jkehoe

Hello @jkehoe,
@barninga, has it very well explained.
invert the HSL adjustment layer with the shortcut CTRL + I
The settings made are now not visible.
Paint over the areas whose settings should be visible with a soft brush, foreground color white.
HSL.mp4

@jkehoe, the #7 shows a way to mask/unmask an effect in order to apply it only to certain areas of the image. in AP,  any effect layer is also a mask. if you select an effect layer and paint black on it, the effect disappears where you just painted. if you paint white over the black area, the effect reappears.
the exercise instruct to add a hsl layer, then invert it. inverting an effect layer actually means inverting its mask. when you add an effect layer, its mask is white by default: this means the effect is applied to the whole image. if you invert it, its mask becomes black and the effect is not applied anymore. in the exercise, you set the paintbrush to white, and the paint over a specified areas after selecting the hsl layer. this way, you create a white "hole" in its mask, which the effect becomes visible again through.

Hi Everyone,
 
I just wanted to share how Affinity Photo and Designer helped me set up my cover art file for publishing my iBook onto the iBooks Store. The original digital photo had been edited in Apple's Aperture over a year ago but one version was saved as a .tiff. Here's a brief outline of my workflow:
Open the .tiff in Affinity Photo and save it in .afphoto file format (just my preference to do that)
Add a New Live Filter Layer > High Pass Filter (I really like this tool)
Make minor adjustments and save it
Open that same file in Affinity Designer and save it in .afdesign format
Add layers as needed to build text boxes, keeping each box in its own layer
Ensure that the font type matches that used in the iBook project
File > Export to jpg in best quality setting
 
The file dimensions are pertinent only to this case as it pertains to an iBook that was built using Apple's iBooks Author app.
 
Best Regards!
 
 

Hello Everyone,
 
Yes, count me in, too, as an interested Affinity customer that is using Aperture for its asset management capabilities. I also imagine that Aperture will cease to function and I'd rather not buy and learn yet another vendor's product. I vote for Affinity!

Thanks Everyone,
 
This feature stumped me a few times before I figured it out. I really like R C-R's suggestion of brightening tab text.

Hi,
 
I just want to add my own perspective on this topic. Other Affinity members had posted similar issues with relying on Apple's Photos app and then trying to pull images out of there and into Affinity Photo (or other). After years of using RAW images on two different Macs, I currently ensure that my RAW files are downloaded without being edited or converted. For now, this means I'm using Apple's Aperture as my Digital Asset Manager (DAM), even though Apple no longer supports it. I don't use Photos or iPhoto at all. When I choose to edit a photo in Affinity, I browse to the Masters folder inside the Aperture library structure, right click on an image and choose "Open with..." and select Affinity Photo or Designer. That way I can see how the RAW converters compare between Aperture and Affinity. I had also used Canon's Image Browser setup in the past, which allows users to store the images in their pristine state.
 
Regarding CarlB's suggestion of a folder structure, I do almost the same: within the Mac's Pictures folder, I create subfolders that have intuitive names and dates. This setup allows me to leverage Apple's Aperture as my (mostly) default photo management setup and provides me with a wide array of photo editing choices. Once an image is developed from RAW, I save the jpg (png or tiff) in one of these easy-to-find folders. My older Mac has an old version of Photoshop Elements, my current one has only Affinity and Aperture. This works fine for me. I have never had Adobe Lightroom but I know a LOT of folks use it and love its Digital Asset Management features. That's why some of these folks own both Lightroom and Photoshop (a powerful combo).
 
But as in photography, these are just some of the many choices that don't have a "right" or "wrong" answer—they're mostly preferences.
 
Best Regards, and enjoy the journey =)

Would like to see the enter button on the keyboard be the equivalent to Apply whenever its applicable.

Add a +1 for me on this - user looking for new solutions to CS-era Photoshop, InDesign, and Aperture. Serif's products look VERY nice.
 
Aperture's strengths of quickly triaging large numbers of files, batch adjusting, batch keywording and organising, don't really seem to have been bettered.
 
