Andy05

Amen to that! I used to administrate and moderate some public MMO game fora with hundreds of thousands of members each for more than a decade. Unfortunately, most forum users think a forum would represent the overall opinion among all users. But with just a tiny bit of common sense one would figure out that this can't be right. Persons who are annoyed about something far quicker want to vent out their frustration in places like a public forum than the vast majority of users, who will never find their ways into the forum and/or comment something "Yeah, the apps just do what they should - working fine for me".

(Very) brief summary: Pantone and Adobe couldn't agree on an ongoing relationship, so you now have to pay a monthly fee for using Pantone colours within the CC apps. YouTube channel Linus Tech tips tackled this issue and mentioned Affinity apps as a possible solution to this problem. With that channel's 14.9 subscriptions, this is quite some massive advertising.

Check if your image is 32 bit. The plugins don't work with 32 bit images.

V1 points at the subfolder (./Color Efex Pro 4). That's where the plugin file (*.8bf) is located in. Your V2 path points at the parent folder.

Technically correct, because you'd have to drag Serif to court to actively assist you with transferring the license. But software purchased within the EU can be sold regardless what the EULA says. Latter renders invalid in this point since The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that publishers cannot stop you from reselling apps or digital licenses for them.

Check, if you selected a pixel layer before trying to open the plugins. Also, NIK plugins can't deal with 32bit (colour depth) images, so that might also be worth checking.

Das liegt daran, dass die Pinsel, die du den Kurven zugewiesen hast, keine echten Vektor-Pinsel sind. Leider haben die Affinity Apps hiervon nur ganz einfache (z. B. runde) Pinsel. Alle anderen "Vektor Pinsel" sind in Wirklichkeit Bitmaps, die sich an einem Pfad ausrichten. Je nach Projekt könnte es helfen, wenn du die Auflösung des Dokuments (DPI) hochsetzt. Damit könnten die gerasterten Pinselstriche zumindest in der für das Druckverfahren benötigten Auflösung gerastert werden.

Utter nonsense. Using dedicated tools for single special tasks is the correct approach. Not recognising this is failing. I wouldn't want Designer doing 3D renders either, although I need them in quite some of my clients' work. As @Pšenda already stated—and I agree with the "often completely unsatisfactory" part, which is true for most implemented auto tracing features in other design apps: Dedicated apps for such tasks, which solely concentrate on creating a useful output, are there for a reason. It's by far not "an easy thing" to implement, otherwise Corel's or Adobe's built-in vectorisation probably wouldn't fail that often.

Seriously, tracing an image (turning a raster image into vectors) is a one-time procedure to be done to an image during the design process. The result will be used in further workflow and in a design/layout. It's not that much of a downside, using dedicated apps for this process. Neither in time needed for this, nor in functionality. For me, a design software should provide the steps, which I repeatedly have to do or edit during the workflow of designing/layout. Tracing clearly isn't one of the "constantly repeating steps" one usually needs during a project.

Updates are free. Upgrades never have been announced to be free. How do you think a company could survive with maintaining, developing and improving any project forever without charging for new versions?

This can be answered pretty easily (and quickly): Yes. You can install and run V1 and V2 simultaneously without any issues.

Yes, but with the current discount on top, the bulk license is still a steal.

I'm not on an iPad, I but I think it's similar: V2 can open any V1 files without problems/conversion. On Windows, you'll get a prompt, tho. Asking you, if you want to open the original or if you want to create a copy (because once saved in V2 format, V1 apps can't open the file any longer).

When using the "reset" feature during start, the message should appear anew, shouldn't it? But one would lose all settings for V2 done already.

Yes, his messages (ab)used as notifications for when I have to carry out the trash bins (see one of my previous comments on this matter). I appreciate that service.

Yeah, don't get me wrong, I just tried to find some equivalent/example for some religious "cult" in a more positive way. Not some fanatic lunatics. I, personally, consider all kind of religions some kind of "cult". 😄 Maybe Mormons would have matched better rather than Jehovah's Witnesses, but I don't really know much about those either, all I know about them is from movies. LOL They are not very present over here, in Germany. But I guess I better stop at this point. Apologies, if I insulted any religion, that wasn't my intention. At all.

Weird, I think I know your friend too. Does your friend have average colour hair? Weird, indeed! I thought @thomaso doesn't have any friends at all! (SCNR)

I stumbled upon some of their videos ages ago, probably because there haven't been many Affinity related videos at YouTube back then and the algorithm thought I'd be interested. And although it might be true that they are excellent teachers, they always gave me some "religious cult"/"Jehovah's Witness" vibes. No idea why, it was not about their content.

Necromancing this old thread—but as predicted, Unsplash has slowly moved towards paid (premium) content. I hope they'll still keep offering a good amount of quality open source images in the future, but I'm suspicious... https://unsplash.com/blog/introducing-unsplash/

Uhm. Seems like you missed the point completely. Affinity never gave a deadline (a date, or a period of time) with their license. AFAIK it has always been "for all V1.xx versions". So, no, doesn't sound familiar. It's the complete opposite actually.

Probably they think they'll be able to release V2 within less than a year. So people would uproar, if they paid for "1 year of upgrades" and neither getting V2 nor any updates for V1 after V2 rolled out, in case if it's less than a year since they purchased a license.

I'd like to thank you for your weekly reminder. As I can use every second one as a reminder for myself to move the garbage bins out as you post exactly on the day it's due. (BTW: That's not even a joke. A convenient coincidence...)

Yeah, as mentioned in the initial post, I created the macros for working on a client's brief. Hence the fixed size/aspect ratio. Unfortunately, editing existing macros in Affinity apps is still a nightmare/not possible at all. It's interesting that it works without installing the styles, but that explains the macro's size. IIRC, it wasn't working with the Affinity Photo version back the days (when I created the assets) with installing the macro only, hence I had to add them to the downloads. Same applies to grouped layers. I had to add the advise to flatten the layers and/or mark only one, because I had two users reporting problems when not doing so. But there might have been different reasons for their issues, I just remembered that I worked on flat images only for my client. To be honest, I just did a quick check, if the macro is still working "as it was originally" before moving the files to gumroad.

Thanks Walt, for the reminder! Although I received @RosM's notification days ago, I completely forgot about it again due to some urgent projects keeping me busy lately. I've transferred the files to gumroad (https://thargoran.gumroad.com/l/engraving_effect) and updated the initial post with the link to it. It's still for free—just enter "0" into the price field. (But I'd appreciate some stars rating nonetheless.) Gumroad makes it easier for me to update it, if I ever feel like I should add/improve anything to this.

If that would make you leave the fora prior to this winter, I'm all in for Publisher for iPad not coming too soon!