Gradual burry image when Copy and Pasted several times

[pauldraws]

Hi,

I use Affinity photo to draw my comics line art with the brush tool as well as color my comics.  Occasionally I'll need to copy and paste some line art to avoid drawing it multiple times.  However when I do this, each time I paste the copied image the pasted result becomes more and more blurry each time.  Why is this happening?  will this be fixed in the next version update?

(This also happens sometimes when I try to rotate my line art.) 

P.S. I use photo persona for all my drawing.

Thanks!

Paul

[Pšenda]

Just for these reasons there is a vector drawing.

[R C-R]

If you are using Affinity Photo's Paint Brush Tool, you are creating raster images. Rasterized layers (those identified with the "(Pixel)" suffix in the Layers panel) cannot be resized, stretched or shrunk, skewed, or rotated by other than 90° increments without becoming blurrier than the original.

That is because in raster images everything is mapped onto a grid of pixels, each of which must be completely filled with exactly one color. When any of the above transforms are applied, the pixels of the original image no longer can be perfectly mapped to whole pixels, so to avoid the stair-stepped effect informally known as "jaggies," anti-aliasing is applied to give the appearance of smooth edges at the expense of increased blurriness.

As @Pšenda mentioned, drawing with vector shapes avoids this issue because vector shapes are defined geometrically, independently of how many pixels they fully or partially fill.

[pauldraws]

On 5/7/2019 at 6:11 PM, R C-R said:

If you are using Affinity Photo's Paint Brush Tool, you are creating raster images. Rasterized layers (those identified with the "(Pixel)" suffix in the Layers panel) cannot be resized, stretched or shrunk, skewed, or rotated by other than 90° increments without becoming blurrier than the original.

That is because in raster images everything is mapped onto a grid of pixels, each of which must be completely filled with exactly one color. When any of the above transforms are applied, the pixels of the original image no longer can be perfectly mapped to whole pixels, so to avoid the stair-stepped effect informally known as "jaggies," anti-aliasing is applied to give the appearance of smooth edges at the expense of increased blurriness.

As @Pšenda mentioned, drawing with vector shapes avoids this issue because vector shapes are defined geometrically, independently of how many pixels they fully or partially fill.

I know what a raster image is, and I know I cannot resize it without losing quality.  That's not the problem.  The problem is with copy and paste.  When I copy a raster image  drawn with the brush tool, and then paste it, the pasted image is blurry.  This is a problem with the software, because it doesn't happen with any other program (Photoshop, Clip Studio) that I use.

[Old Bruce]

8 minutes ago, pauldraws said:

The problem is with copy and paste.  When I copy a raster image  drawn with the brush tool, and then paste it, the pasted image is blurry.

I think what is happening is the pasting is putting the copy on a fractional pixel location and that is causing the 'blurring'.

[pauldraws]

3 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

I think what is happening is the pasting is putting the copy on a fractional pixel location and that is causing the 'blurring'.

Thanks, do you know how this can be solved?

[Old Bruce]

On the Toolbar are a couple of buttons, Force Pixel Alignment and Move By Whole Pixels. The former (far left) will probably do what you want when it is on/pressed.

[pauldraws]

Thank you! That's exactly what I needed. Now I can copy and paste without losing quality.  Thanks a ton!

[Fluxpunk]

I would like to verify this bug. I am working on a pixel art project and I've used many different raster art editing tools without ever seeing this issue. If you COPY pixels then PASTE them they become blurry, as if a filter is being added to them. In the example below I've copied a 64x64 block of pixels at 72dpi and pasted them into a 64x64 72dpi image and it has been blurred. This does not occur in other software, like the FREE editor GIMP. This makes Affinity Photo a horrible tool for artists, especially game artists as we need complete control over every pixel.

This is frustrating as it looks like I should have stuck with GIMP rather than re-purchasing Affinity Photo for Mac. The response that the VECTOR tool Affinity Designer is the tool for RASTER PIXEL ART is disheartening. I own Photo and Designer on Windows and grudgingly re-purchased Photo for MAC, just to discover I should have downloaded the free tool GIMP instead. 

[Old Bruce]

This is because the pasted pixels aren't on the pixel grid.

[Horseflesh]

@GameDevJoe are your snapping options set like this? 

If that doesn't do it, I am sure there is some way to get the desired behavior. 

[Old Bruce]

But Move by whole pixels is part of the problem, a pixel placed at x = 1.543 and moved by 10 whole pixels is going to be at 11.543 pixels.

[Fluxpunk]

Thanks for the responses!

This was confusing for me. I certainly had those settings selected and also tried the Pixel Work preset, however when pasted the pixels were not automatically aligned to the grid. This caused the blurring, which I assumed to be resampling of my pixels during the cop/paste process.

Manually dragging the image until it snapped to the pixels fixed this for me. Thanks everyone! Maybe I can avoid suffering GIMP's interface after all.

 

[Fluxpunk]

6 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

But Move by whole pixels is part of the problem, a pixel placed at x = 1.543 and moved by 10 whole pixels is going to be at 11.543 pixels.

Yes! This initially stumped me as well. Once the image is pasted off the grid it will remain off the grid when you drag it if moving only by whole pixels. 

[Horseflesh]

Looks like the required settings are in a provided preset! I looked under that menu and found "Pixel work." Too bad it won't automatically snap to the grid on paste, the dragging step is not intuitive.

I am not a pixel artist but knew I would get bit by this someday too. Glad there was a solution. 

[Pšenda]

1 hour ago, Horseflesh said:

Too bad it won't automatically snap to the grid

Try set Screen tolerance.

 

[R C-R]

12 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

Try set Screen tolerance.

As mentioned in the linked topic, Screen tolerance only sets how close an object has to be (in pixels) to a snapping point before it will snap to it.

[pauldraws]

The "Force Pixel" alignment button was certainly the fix for me, but it's good to know there is also a preset for Pixel Work in the menu. 

Also, the comments about just using vector instead were super unhelpful.

Thanks!