gw_westdale

Thanks that is helpful -- the eraser is pretty useless being circular - perhaps the eraser should be allowed to have brush shapes ( or the normal brush should pick up a colour of transparent ) Noted that this needs the shapes etc to be rasterised. (I'd dearly love a vector eraser in Designer - but that is another story)

Fair point. Having read your post I played more with cropping. I didn't realise negative cropping was a thing!

Thanks for response - that is useful. Independently of the use of FilterForge, I think what you are saying is that Crop does not fully crop the file - and the file saved after cropping would still contain the full image. So, in order to save filespace if one uses large background bitmaps, Crop is not enough and one should Rasterise and trim each of any large bitmap layers as well? That appears to be the case from a quick trial I did. I would suggest that it would be better for Crop to do a trim as well in some future version.

Not sure I understand this .... is the following (from the Designer Help File inaccurate / misleading when it says there is support ..... Features of Affinity Designer Here's an overview of the features of Affinity Designer. Choose a category from the menu below, which includes options to view all features, or only those that are new in this version—marked with a red bullet (▪). All featuresNew in this versionPower, performance and compatibilitySolid graphic design toolsPowerful layer managementExternal resource managementProfessional object controlProfessional colour supportVector brushes with stretch and corner controlText and typographyUser interfaceDesign aidsPixel-based designsInteroperabilityDocument control, Import, Export and Printing Power, performance and compatibility: Optimised for: Direct3D 64-bit engine Hardware GPU acceleration (OpenCL) for integrated, discrete and external GPUs Create massive gigapixel-sized documents 16-bits per channel editing Sub-pixel accuracy 64-bit plug-in support <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Up to date Tablet support Multi-touch support Surface Studio with Surface Pen and Surface Dial support

+1

Indeed so. This may be an example of two very similar things being developed by separate teams, and taking the best of both and making it uniform would be good. I rate presets above live filter if there is need for a choice --- typing in any long formula and parameters is really error prone.

I process a jpeg in Photo and crop it to square, then save as an afphoto file. I open this 'square' afphoto file. On selection , a rectangular boundary shows the original boundary with the square image within it. On selecting the crop tool the specified image and crop dimensions are both square as I wanted. If I feed this image into a Forge plugin, it sees the original dimensions and messes up processing of distortions and tiling. Win10 PC 64bit

Absolutely right -- I have no idea how that turned on but that is the problem ... many thanks - I had tried all sorts edit : I think it's down to accidentally selecting a brush that sets 'protect' on, then choosing the brush I intended to use, which does not set 'protect' but leaves it on. the 'leave the setting alone' type of brush is a hazard I'll have to watch out for !

In Photo, if I create a new pixel layer, I get a transparent canvas on which I can start painting leaving any layer underneath visble where I have not painted. In Designer pixel persona Windows 10 V1.9 a brush will not paint on a new (ie transparent) layer. Filling the layer with white enables me to paint - but obviously kills the aim of being able to see the layers underneath. A transparent area created by erasing paint after filling with white also does not allow painting so that is not a workaround. Still true if I rasterise the layer. Is there a workaround or is this a bug or misfeature?

Agree - need some touchable items that are usable when in tablet mode shift alt ctl and perhaps ctl-z/undo as a hot button. On my HP Envy in tablet mode, I can display an on screen touch keyboard but that is modal - holding that shift key keeps focus on the keyboard so disables drawing with the pen .

Oh <sad face> I've been gradually gradually working through some of the simpler things I do in Illustrator to convert my work to Affinity. As I am retired doing limited numbers of posters/tickets etc for political and charity organisations, the impact isn't as great as for a pro, but ....... having been used to Illustrator's Expand Appearance on brushes as per the attached image ( line-applybrush-expand-styleit) this is something of a shock. Fortunately I keep an old Illustrator running (largely for the Scriptographer plugin) so I can go back to it when I want to do anything 'clever'.

All three programs Designer/Photo/Publisher can save a thumbnail with a document, and this works well, showing the thumbnail image in Windows Explorer. The saved thumbnail does not show up in my resource management software where only the associated application icon is visible. I've discussed with them and they have no problem in showing the windows thumbnail ( and I see one in Photoshop and Illustrator documents etc ) . They tell me they know of one problem package and that is Corel - who hide their thumbnails from apps other than Explorer in some way- and no good reason was given by Corel. Is it the case that Affinity are doing like Corel and in some way hiding the thumbnail? If so, I don't think it's a sensible option as it can be annoying to have to explicitly save (for instance) a reference jpeg. If not deliberately hidden is there any advice that you could give to sort this out? thanks

A very useful discussion. I think I may be almost there using a mouse. I have managed to get some variation in the width and opacity of a line by setting the context controller to velocity .... BUT .... By moving my mouse as fast as humanly possible across the whole screen, I get up to abut 25% of the full width of the line... How can I make Affinity realise I really do want to get a thick line if I move quickly while retaining some control of where the mouse is going across the desk 🙂 edit - I also cannot find a context controller for the pixel brush equivalent --- are pixel brushes not supported for mouse?

Designer in Windows 10 just showing an icon, Photo in Windows showing an image No - it's not as complicated as I thought - not about location of the file -- just need to show LARGE icons - <duhhh>

Grouping items where a contour has been applied breaks when dragging the group....... Create artistic text. Duplicate. Contour top item to be smaller. Add stroke to top item Group. If one then selects the two items within the group and drags, they move correctly [lower part of image]. If one selects the group as a whole, [upper part of image] and drags, the drawing parts move differently, as if the scaling of the contour is affecting the movement? Windows 10 Ryzen5/Radeon Designer 1.9 regards Gareth