faulknermano

If the operating system had per-application-level control, I don't mind where it is set. But in my case, I am working on Windows, and as Alfred mentioned, we don't have the facility for that. I have scaling enabled to 110%, which is a global scale. Developers have different aesthetics, so UI font sizes vary widely, make global scaling insufficient. That's great to know. Thanks for that info.

My 7-day Affinity Photo 2 trial is over, and I thought of summarising my experience. 7-day trial is short 🙂 I have to say that it's difficult to adequate assess Affinity Photo 2 within a span of 7 days. Drawing stabilisers are great I'm coming from an old version of PS (CS6) which didn't have this natively (only available via plugin), so this feature might be old news to many of you, but I found these to be a very convenient drawing aid. PSD round-trip The PSD worfklow is great. I understand, however, that PS Smart Objects are not "recreated" when AP exports embedded objects. This is unfortunate, but understandable. So far, in my experience, I'm pleased with the PSD round-trip workflow. Feels like PS - usability It is great that I feel that I don't have to adjust to a completely new photo editor. It may be different, but feels familiar, and I think this is the probably the biggest positive factor. (It's good to have implemented Scrubby Zoom!) Live Filter > Perspective vs Perspective Tool I was initially confused by the AP's behaviour with the Perspective Tool vs the Live Filter variant. If Perspective Tool is used on a vector shape or embedded object, Assistant (if active) rasterises it immediately. With help from the people in the forums I found that the Live Filter > Perspective is what I wanted. However, this prompted the question: why does the Perspective Tool (in the Tools panel) not simply behave like the Live Filter variant (especially if the Layer type being operated on is _not_ Pixel), since we always have the option of rasterising when we want. Perspective Tool reset behaviour This is an odd one that certainly belongs in this feedback forum. I've had quite a hard time getting to grips with the way it "resets" when you do not manage to perfectly click on the node. See the gif below to see what I mean: if you miss the handles and drag, the tool will turn into a box and reset any modifications you have done. This was extremely frustrating as I was trying to precisely put those handles in exact locations, and any mistake at all will nix my work. Line Tool (or Shape Tools in general) There are some simple things that would have been of great convenience such as having the ability to resolve the results of the Line or any shape tool as pixels on the active Layer. Right now each drawn line/shape can only be represented as a vector shape in its own layer. As a result, small drawn lines accumulate in the Layer stack, and it soon becomes difficult to spot which ones you want to merge down. We can keep on merging down frequently but is quite inconvenient, as the drawing lines may be done in rapid succession (and the user is thinking of drawing lines and shapes, not managing accumulating layers). Embedded Objects ("Smart Objects") AP's embedded objects are great, as they give "referencing" capability. And Live Filters support these, which gives us a very widely used capability. However, in my opinion, the PS Smart Objects true advantage is simply the convenience of being able to create them from selected Layers, something that AP doesn't do. In all other respects Embedded Objects function as powerfully as Smart Objects. But without this simple "convenience", it's not very useful in my workflow. API I understand that an editor API is in the works, which is great! UI font size not modifiable A small thing, but I hoped that UI font size could be enlarged, and perhaps even changed. 🙂 Some functions not exposed to hotkeys E.g. setting foreground/background colours' panel cannot be brought via hotkey. Not a big deal because there are ways around it. Summary My trial experience is narrow mainly because I've been able to use AP only for a few aspects. The Embedded Object limitation I mentioned above is effectively a show-stopper for me, so whilst I had complained about the shortness of the trial period, I probably won't need to trial any further. But even if I didn't spot the limitation, a short 7-day trial makes it hard to positively choose AP despite its excellent usability. I use a photo editor for independent vfx and game work. I go through sessions of different tasks across weeks, e.g. concept painting, vs ortho line drawings, vs texture painting/processing, vs HDR tonemapping. I don't use the same set of tools all the time. So it makes me ask myself "Will I encounter any showstopper issue for a particular aspect I haven't had opportunity to test?" Nevertheless, AP is an excellent application; it's obvious how much work has been put in there. Serif's done a really a good job, and I look forward to seeing more its development, hopefully some progress on the Embedded Objects front! I'm keen on the editor API, too.

