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CS5 soft brush jagged edges


slowman

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Hi folks

I am a long-time PS user, currently running CS5 x64. Some time back I installed a new GPU - an Asus Radeon HD7760. I have updated the drivers a couple of times as new ones became available. Somewhere along the line I have noticed a problem with my brush tool in that just a basic soft brush has a noisy jagged edge. No other settings are applied to the brush, it's just the default soft brush. When I enlarge the brush and look at the actual edge of the cursor (circular brush tip shape) I can see it is not a smooth circle, it's a really rough messy approximation. When I spray with it, as the paint builds it produces this messy fill that looks appropriate to the messy edge of the brush. See the screen shots for detail. If I use the gradient tool though, it is much smoother.

I have been trying to get to the bottom of it. I have rolled back to previous versions of the driver and I have just reinstalled PS CS5 from scratch. Everything is set to defaults, and should be fine. I have a couple of huge scratch disks (500gb in total) and a very fast system (Core i7 3.5Ghz quadcore) with 16gb of RAM, PS is able to use 9GB of RAM, etc. Whether I have Open GL enabled or not makes no difference. I have tried different performance settings in PS and in the Catalyst Control Centre that manages the video card. These are set to defaults again now. I am one version back on the GPU driver but even with the latest version the problem is the same.

Next step is to try going back to the old video card (I think I still have it in the loft somewhere!) but this is a real pain because it means going back to an analogue connection on one of my monitors, etc, and an inferior card, at least on paper. New card is running displayport and DVI outputs and I have one of each for my dual monitor setup.

Before I start pulling out hardware, is there anything you can suggest that I might have overlooked??


Bad edge to soft brush:
brush-problem-1.PNG

Bad blending when over-spraying:
brush-problem-2.PNG

Basic brush settings:
brush-settings-basic.PNG

Linear gradient tool:
gradient-linear.PNG

Radial gradient tool:
gradient-radial.PNG
 

iDad

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From what I see it's not a bad brush, the soft edged brush is supposed to work like that, feathering to the edges. the gradient only blends (hides) those feathered areas. I'm not sure where your problem is, maybe you want to be working in illustrator or a vector-based program?
 

slowman

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Hi iDad

Thanks for your reply. I've always been able to use the soft brush to spray say, white on a new layer over another image and get the effect of feathering the edges of the image to white smoothly and evenly. Or for example to spray with the soft brush onto a masked image and feather away the detail smoothly to transparency. But now I have this speckly noisy delivery from the brush and as I get down toward transparency I loose great ragged chunks of the underlying image, rather than a smooth transition down to nothing. Here are some examples:

100% flow 100% opacity - noise and ragged edge
brush-100-flow-100-opacity-noise-and-ragged-edge.png

low flow and low opacity - banding and noise
brush-low-flow-low-opacity-noise-and-banding.png

noise rather than smooth feathering

smooth-brush-not-really.png
 

iDad

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What comes to mind is your resolution, perhaps it is too low?
 

slowman

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I'm working at 72dpi for web, or 300dpi for print as I have done for years. But it makes no difference to the brush behaviour - here is a image created at 300dpi - basic soft brush set to 65% opacity and 18% flow, just one colour being used. Does that look right to you?

65opacity-18flow-few-clicks-with-brush.png
 

ibclare

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Have you tried resetting preferences? This is a quick fix for some problems, but you may be correct in saying the culprit is the video card, but honestly, I'm not the techie you need advice from in that area. I do agree with you about the brush, and your screen shots do illustrate the problem, especially the second set that clearly demonstrate the banding, not the normal function of the brush.
 

slowman

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Hi ibclare - yes I went as far as uninstalling (and deleting preferences) then reinstalling photoshop. Everything is default and this is the behaviour of the brush...
 

slowman

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Hi there - here is an photo of my soft brush cursor at it's largest size - just the brush tip cursor is being shown here, nothing is painted on the canvas. I just took a photo of the screen.

Can someone compare their soft brush tip shape to mine? I always remember it being perfectly ROUND not all messy and ragged like this. I have a feeling this might be indicative of the problem but I don't know what to do about it.

20131105_205340.jpg
 

iDad

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Not sure about the picture above, I think I found your noise problem with the feathering
I can simulate the spacing on the edging or feathering by the brush presets see attachment I can only simulate it by checking noise unchecking it creates a nice smooth transition
Screen Shot 2013-11-05 at 4.50.49 PM.png
 

iDad

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I think I also found your rough edge problem within the brush preset window, the dual brush creates that jagged edge unCheck It
 

ibclare

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Interesting point iDad. Maybe his settings were changed.

Slowman, when I increase my brush size set at soft, it does look exactly like that in your depiction. Here is the result of it. Doc is 6" x 6" at 240.

brush.jpg

There is banding, but then I can't imagine wanting to use my brush at this pixel size. But that's me.
 

iDad

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if you accidentally or purposely changed the settings on the brushes and forgot....just reset them
 

slowman

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Hi iDad - thanks for investigating that, but unfortunately I've already tried that. I have nothing else going on with the brush other than the smoothing. But even with that off, it doesn't make any difference to the problem. I had a friend check out whether he has a smooth round brush tip or a rough edged one when viewed at a large size and he has a rough edge too apparently. So maybe that's not the problem.

As I say I uninstalled PS and killed off the preferences and resinstalled from scratch with everything set to default, just to make sure it wasn't a setting that had gone awry.
 
Last edited:

slowman

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Hi ibclare - given the same colour combo and doc size you've used, I get a very similar result, and it looks fairly smooth, but I think that's more because of the colour contrast on the eye.

ibclare-match.png

However if I take the same background colour and use a white brush, I get the banding. In this example I have used 100% opacity and 1% flow, with a lot of clicks to lay down the paint. So this is the finest and most even 'spray' I can get. And it builds out in bands like this:

100opacity-1flow.png

Which, compared to my memory of previous versions of photoshop, is pretty poor! It maybe that I've not done anything since PS5 to really notice this problem very much, until recently. But unless I am going nuts, I certainly remember being able to spray a smooth build up of paint with a soft brush in the past - i.e. where the highest concentration of colour is at the centre and a smooth transition of colour down to transparency proceeds to the outer edge, without all this banding.

If I use a higher flow rate I get different artifacts, but not any better - a more pronounced circle in the centre and varying amounts of banding, but never a smooth flow.

Do you get the same thing?

Is this just a mark of 'progress' in photoshop perhaps?
 

iDad

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Sounds like backwards "progress" to me. Very strange!
 

hapilyDamaged

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OP have you found a solution or even an explanation of this??
(Having the same issue in CS6 and I don't remember it happening in CS5)
-hap
 

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