Graphics - advice wanted

I have been starting to make more graphics for Reaktor. I own Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Designer. I am able to get sharper images in Reaktor when I use Affinity Designer, particularly with curves and diagonal lines, but I am finding the text from Photoshop a little sharper, particularly when using antialiasing in Photoshop.

What programs do you all use, and what advice do you have about creating graphics for Reaktor?

 

dj superherpes from aggregati musika went down this rabbithole deeply. i will contact him. maybe he will react.

 

Any vector shape can be blurry, if too much stuff is inbetween pixels. So no matter, which program or antialiasing algo you're using, some manual checking and adjusting will always work. I usually convert fonts to vector shapes and adjust them. A pita, but to me it's worth the effort.

 

Thank you for checking, Thala, and thank you for the advice, loachm, I will look into that for the fonts.

 

Hi Ken, i´m using Affinity Photo (AP) for creating my GUI, so ist quite similar to your Affinity Designer (AD).
As long as the text is still vector, as long it looks sharp, but after rasterize, well it becomes unsharper. Its in the physical restriction of 72 dpi by current monitors (even retina use this -- well you can export as 300 or 600 dpi, but then the size will grow up.... its a little bit complicated). Especially with small fontsizes you will see this restriction. I test a lot things to improve the readability, from layer fx (3D) to filters.... nothing of them really sharp it more. But i found a simple workaround which works for me: Just duplicate the layer and set the duplicate to "average" blend mode with 50% opacity. Its always not perfect, but the best i found so far.
I can not insert an image here, so test it, create both, put them side by side and make a screenshot, so you see the effect as raster. For 100% you have to export, at least retina-macs will double the size of screenshots, instead render out the true 72 dpi in the reaktor frontend.

If you want to create multi-pictures each frame must have the EXACTLY same size, otherwise the single-frames will not start at the right point. But if you export such a vertically line of eg. 10 items with fontsize size, this text will be just maybe 98 points. But it must be 100 points for 10 itmes in 10p.
So group the text and put an invisible shape with exact 100 p (on the right place) in it and export the whole group to get the correct size.

 

Ken you can use the R6 inbuild text tap styles:

 

BTW: we discuss this also here: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/in...-but-bad-quality/&tab=comments#comment-384814

NI really lives in-the-last-cenatury in many ways. It a large prehistoric reptile firm, no fresh ideas.... In this special case: In really modern APPS you can use flexible and really small VECTOR or SVGs instead big and inflexible PNG... but, its NI! They seems to be enemies of user-friendly as much as they can. Always, 4-12 behind... but very good in adverstising!

 

Thank you for the advice Paule. The NI texts looks very nice but sometimes I want to use a different font or have text in a picture.

Thank you for the comments, strg+v. I learned a lot from them and particularly the comments on the Affinity forum. I have not used Affinity designer and Affinity Photo as long as I have Photoshop, but they seem like very nice programs. Do use use Affinity Designer or just Affinty photo?

 

Thats a bit unfair. When NI first released generator, bitmap based graphics were the only practical option. So they didn't I tentionally choose the worse of two options to make the app worse for us. They chose the only option.

The choice they have made is not to prioritised re-writing a large fundamental part of the application that uses old code that was probably written by people who don't work there anymore... because it would take a very long time, cost a lot of money, introduce lots of bugs, and folks would just find things to criticise about it anyway...

I wonder if the cost of updating the rendering library completely in this way would just be so expensive that if it was seen as essential to do so, they would just scrap Reaktor instead?

 

Better a fav pastime like a hobbyhorse as a scrap Reaktor, IMO.

 

You can use knobman's text feature with 4x oversampling

 

I am sorry Paule, but I have no idea what this means.

https://www.kvraudio.com/product/knobman-by-g200kg

If this the the knobman you are talking about, I use a mac...

 

well I have no idea what this means!

But I totally know what this means

It's this awesome free software for making knobs. I've used it a lot. It's pretty versatile and easy to learn. All the buttons, switches and knobs from digit8 were done with it... and echo grease.

And it has 2x and 4x times oversampling as an output setting

 

knobman is a java version - runs on pc and mac
my avatar is a knoman file

 

You mean the « grumpy dahu » avatar ?

 

...it's true, that vector shapes are very comfortable and flexible, but they are surely not the answer to everything. And ultimately, no matter, which resolution someone is using, these flexible shapes have to be represented within a fixed grid - pixels (though it's true, that the bigger the grid's resolution is, the "fractional digits" matter less).

The problem rather seems to be, that NI is still working with a, roughly speaking, 2k paradigm for their interfaces. Once this will change, we probably wouldn't have these problems and discussions anymore (having to deal with single pixels at times). It's true, that NI seems to be slow on this issue, but this problem can be observed for many of their products, so I could understand, that a UI engine for all of their products might not be a trivial task (even more, if you include backwards-compatibility). I'm not an expert on these matters, so I could be wrong about this - I'm just trying to ponder, which might be the crucial aspects for this issue.

The idea to "just include" svg support seems to be plausible, but there might be more to this issue than just that. And from what I read here it certainly seems, that Reaktor's processing and audio aspects should have priority over its graphical abilities.

 

hungry not grumpy

 

ok then, said this because of the punky mohawk

 

That's the antlers (horns).

 

oops ! Always saw this as a mohawk ah ah