JDW

Then I shall post my idea as a separate feature request.  
 
Thank you for the explanation.

That would be all most of us need!  :-)
 
But no, I've not seen a comprehensive comparison on a single chart.  I myself have just been trudging through the Affinity apps trying to compare what is what.  Thankfully, some keyboard shortcuts are the same, but not all.  Although I bought Designer and Photo, neither app is still an Illustrator and Photoshop replacement yet.  I am hopeful that day will come and come soon though.  And toward that end I am searching the apps to see what can be improved.  We should all remember that Photoshop and Illustrator have been around FOR DECADES and are very refined apps.  That makes the Affinity apps all the more surprising because they are really good after only 5 years of engineering.  Perhaps in another year or two, if we all submit well thought out feature requests, we can retire Adobe for good in 2016 or 2017.  Fingers crossed.

Are you a designer or programmer?  If the latter, you're in the wrong place.  You are here among VISUAL DESIGNERS.  That means we go with what we see, not with what theory or scientific data says to us.  If something looks sharper to my graphically trained eye (with Photoshop and Illustrator experience that spans the entire life of those products), then IT IS SHARP.
 
PERIOD.

Since no one knows what the difference is between Lanczos 3 "separable" and "non-separable" may I suggest that Serif put something more meaningful and descriptive into those parenthesis instead?
 
In my testing, Lanczos 3 (separable) enlargements and reductions a tad sharper than Bicubic, and Lanczos 3 (non-separable) is much sharper.
 
So I would think the Resample popup should read as follows:
Nearest Neighbor Bilinear Bicubic Lanczos 3 (sharp) Lanczos 3 (sharper) Because, quite honestly, "separable" and "non-separable" may appeal to the left-brainers, but isn't Affinity Photo appealing to our right-brain creative side?  Yes.  So make the descriptions more understandable, please!

I have to agree.
 
I am blown away that AP does not offer white and black eye dropper and cannot adjust / move the mid gray tone.
 
I work alot with sketches and scann them in and it seems AP is one of the worst tools here because it is more labor intensive.

+1 For a picker to set Black/White Point :wub:
It's very useful to be able to decide exactly what i want to be black/white in an image.

My apologies.  My thinking cap wasn't on yesterday!   :blink:
 
I get it now.  Works just like Photoshop's Polygonal Lasso Tool except for these two things:
 
1. AP requires you to press the Shift key and keep it held down during your selection (okay, you don't have to hold it down all the time, but are you really going to press and unpress it just prior to each click?  No!), which may not be desirable in cases where you are spending a long time making an intricate selection.
 
2. AP auto draws the closing segment of the selection as you are making your selection.  I find that interesting.  Not sure if it is desirable or undesirable.  But I will say that (1) is more of an issue than (2).
 
Maybe an easy fix would be to allow CapsLock to eliminate the need to hold down the Shift key.  The goal here is to allow the selection to be made without the need for constant pressing of a key or the mouse button.

I agree with JDW. Furthermore, I've been forced to start over a complex selection becouse if you un-press the shift key, AP closes the selection, no matter if you wanted it or not. I was thinking on posting the polygonal lasso independent tool as a feature request, but your CapsLock idea will be perfect as well.

Since no one knows what the difference is between Lanczos 3 "separable" and "non-separable" may I suggest that Serif put something more meaningful and descriptive into those parenthesis instead?
 
In my testing, Lanczos 3 (separable) enlargements and reductions a tad sharper than Bicubic, and Lanczos 3 (non-separable) is much sharper.
 
So I would think the Resample popup should read as follows:
Nearest Neighbor Bilinear Bicubic Lanczos 3 (sharp) Lanczos 3 (sharper) Because, quite honestly, "separable" and "non-separable" may appeal to the left-brainers, but isn't Affinity Photo appealing to our right-brain creative side?  Yes.  So make the descriptions more understandable, please!

Recent versions of Photoshop have such an "Automatic" setting.  But an auto setting may be more difficult on Affinity Photo because AP has two types of Lanczos:
Lanczos 3 (sharp) — roughly the same as Photoshop's Bicubic Sharper Lanczos 3 (sharper) — this setting is really sharp So if Serif did implement an AUTO setting, I would assume it should choose Lanczos 3 (sharp) rather than Lanczos 3 (sharper), or maybe such could be a preference setting?

Since no one knows what the difference is between Lanczos 3 "separable" and "non-separable" may I suggest that Serif put something more meaningful and descriptive into those parenthesis instead?
 
In my testing, Lanczos 3 (separable) enlargements and reductions a tad sharper than Bicubic, and Lanczos 3 (non-separable) is much sharper.
 
So I would think the Resample popup should read as follows:
Nearest Neighbor Bilinear Bicubic Lanczos 3 (sharp) Lanczos 3 (sharper) Because, quite honestly, "separable" and "non-separable" may appeal to the left-brainers, but isn't Affinity Photo appealing to our right-brain creative side?  Yes.  So make the descriptions more understandable, please!

Since no one knows what the difference is between Lanczos 3 "separable" and "non-separable" may I suggest that Serif put something more meaningful and descriptive into those parenthesis instead?
 
In my testing, Lanczos 3 (separable) enlargements and reductions a tad sharper than Bicubic, and Lanczos 3 (non-separable) is much sharper.
 
So I would think the Resample popup should read as follows:
Nearest Neighbor Bilinear Bicubic Lanczos 3 (sharp) Lanczos 3 (sharper) Because, quite honestly, "separable" and "non-separable" may appeal to the left-brainers, but isn't Affinity Photo appealing to our right-brain creative side?  Yes.  So make the descriptions more understandable, please!

