I am revisiting an old request of mine: smooth strokes. Currently, drawing with a tablet in Photoline is not an option, because the strokes look very jagged and wobbly. Even when I set my wacom mapped to one 2560x1440px screen only, and zoom in to 100%, the strokes still look quite bad. And it does not matter whether I draw with the mouse or tablet. The lines are unusable.
After testing many other applications with drawing capabilities, I have come to the conclusion that. except for Paint on Windows (and Photoline), other drawing code implements some kind of stroke interpolation to prevent these jaggies and wobbles.
Even when I use "Lazy Nezumi" to draw smooth curves in Photoline, the strokes, although nicely curved, STILL look ragged and all wobbly when drawing at any zoom factor more than 200% (meaning that
even at 100% zoom the drawn lines look 'wobbly'.
Here is a comparison with Gimp (all drawing done on A4@300ppi in both applications):
http://www.estructor.biz/testje/strokes.png
Compare the strokes made with Lazy Nezumi activated in both PL and GImp: if mouse/tablet coordinate interpolation would be an issue, Gimp's "Gi" version at 25% should, I think, be looking the same as Photoline's version. But they do not. Photoline's version is horrible, and completely unusable.
With smooth strokes activated in Gimp, the lines are super smooth, even when working at 25% zoom levels on an A4@300ppi. And I did not even map the tablet to only one screen - which means Gimp creates smooth lines at 25% with almost a third less data then Photoline! Even the "Gi" version at 25% still looks on par with Photoline's 100% version.
Most people do not draw at zoomed in levels nowadays: they draw at higher zoom levels, making some form of smoothing and interpolation to ensure the quality of the strokes absolutely essential. Merely drawing pixels directly on the canvas no longer is good enough.
I am aware Photoline should not be comparing itself to dedicated drawing software like Painter or ClipStudio (Manga Studio). But currently when the user wants to draw a curved line in Photoline, it becomes somewhat impossible to attain a good quality unless we zoom in to 200%. That is a bit silly, I feel.
My request would be to please implement a "smooth stroke" option (Gimp's source code could serve as an inspiration), and changing the method of how Photoline currenly draws on the canvas, so that it can compete with the other software on the market.