John-B

It's not just textures. Transparent textures are expensive in 3D games, and I use them very sparingly. For me, it's creating the 2D interface where control of the alpha channel is most important, something I do all the time, where it's not just making cutouts. For example, a button with an alpha drop shadow can be created in AP, as I eventually learned, it's just a different workflow. The same is true for other alpha effects I used to do in PS. I've been able to get AP to do what I've needed to do with the alpha channel, it's just not always as direct or obvious as doing it in PS. However, regardless of AP's target audience, there doesn't appear to be any reason NOT to make the alpha channel accessible. All they have to do is make the little icon that indicates that a layer is editable work for the alpha channel (currently it's a button that does nothing). The editing tools are already there, they're just blocked from working in the alpha channel. It seems like they're going out of their way to treat the alpha channel as a special, non-editable layer.

If I try to close a document that has not been saved, I get the prompt to save the file. If I do a save, the document doesn't close. I have to close it again. This is not normal behavior for a Mac application. The file should close after saving without me having to close it again.

By arbitrary position, I mean any location within the document, NOT any rotation. I'm talking about horizontal and vertical lines. By selection, I mean a selection made with a marquee tool in a pixel layer. (There is more than one way to draw a line.) In the attached image, I made a selection with the Column Marquee Tool, and filled it with white on a black background (left line). Then I made another column selection, filled it, then dragged it a few pixels to the right (other line). You can see in the screen capture that the second line is still selected, but it's gotten wider and darker, the filled area now extends past the "selected" pixels. So it looks like it's not possible to be precise with either vector or pixel objects. I understand why this is the case with vector objects, but a pixel is a pixel. A selected area of pixels should NOT change its appearance or size as it's dragged around the document.

So it's not possible to draw a precise, single-pixel line in an arbitrary position? What about filling a one-pixel wide selection? Why does that also depend on position? Shouldn't a filled selection include all the pixels within the selection, and none outside, with the same color/transparency? It looks like it's doing antialiasing whether I want it to or not. Is it not possible to do precision, pixel-perfect drawing?

Thanks, that'll be good to know if I ever get Affinity Designer. What about the Rectangular to Polar filter, seems like that should do the trick, but it just turns the text upside down and tilts it.

How do you make text follow a curve, for example wrapping text around a circle? I've found a video that shows creating an ellipse shape, then clicking on it with the Artistic Test tool, but that doesn't seem to work in the desktop version of Affinity Photo.

I'm having trouble drawing single-pixel, opaque, non-antialiased lines. I can't find a way to turn anti-aliasing off, and the lines are either more than one pixel wide or partially transparent. I'm only talking about horizontal and vertical lines. In the attached screen capture, the line on the far right is a curve with a 1-pixel white stroke on a dark gray background. The line is vertical, but you can see it is more than one pixel wide, and it's not white. The line on the far left is a filled pixel selection. It looks correct, a single pixel wide and opaque white, but if I move it (the line second from the left), its width and color changes. I need to create a single-pixel line that's not transparent and a known color, like the line second from the right imported as part of a Photoshop document.

Thanks. I'll give it a try. I just launched it, and all my settings, prefs, window arrangements are gone!

Affinity Photo 1.6.7 (Mac OS 10.14.3) frequently slows to a crawl. The interface and all tools lag to the point where they are unusable. Quitting AF and restarting restores normal performance. It doesn't seem to matter how many documents I have open or how complex they are, since after restarting, I open the same documents and performance is back to normal. Just closing all open documents doesn't fix it. It seems to be related to how long AF has been running without a restart. Normally I keep AF, and a few other apps (Unity, Cheetah3D, a text editor, a browser, iTunes), running all the time, only quitting/restarting an app when necessary. With AF, it's necessary every 2-3 days.

Thanks. It wasn't obvious how to get the Stroke panel to show up with the text selected, but I got it working. The results are pretty similar to the bold text I'm trying to match.

How do I set text to bold (or italic) if the font doesn't have those styles? I'm trying to match some text created in Photoshop, but in AF the bold and italics options are not available unless the font supports them. Can I only apply styles are that available for a particular font?

I finally got it working. Thanks again. I discovered I'd missed this one critical step. If you don't opt-click the thumbnail (obviously), the mask is invisible, and it looks like nothing is happening. One more thing I still can't seem to do is paste into the mask. For example, if I want to copy an alpha channel from one image to another.

That works (cmd-click on Mac), but it selects all the pixels in the layer. I'd like to just select the pixels within the original selection, but this is a limitation I can adjust to. Thanks.

That just changes the size of the selection area. A rectangular marquee just gets bigger or smaller.

How can I shrink a rectangular (or other) selection to an irregularly-shaped object? In Photoshop I can draw a rectangular marquee around some shape, then nudge the selection (cmd-arrow), and the selection shrinks to only include the filled pixels in that layer, edges and holes are excluded from the selection. Is there a way to select just the filled pixels, maybe a different selection tool or selection options, within a given area without selecting the empty space?