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_fluffy

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Posts posted by _fluffy

  1. The Procedural Texture Generator is pretty great for a lot of things, but something it can't do, as far as I can tell, is make computations on a source pixel based on its neighboring source pixels. If there were a way to index other pixels by offset within the texture function, Procedural Texture Generator becomes an incredibly powerful tool for things like generating normal maps from height maps and applying convolutions.

    On that note, it would also be great if lookups could come with a convolution kernel (to apply a transfer function to a group of pixels at once).

    In particular I'd love to be able to edit a normal map from Affinity Photo by drawing into a height map and then have the new normal map generated on-the-fly as essentially an adjustment layer.

  2. I understand and agree with people who are upset that they bought it a few months ago and then are being asked to buy it again, rather than getting an upgrade grace period. There are many mechanisms that Affinity Serif could use to verify the purchase being recent and then extend a free license to those users (regardless of how they bought the license).

    However, I absolutely do not understand people who are upset that they have to pay another $40 (or $100) to update a product they’ve had for years and then, as a response, say they’ll go back to Adobe, of all things.

  3. 35 minutes ago, Adobe Certified Expert said:

    The comparison with buying a new car is also very misleading. Cars wear out in all parts, which software does not. A new customer gets software with hundreds of new functions. An update buyer only gets the new functions for the same price, because the previous functions are not "worn out".

     

    The only comparison I've seen with "buying a car" was when I was talking about the Mazda discount for new vs. existing customers, where they both got the same discount, just with different names. I mean, feel free to misinterpret that however you want, but I just want to be clear, I wasn't comparing the purchase of this software with the purchase of a car. Because indeed, software doesn't wear out (beyond older versions losing support in newer OSes or hardware configurations). But it's disingenuous to claim that a comparison was being made where one wasn't.

  4. Hmm, gradient map adjustments have been in Photoshop for ages, though. But they're also not very commonly-used so that's probably not something they came across when building their PSD importer.

    That said there's probably some other approach I can take to restore them to my documents, like it should be pretty easy to rewrite it as a procedural texture generator. I'll see what I can do about that particular issue.

  5. 35 minutes ago, deeds said:

    It's impossible to compare Affinity Photo with Photoshop + Lightroom - unless you're only using the limited feature set of Affinity Photo... the Adobe offering is at least a 5x the product and environment for serious, professional work with imagery. Just Lightroom is an entirely different league of endeavour, before getting to Photoshop.

    The only reason I even mentioned Photoshop+Lightroom is because you can't get one without the other. I personally don't use Lightroom at all; Apple Photos.app is more than sufficient for my photography processing needs.

  6. Just now, Jimo said:

    You can pay on a month-by-month basis (and cancel any time), but it also costs more per month that way.

    I could never find those pricing options, probably because Adobe likes to make things seem cheaper than they are to entice people in.

    Anyway, regardless, the entire Affinity suite currently costs less than two months of the equivalent products from Adobe.

  7. 2 minutes ago, Jimo said:

    A Reaper licence is good for TWO versions. So if you purchase version 6, you get free updates all the way up to the final update for version 7.

    You are correct, it takes slightly longer to have to pay again than it does for most software. But you still have to pay again, which is the point I was trying to make.

    Ongoing software development costs money, and there's only so many people who are going to be buying the software to begin with. You can't rely on a continuous flow of new customers to finance the improvements to the software you rely on.

    It would be nice if Affinity had upgrade pricing for loyal customers, but this 40% discount is pretty massive.

    Here's an analogy which might make some sense: Many years ago I bought a Mazda vehicle. They had two incentive programs: a discount for loyal Mazda customers, and a discount for new Mazda customers to entice people over.

    The discount, as it turns out, was the same for both.

    You can see the 40% pricing for Affinity the same way: either you're being rewarded a 40% discount for your loyalty, or you're being rewarded a 40% discount for giving Affinity a try. Either way you're saving 40%.

  8. In the US, Photoshop+Lightroom is $120/year, and they lock you into an annual contract (charging an early termination fee if you want it for only a month or two). You have to keep on paying this in perpetuity while you continue to use the product.

    In the US, Affinity Photo V2 is currently $40, and normally $70. Both of those are cheaper than a year of Photoshop+Lightroom.

    The entire Affinity Suite (Photo+Designer+Publisher) is $100 now, or $170 normally. The equivalent Adobe software is Photoshop+Illustrator+InDesign, which costs $60/month, and I believe that's also locked to an annual contract, so you're going to be paying at least $720 for it. And, again, that's per year.

    Pricing does vary by country but it's extremely hard to argue in good faith that Affinity ever costs more than anything Adobe produces.

