jmagill

Thanks, Walt!

Hi I'd like to add a link to a website in a Publisher document but it looks like the only hyperlinks permitted are to anchors within the document. Does Publisher have this feature? If so, where can I find it? Thanks.

Hi stokerg, I restored the defaults, though I wish there were a 'restore defaults' button on the Performance panel in Preferences. I had to look at the defaults in ADesigner and APublisher to get the proper values. Anyway, whatever values I use on the Performance panel (and I experimented with them a lot) I still have no luck. The Flood Select tool is still unacceptably slow, with too little control to be usable. As a workaround, I used the Selection Brush. With that tool, when I click & drag to select the sky in the pano, I still don't see a real-time selection, and when I release the mouse button there's a delay of about 10 seconds until the marching ants appear. If it doesn't select everything and I have to click & drag to select more of the sky, the same thing happens, but now it's only a delay of about 4 seconds. I also miss having a Tolerance option on the tool's context toolbar, but compared to the 58 seconds the Flood Select tool makes me wait to see the marching ants, the wait-time for the Selection Brush is a little irksome, but now tolerable. Out of curiosity, I tried using the Flood Select tool on a 300dpi 62MB .aphoto file of my own and it worked perfectly: marching ants in real time. The Selection Brush worked fine also. So, I thought I'd try it on one of the unstitched Torres source files (DSC6480.tiff) which is also 300 dpi but smaller at 39.7 MB. The problem was back: no marching ants in real time and I had to hold down the mouse button for several seconds for the tool to catch up and show me the correct Tolerance. Strange. What is it about those Torres source files?

fde1: Thanks for the tip about setting RAM usage below the physical memory. I lowered it and the tool works a little better now, but it's still abysmally slow. Hardware acceleration is enabled for metal computing but it's not an option for the display. I tried things with metal enabled and without and there was little change in performance. It's curious to me that, while the other operations on this file in the tutorial are a little slow but work within the tolerances I'd expect for a file of this size, when using the Flood Select tool the program just hits a wall. And because it happens while working through a tutorial project from the workbook Affinity publishes, using files they supply, I feel like they wouldn't put it out there if it were a speed problem in the application, which is why I've been assuming it's a problem on my end. But unless someone can point to the issue on my machine, I'll start wondering again if the problem's in Affinity Photo... Also, regarding the file format, I'd been working with the aphoto file originally when I encountered the problem. I only tried the other formats to see if they were any better. Thanks for the advice. I'm hoping someone from the Affinity team can respond...

(I originally posted this in the Affinity on Desktop Questions forum, but it occurred to me this might be the better forum for it. Please excuse the redundancy) As a long-time Photoshop jock I’ve been pretty impressed with Affinity Photo (AP), but I’ve run into a real performance problem. While working through the Torres del Paine panorama project in the AP Workbook, the program’s performance has hit a wall and I’m not sure where the problem lies. I stitched the pano but when I tried to select the sky in the resulting file using the Flood Select Tool as instructed, the program choked. I clicked and dragged to the right to try to get the suggested tolerance (15%), then had to wait for the program to catch up (sometimes nearly a minute) while I held the button down (actually my finger on the trackpad) before it displayed the selection as marching ants. In addition, no matter how many times I tried, I would always be under or over 15%. Once the selection was displayed, I tried changing it by adjusting the percentage in the toolbar to no effect. Now, the pano is a pretty big .tiff file (379.5MB), so I expected that running operations on it are necessarily slower, but too slow to make tools usable is not acceptable, so here’s what I tried to get things into the ‘usable’ range: 1. I closed all apps, ran the ‘First Aid’ operation in Mac’s Disk Utility, then shut down. 2. I rebooted, made sure no other apps were running, then opened AP. 3. I went into Preferences and under ‘Performance’ pushed the RAM Usage Limit to the maximum of 65536MB and the Undo Limit down to 200. 4. I opened the big pano .tiff file and exported it as a .png and a .jpg to see how a smaller file would work. 5. The .jpg file was 147.1MB and .png file was 182.9MB. I decided to give the .png file a try. 6. Performance was only a little better than the .tiff; still frustratingly slow and not yet ready for primetime as far as my work is concerned. 7. I tried again with the smaller .jpg with the same result. Does anyone have any suggestions to improve performance, or does AP simply have trouble manipulating large files? Here are the specs on my machine: MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012) running macOS Catalina v. 10.15.4 Processor: 2.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 Memory: 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 Startup Disk: Mac HD Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1 GB, Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB Thanks for the help! Jim

As a long-time Photoshop jock I’ve been pretty impressed with Affinity Photo (AP), but I’ve run into a real performance problem. While working through the Torres del Paine panorama project in the AP Workbook, the program’s performance has hit a wall and I’m not sure where the problem lies. I stitched the pano but when I tried to select the sky in the resulting file using the Flood Select Tool as instructed, the program choked. I clicked and dragged to the right to try to get the suggested tolerance (15%), then had to wait for the program to catch up (sometimes nearly a minute) while I held the button down (actually my finger on the trackpad) before it displayed the selection as marching ants. In addition, no matter how many times I tried, I would always be under or over 15%. Once the selection was displayed, I tried changing it by adjusting the percentage in the toolbar to no effect. Now, the pano is a pretty big .tiff file (379.5MB), so I expected that running operations on it are necessarily slower, but too slow to make tools usable is not acceptable, so here’s what I tried to get things into the ‘usable’ range: 1. I closed all apps, ran the ‘First Aid’ operation in Mac’s Disk Utility, then shut down. 2. I rebooted, made sure no other apps were running, then opened AP. 3. I went into Preferences and under ‘Performance’ pushed the RAM Usage Limit to the maximum of 65536MB and the Undo Limit down to 200. 4. I opened the big pano .tiff file and exported it as a .png and a .jpg to see how a smaller file would work. 5. The .jpg file was 147.1MB and .png file was 182.9MB. I decided to give the .png file a try. 6. Performance was only a little better than the .tiff; still frustratingly slow and not yet ready for primetime as far as my work is concerned. 7. I tried again with the smaller .jpg with the same result. Does anyone have any suggestions to improve performance, or does AP simply have trouble manipulating large files? Here are the specs on my machine: MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012) running macOS Catalina v. 10.15.4 Processor: 2.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 Memory: 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 Startup Disk: Mac HD Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1 GB, Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB Thanks for the help! Jim

Many thanks.

The 'golden spiral' overlay when the crop tool is selected is great... as long as the center of interest is in the upper left. For images whose center of interest is in one of the other three quadrants, is there a way to rotate the spiral?

Duh. Just tried Navigator. Thanks!

Photoshop and Illustrator give you the size of the image it displays with a little percentage window in the bottom left corner of its workspace. InDesign puts it in the top toolbar. Do the Affinity apps have somewhere I can get an idea of the size of the image it's displaying? Thanks!

Newbie here. In Affinity Photo, the default values of the Select>Tonal Range tool work great, but is there a way for the user to define the tonal range the program classifies as 'Highlights', Midtones and 'Shadows'?