but thankfully the lines there were still smooth and working fine. 

Help please. I want to use affinity but the lines are making me cry

PS. I also turned off tip double-click distance in wacom preference. it helped a little but the lines aren't smooth.

[Dan C]

Hi angrydani,

Welcome to the forums

If you open up the Preferences menu under Edit>Preferences then select Tools, you can tick the High Precision Tablet Input option here, which may help with the output you're seeing.

Could you confirm which tool you're using in Photo? Our Pixel drawing does not apply smoothing to curves, unlike our vector drawing. You can stabilise your strokes with the Paint Brush Tool by selecting the appropriately named option on the context menu and these will improve the smoothness of your lines considerably.

There are a few threads on our forum discussing this I'd recommend reading this and this post.

[angrydani]

Hi Dan!

Thanks for getting back to me.

Yes I was using the brush tool. The stabilizer completely removes the jitteriness but it's sadly not going to work in all situations because it makes lines and curves look mathematical if you know what I mean (digital rather than hand-drawn which are two different styles). It also doesn't respond to small movements.

I found the high precision tablet input option under tools (I'm guessing that's the one you meant?) and the lines did improve when i activated it! Unfortunately it also made my cursor jump halfway across the screen away from the pen tip every time i hovered over the canvas! So if I want to draw anything on a canvas in the middle of the tablet's display, I would have to draw on the far left side.  The cursor only jumps when they pen is over the canvas.. It feels like the precision function built-into wacom tablets .. just that the pen has to be outside the canvas to be able to draw. Any adjustments that can fix that?

I went through the posts you shared (thanks for those). I'm afraid I'm not technical enough to understand all of the points but from the ones I did understand, I tried zooming to 100%, and the lines I drew then were indeed very smooth and beautiful. The only issue I would have though is that painting while zoomed out to around 30-60% is necessary half the time.

I probably sound like a diva, but these small things are very impactful on how images end up looking.

[Dan C]

7 hours ago, angrydani said:

I found the high precision tablet input option under tools (I'm guessing that's the one you meant?)

It was, apologies as I was slightly incorrect in my original post but I've since updated it

7 hours ago, angrydani said:

Any adjustments that can fix that

Unfortunately not currently, it's a known issue that's been passed through to our dev team to fix and hopefully should be sorted soon.

7 hours ago, angrydani said:

 I probably sound like a diva, but these small things are very impactful on how images end up looking.

Not at all, I completely understand. We're aware that tablet input behaviour is slightly different between our Windows and Mac variants and we're working hard to put this right. Keep an eye out on our forums for any upcoming betas as these may address the issues you're having. 

[angrydani]

Ok thanks. How I wish I still had a mac, but I heard that they don't make them as powerful for professional graphic use anymore :-(

[SrPx]

The zoom-in / out issue, that is, that when painting zoomed out (100% agreeing, illustrators, comic artists, concept ppl, etc, we do have to work zoomed out most of the time, just as one needs to give step backwards when painting in an oil canvas, 60% of the time....)  is something I did notice since the very beginning  , in the very early Windows betas. Perhaps it does not happen in the Mac... this alone makes me wish to have a Mac, lol (nah, am Windows for ever  )... Is kind of as if when drawing zoomed out it considers a different grid, like a smaller res grid than the actual pixels are, and it is produced the jitter... if you do a huuuge zoom out, the effect used to be amplified back in the day, but probably that was only in the very early betas. I though it would have vanished now (there was a certain fix of this at some point, but seems it only improved it a bit...).... Hopefully, the continued work on the brush system in Windows will be progressively polishing these issues.

My dirty solution back in the day while I was testing and trying to find issues, was...well, not an actual solution, but in case you are now in the middle of an urgent project and desperately needing a solution: Sketch your colors or lines in very low res so that you can work in a zoomed-in or 100% (the less zoomed-in u can without having jiter) , even a 1900 px wide pic (if u have a 1920x1080 screen).... You know how one can even make a master composition in napkin....I can tell you, even if dirty, you can add a load of detail even in so low res (I'm too a pixel artist, but I mean drawing normally, not blocky pixel art). You can indeed do you values and colors (best way to start a concept, also) completely so this way. Then, for fine tuning and detailing,  just enlarge the canvas, I mean, the image size, to your final size, ie, 8k x 6k pixels, it's now terribly blurry, but you will be detailing....Zoomed-in ! So, it should, again, not make the jitter appear. The key, and/or possible show stopper here is the level of zoomed-in and how high res can be that "sketch-base" low res image. If it is too low res, might not be valid this whole trick. It depends on your system, screen size, etc. 

I'd be glad to know if the trick serves your purposes at least for an urgent project and until this gets definitely fixed.... (if it works for u, I'd be really happy to know here, I'll be following this thread....). It is not a solution, reason why my focus changed to (I have AD purchased) use other software painters, and plan Photo as an end point only for global image editing/final deployment of the image. It'd be outstandingly good, productive and motivating If we could have a brush system comparable (if only in the basic behavior, no need for more) than other 2D software apps in windows.

Anyhow, and how it is even in my own signature... Here's hopes on the brush system keep getting fixes and improvements. A. Photo is rock solid already for anything 2D, but I firmly believe it can get to be outstanding (and preferable even to specialized painting software, for reasons too long to explain (and arguable for some, who are happily wrong, hehe)) as an illustration tool. I mean, AD is already that, but for vectors. And raster illustration DO benefit amazingly from the large raster power that Photo has. What you mentioned in this thread (the jitter when zoomed-out), certain lag in small details and in some cases at start of strokes, and the two issues I refer in my signature, are imho the pending subjects for the brush engine. But Photo is already very useful (reason why I wish so bad it gets better there   )

Cheers, 

 

[Patrick Connor]

We have made fixes/improvements to this area (Tablet cursor jumps about when using High Precision Input ) of the program in the latest beta release of Affinity Photo & Affinity Designer on Windows. If you would like to try these changes the beta software is available in the forum posts listed below. Once Affinity Publisher has been through a full beta process the change will be released in a future free 1.8.0 update to all customers.

To benefit from this fix please turn Windows Ink on in your tablet driver.

The 1.8.0 beta builds are in links at the top of these beta forum posts

• Affinity Publisher 1.8.0.518 for Windows
• Affinity Photo 1.8.0.514 for Windows
• Affinity Designer 1.8.0.514 for Windows

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