  9. On the actual topic: personally I'm annoyed at having to pay for it again mostly because V1 came with the prospect of replacing Photoshop but it had so many UX issues that I ended up using it very little (and had to keep paying for Photoshop after all). V2 finally fixes most of the issues I had, and the remaining ones I've run into are easy enough to work around. While I wouldn't mind getting a (years late) refund on the V1 purchases (including the iPad version which I bought and used, like, once), the total price on V1+V2 is still less than a year of Photoshop.

  10. 43 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

    This is an outlier in the software world.  If my memory serves me correctly there was one charge once for an upgrade, but that may have been from 7 to X. Final Cut and Motion are two pieces of software I have used for years and years with no upgrade charge. Consider though how much Apple makes from its phones, they are awash in cash.

    Logic has always been very expensive to upgrade until X came out; 7 to 8, 8 to 9, and 9 to X all cost money to upgrade. (8 to 9 was especially egregious because it was an expensive upgrade that added very little, but it was forced on people who were using the GarageBand Jam Packs!)

    X is very much an outlier in that more has changed in any of the individual point releases (10.1 -> 10.2 and so on) than there usually was between the major releases, and that those point releases haven't required upgrade pricing. I'm pretty sure Apple sees Logic as a loss-leader to encourage people to keep on buying new Apple hardware.

    And Logic is absolutely an outlier in the audio world, too; I can't think of any other software that doesn't require a paid upgrade for a major functionality change. Even the indie darling Reaper costs money for major version updates, as do Cubase, Bitwig, and Ableton. And ProTools, the "industry standard," charges a subscription.

  11. Yeah, and I kinda hate to say it, but every time I try using Affinity Serif software I keep on getting just enough little UI papercuts that keep me going back to Adobe products. I really want to love Affinity Photo but I just can't handle all of the little issues that keep on cropping up, and it's especially annoying to post about these to try to see about workarounds or other ways of doing what I'm trying to do only to see people on this forum being all, "That's how this software is, deal with it."

    Like I mean, I get that this is a different piece of software and the developers' focus isn't necessarily going to be on the same things that I'm expecting out of it, but I still want to use tools to get stuff done. I am totally willing to learn a different way of doing things, but everything that isn't Photoshop seems to require you to take a dozen extra steps to do a thing that was just 1-2 clicks in Photoshop, and those 1-2 click things are what I've built my entire art workflow around.

    If there were alternate approaches that weren't so cumbersome I'd just learn those alternate approaches, but as far as I can tell, Affinity (and many of the other would-be Photoshop competitors like Acorn and Pixelmator) just plain don't see those things as priorities.

    I feel silly for having spent money on this software without thoroughly trying to see if I could do things in it. I figured that buying it would show my support for it and do my small part to finance its improvement, but when I try to give my feelings on how it could become the amazing piece of software that it has the potential to be, it's met with snark and attitude from other users and a deafening silence from the developers. How am I supposed to just keep on holding out hope that it will improve for my needs, given that?

    Anyway. I'm sorry to rant. I'm just getting frustrated with having to pay $$$ every year to keep Photoshop working, when it's not like I'm even using any of the new features they keep adding (but good luck getting the final non-subscription version installed/working/etc. on a current-gen Mac...)

  12. cmd-delete, or option-delete? I seem to be able to bind any other shortcut key and it works; option-delete seems to be hardcoded to edit>inpaint, at least on version 1.7.2 for Mac.

    I mean as a workaround I had opted to use cmd-delete instead and that was working, I'd just rather not have this way of accidentally doing an inpaint fill that takes forever and can't be canceled based on my muscle memory of these keyboard shortcuts from years of using Photoshop.

  13. Okay, so I reset my keyboard shortcuts and option-backspace was indeed defaulting to "inpaint."

    However, removing that shortcut and setting one for "fill with primary color" continued to just try to inpaint instead.

    Here are my keyboard shortcuts: note the 'fill with primary color' being option-backspace and 'inpaint' being empty:

    552132328_ScreenShot2019-09-18at9_22_00AM.thumb.png.d9d776c7819b82ac4584361860cf9f27.png

    Here is what happened when I pressed option-backspace after wanding a selection:

    1744219134_ScreenShot2019-09-18at9_23_44AM.thumb.png.8f1532e61b64f94f086b0780547b4ed2.png1520928282_ScreenShot2019-09-18at9_23_56AM.thumb.png.b0c53640967ddb5dcf388979e6f81009.png

  14. Hi, on Affinity Photo 1.7.2 on Mac, the default keyboard shortcut for "fill with primary color" is set to option-backspace, but when I use that key combination, it does the inpaint instead, even though I don't have a shortcut set for inpaint. If I set a different shortcut for inpaint, option-backspace still does the inpaint. If I set a different shortcut for "fill with primary" (such as cmd-backspace), that shortcut does work. So, as a workaround I've set "fill with primary color" to cmd-backspace for now.

    Is there somewhere else that the keyboard shortcuts might be coming from?

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