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Blur tool on Mac does nothing


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Either the blur tool doesn't work or I've somehow got an important setting wrong or something. I click the tool and set all its options to 100%. I make the brush huge. My layer is selected, and it's a pixel layer. I click on the layer where I want to start blurring and drag the tool like I'm painting, and absolutely nothing happens. I go over it many times - still nothing. What am I doing wrong? This is so easy to do in GIMP, I just don't understand what I could be missing.

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28 minutes ago, melonbird said:

Either the blur tool doesn't work or I've somehow got an important setting wrong or something. I click the tool and set all its options to 100%. I make the brush huge. My layer is selected, and it's a pixel layer. I click on the layer where I want to start blurring and drag the tool like I'm painting, and absolutely nothing happens. I go over it many times - still nothing. What am I doing wrong? This is so easy to do in GIMP, I just don't understand what I could be missing.

Check your Flow setting, at 0 % nothing happens here but at higher percentages it works.

Post Script: I assume you are using Photo.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.6 
Affinity Designer 2.5.5 | Affinity Photo 2.5.5 | Affinity Publisher 2.5.5 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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At least for me, the Blur Brush Tool acts somewhat like the Smudge Brush Tool -- even at 100% opacity. flow, & hardness, unless I jiggle the brush back & forth a bit while using it, the blurring effect is very subtle, so much so that I often have to zoom in far enough to see individual pixels to see it.

One thing that increases the effect considerably is to take the brush spacing down from the 25% default to the minimum of 1%.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.5.5 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
A
ll 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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6 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Check your Flow setting, at 0 % nothing happens here but at higher percentages it works.

Post Script: I assume you are using Photo.

Yes, ALL the settings - including Flow - are at 100%. And yes, I mean Photo.
 

45 minutes ago, R C-R said:

At least for me, the Blur Brush Tool acts somewhat like the Smudge Brush Tool -- even at 100% opacity. flow, & hardness, unless I jiggle the brush back & forth a bit while using it, the blurring effect is very subtle, so much so that I often have to zoom in far enough to see individual pixels to see it.

One thing that increases the effect considerably is to take the brush spacing down from the 25% default to the minimum of 1%.

I'm pretty sure it's really not changing anything at all. I've zoomed in to where I can see little squares, set the brush spacing down to 1% as you suggested, and dragging the circle back and forth over them has no effect I can see.

I'm definitely on the right layer. It's a pixel layer. I don't have anything selected (I've hit Cmd-D a few times to be sure). It really feels like there's something I'm doing wrong or I've picked a weird wrong setting somewhere, but I just can't figure out what.

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You could try a different brush shape, for example the basic square brush.

-- 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 17.7, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.7

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10 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

You could try a different brush shape, for example the basic square brush.

I've tried a number of different brush shapes with no difference, if you're talking about this tool. If you're talking about something else, please let me know. I've only been using Affinity Photo for a few months, and I know there are parts of it I haven't explored yet.

1884238169_ScreenShot2019-03-22at5_40_37PM.png.15e80e7b14943cbbb83cec2c96bcedb1.png

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I'm taking about the square brush at the bottom of that list. Select the Blur Brush tool, then the square brush from that list, and see if that helps.

-- 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 17.7, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.7

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2 minutes ago, melonbird said:

Maybe I'm dense, but I don't see any square brush.

I don't have any square brushes either, not at the bottom of the list or anywhere else in any brush category. AFAIK, at least in the Mac version they have to be created (or imported), as you just mentioned that you did.

My only other suggestion is to try a large 'basic' blur brush on an area of high color contrast -- at least for me the blur effect is most obvious when applied to those areas & borders on imperceptible in low contrast areas.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.5.5 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
A
ll 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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6 minutes ago, >|< said:

Press cmd-d (ctrl-d on Windows) to ensure there is no active pixel selection.

In an earlier post, @melonbird mentioned that this had been done:

Quote

I don't have anything selected (I've hit Cmd-D a few times to be sure).

 

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.5.5 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
A
ll 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Well, this is weird. I've just tried to blur this and several other photos in GIMP, which always blurred as expected, and nothing happened. Same photos in Affinity also didn't respond to the blur tool. How have I managed to turn off blurring in both programs somehow? In both programs, the smudge tools work as expected. 

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....I rebooted the computer, and now it's working. In both programs. I guess that means something in the Mac OS was interfering with blur (but not smudge or any other tools) in both programs? It doesn't make sense to me, but it's working now. Very subtle and slow, unless you make the image smaller, as others have noted. But it's working.

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  • 5 years later...

Same is happening for me.  It works 1 out of every 30+ times I try to use it.  Here is a screenshot of what I am trying to do, which is smudge in the yellow.  On the left of the screenshot, it worked perfectly but took me 100 tries to do it, and then it just completely quit working.  I've tried to change my touch-pad settings, brought a bluetooth mouse and everything.  I feel like there is a bug in the software or something.  2 years ago when I did the same thing, it worked perfectly every time, no problem, like i had my finger on the art effortlessly.  You are definitely right in noticing that nothing at all is happening.  Settings are as suggested, trying multiple different settings, and as I mentioned, works perfectly like one time out of every 30+ tries.  Or it does not work at all.  

Screen Shot 2024-06-26 at 9.33.52 AM.png

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