What really does it for me is all of the adjustments / retouching being applied as metadata & versioning - every solution I've looked at seems to want me to flatten my adjustments out into extra TIFF files (which are about 120mb each, as opposed to 30-50mb RAWs). Apple has even dropped the ball on Photos.app with 3rd party plugins still being destructive edits on flattened files.
 
The one thing about Aperture I don't like is it being over-protective of the original files - even for things like rotating - sometimes the camera gets the orientation of an image wrong when shooting up or down, and Aperture can't rotate the original. It needs an "unlock to edit original" function.

let's say I have three objects; object A, object B and object C.
 
I want object A above object B, object B above object C and object C above object A in the layer.
 
Is it possible to have circular layer instead of linear layer?

Hi Hugo.paradox,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
No, there's no "circular" layer. You have to duplicate objects and mask parts of them to build interlocked shapes.
Here's a simple example (video, no sound) showing how to create a rectangle and use it as a mask to show just the overlapping part of a duplicate of a ring in two interlocked rings.

Hi MEB.  Thanks for you reply.  :)
 
Now that makes perfect sense, thank you.  Problem solved.  I did not see the tabs at first, because of the darkness of the UI.
 
Suggestion:  In subsequent releases, it might be nice to see a choice between light and dark themes or some higher settings possible on the UI gamma slider.  I love the dark interface, however, I have noticed, coming from early Photoshop releases, that having a darker interface can influence my assessment of image brightness.  Small point, but possibly worth noting?
 
Many thanks again.

Even without more control over UI lightness/gamma settings, I think it would help a lot if the tab text was brighter -- about as bright as the text in the Context & main menu bars. It is already a smaller font size than the menu bar text (why???), so it is unlikely that this would affect image perception appreciably.
 
I realize that the text of the currently selected document tab is as bright as the toolbar text, I assume to make it easy to tell which tab is selected, but since its title is already displayed at the top of the window, that is more or less redundant.

Hi Everyone,
 
I am stumped by this and I can't delete a segment of a curve, or at least it doesn't work as spelled out above. I opened a jpeg of an insect and set that as the background layer. I then added a new layer, chose the Pen tool, and outlined the main body. I repeated this by adding more layers for wings, legs, head, etc. Now I'm struggling with Designer while trying to delete segments of these shapes that are pen tool lines. I select the body layer, click "Convert to Curves," select the Node tool, click on one of the nodes and it becomes solid blue, I then click "Break Curve" and it become outlined in red (white center, like all the rest). All other nodes are still showing, as if selected. Next, I click another node that's four stops away from the first one--it turns blue. When I click "Break Curve," that selected node turns white, just like all the others, aside from the first one which is still outlined in red. If I hit the backwards Delete key (the main delete key), the entire shape gets deleted (all nodes appear to be selected, so that makes sense). Please help =( I know the answer is in front of my nose, but I'm just not seeing it.
 
Thank you so much. I really like both Designer and Photo (bought both) and want to migrate to them.
John Kehoe

John, I don't think it's a camera maker issue - there are lots of happy Canon users here and at least one Nikon (Nikon 1) user who has encountered RAW processing problems.  
 
Because AP is an editor and (AFAIK) there is no way to have it process RAW direct from the camera, your interface procedure may make a difference.  I perform the Camera > Computer step using Nikon S/W, delete the rubbish, and import the folder of satisfactory NEFs into Aperture where AP is set up as the external editor, but more often than not I export the original from Aperture and edit it in AP's Develop persona***.  I did see that you have used Canon Digital Photo Pro, though, so am not confident about the explanation ...  
 
I see that there is a response above from MikeFrom Mesa.  Mike is a Canon user and has made may good contributions to the forum - it may be worth your while sifting through the posts here for other posts from him.
 
*** There is no reason for this workflow, it's just the way it developed in the months since Apple announced they were not going to support Aperture any more, as I tried and dumped Lightroom, Capture 1, PerfectPhoto and a couple of others, in favour of keeping Aperture as the library manager and using AP for serious editing.