I am comparing Illustrator text selection to that of Affinity Designer 1.3.2.  In Illustrator, if I have multiple text boxes present on the page, I need only choose the Type Tool and the pointer changes to an I-beam, and when I mover that point over any text box, the box highlights with a blue underline.  I can then click and drag to select text.  And once text is selected that way in one box, I need only do the same thing to select text in another text box.  No double-clicking or special text insertion tricks required.  No so with Affinity Designer though.
 
In Affinity Designer, if I click the Artistic Text Tool and hover over any text boxes on the page, none of the text highlights.  Furthermore, if I try to just click-and-drag atop any text box, AD creates a new text box rather than highlighting text in the existing box!  I am forced to double-click to insert the text cursor inside an existing text box in AD.  And once there, I cannot simply click-and-drag on another text box to select it.  I must go to the trouble of double-clicking to insert the text cursor in other text boxes.
 
It may not sound like much, but this time waster is a huge time waster when you deal with a lot of text editing like me.
 
One more thing.  There is a small but noticeable lag when it comes to selecting a lot of text by click-and-drag and even typing text.  It feels on order of 200ms or so for text selection, and less than that for typing text.  I feel no lag at all when selecting text by click-and-drag or tying text in Illustrator though.  This is true in an existing document as well as in a new document.

Try this:
 
1. New document.
2. Click once on the Rectangle Tool (or type "M")
3. Click the square to the right of "Fill:" in the upper left corner of the window.
4. Click on the "Gradient" tab.
5. Note there is no field to set the ANGLE.  Please add that.
 
Why?  Because Illustrator has one and for good reason.
 
Yes, you can set the angle by going outside the Gradient panel, choosing the gradient tool and then manually doing it.  But if one is already working inside the Gradient tab (especially for matters of precision), it is only logical that an ANGLE setting should be in there too.
 
Thanks!

I was just going to submit a feature request for a polygonal selection tool like PS, which I use frequently. Glad to find I'm not the only one missing this. The holding down of the shift key while clicking around with the Free hand selection tool just isn't intuitive. And honestly, I associate shift-clicking to adding to my current selection (instead of using the ctrl key in AP).
 
 
I'm so glad you posted this JDW! The first few times I tried shift-clicking I didn't see a line at all, no indication that the tool was even working. Because of that lack of tool feedback I never shift-clicked a second point. Again, it just wasn't intuitive. I want to see where my initial selection point is so I can properly place my second point.

Hi JDW,
 
Glad you mentioned this, I am having exactly the same trouble on my iMac. I'm only running on an older 2GHz machine so wondered if my machine was causing the problem. I use PS Elements - the refine selection on Elements is instantaneous, so I'm not sure why AP takes several seconds - I get a progress bar at the top of the screen every time I click something in AP's refine section. It's not really usable. Hopefully this will get fixed, as I love AP and want it to be the best it can be.
 
Thanks for reading.

Thank you for pointing that out to me.
 
But how do I change the ANGLE?
 
In Illustrator's Gradient panel it's easy because there is an "Angle" field.  I don't see such in the Gradient Panel of Affinity Designer.

I use Photoshop's Image > Image Size feature all the time, and I must say that the addition of "Image Size" within Affinity Photo's "Resize Document" sheet would be welcomed.  For example, when you change the PPI or dimensions in Photoshop, you see something like this:
 
Image Size: 24.5MB (was 64MB)
 
The key part of that is the "was" part in parenthesis.
 
Thanks.

EPS can contain vectors, too, which AD will keep as vectors. Any bitmaps, from any source, will be embedded in AD at their native resolution. When export to a vector format like PDF, EPS or SVG, you can control whether you want them to be output at their native resolution, or whether to downsample them. If you are using File > Export, click the More button to see all the options available; or scroll the panel in the Export persona. By default we also offer three presets: "Export" will not downsample, "Print" will downsample to 300dpi, and "Web" will downsample to 72dpi. You can create your own export presets if these aren't suitable.
 
If the bitmaps are not downsampled or rasterised, we endeavour to output their original compressed data if it's available, to avoid quality losses from uncompressing and recompressing. You can also control whether JPEG (lossy) compression is used at all.
 
Basically, we try to do the best thing.

Thanks for that. I'll see what I can do.

I think the control key method offers more things to reset.

I use Photoshop's Image > Image Size feature all the time, and I must say that the addition of "Image Size" within Affinity Photo's "Resize Document" sheet would be welcomed.  For example, when you change the PPI or dimensions in Photoshop, you see something like this:
 
Image Size: 24.5MB (was 64MB)
 
The key part of that is the "was" part in parenthesis.
 
Thanks.

Try this:
 
1. New document.
2. Click once on the Rectangle Tool (or type "M")
3. Click the square to the right of "Fill:" in the upper left corner of the window.
4. Click on the "Gradient" tab.
5. Note there is no field to set the ANGLE.  Please add that.
 
Why?  Because Illustrator has one and for good reason.
 
Yes, you can set the angle by going outside the Gradient panel, choosing the gradient tool and then manually doing it.  But if one is already working inside the Gradient tab (especially for matters of precision), it is only logical that an ANGLE setting should be in there too.
 
Thanks!

Hi JDW,
Thanks for reporting this. Yes it's a mistake.
I'm logging this issue to be fixed.

Yes, the polygonal lasso is a must!! It saves work time and it helps in certain tasks. I have tried the freehand selection tool and it is cool but it does not works in the same way even with ⇧ (shift).
Thanks