(And I also realise I posted on a Ipad bug thread, not in Desktop. Sorry)

@NotMyFault I appreciate you taking the time; thank you for help. But I think I perhaps failed to mention that I am using Affinity Photo 2, not Designer? I followed the documentation you linked, but there is no Warp Group in Affinity Photo 2 as far as I can make out. But I think this is fine; as long as I know what each tool is doing, it's good; and there still Live Filter to work on bitmaps.

Thanks for replying. I think I might be getting it wrong, but when you say "mesh warp tools" are you referring to the ones found in the Tools/toolbar panel on the left? That is what I'm using; I've recorded my problem in the attached gif. Every time I click on the Mesh Warp (or even the Perspective Tool) button, Assistant converts my layer into Pixel. If I turn off Assistant, the Mesh Warp/Perspective Tool has no effect on the Curve layer. I must be doing something wrong?

(Instead of opening another thread, I thought of "re-using" the one.) In the Desktop version, the Perspective and Mesh Warp tools seem to always rasterise a vector layer (e.g. Rectangle, Curve, etc). I can't observe the nodes being warped. Can someone confirm this? If Perspective/Mesh Warp tools end up rasterising the layer, would it be a good idea to "remap" the Live Filter Perspective/Mesh Warp functionality into the Perspective/Mesh Warp tools? We can always rasterise any time we want, so it feels that the current Perspective/Mesh Warp tools are redundant and not as useful as the Live Filter ones.

Hello, I have seen a thread which covers the topic of converting selection to shape. My understanding is that it is not possible at this time. Because I am just trialling Affinity Photo I am investigating which parts play well or not with my pipeline. Part of my pipeline requires a shape from a selection. Although it is not possible to do this, I noticed that it is possible to save the selection as an afselection file. However, as this file is binary, it is not human-readable, and I am not aware if Serif provides APIs to deal with with these sorts of files. If afselection can be parsed, or perhaps serialised to json if that were practical, then I could see how I can take whatever selection data there and run through some other "pixel-selection-to-shape" algorithm and get the results I want, since the shape data gets used in another application anyway. So my questions are: Is there an API for `afselection`? Or perhaps is there at least a file specification document that will allow me to manually parse the file in binary mode? Would Serif be interested in giving the option to express the afselection file into human-readable format, i.e. ascii (xml, json, whatever fits the bill)? Thanks for your consideration.

I can't remember precisely, but yes, it is most likely that it was *after* being re-imported as PSD, because I had been testing interoperability with PS at the time. I had not saved the document in afphoto format until I submitted the bug report.

Hi @MEB, thank you for passing the report on. Firstly, rasterising works well; it solved the culling issue. It was done in AFPhoto, but that had also been exported as PSD, and then re-imported back into AFPhoto as PSD. Your suggestion about rasterising made me remember another that I had resized the afphoto document as I drew. If I open the problematic afphoto file now, and then resize it to something like 8000x8000, the culling problem is solved, too. But I can't seem to reproduce step-by-step on how I got the document in this state. At any rate, if the file contents themselves is not of help, I guess it's just one of those things. At least there is a method of recovering it and it's not a show stopper. Thank you!

I'm not familiar with how AFPhoto does it, but I opened up a thread on the bug report forum. Unfortunately, this looks like a deal-breaker for me. I was really looking forward to using AFPhoto to replace PS. 😞

What Application are you using? [Designer/Photo/Publisher] Photo. Are you using the latest release version? (here's how to check) Yes. I'm using it in Trial mode. Can you reproduce it? (if you cannot then we may struggle to also, making it even harder to fix) Yes. Please see image and afphoto file attached. 1. Open the afphoto file. 2. Zoom out several times. At a certain zoom level, part of the image disappears (seems like due to sampling). See attached gif, too. Does it happen for a new document? If not can you upload a document that shows the problem? I've attached the afphoto file. What is your operating system and version (Windows 11, OSX Ventura, iOS 16 etc)? Windows 10. Is hardware acceleration (in Preferences > Performance) ON or OFF ? (and have you tried the other setting?) Hardware acceleration is ENABLED. I've also tried Disabling it, but it doesn't have any effect. What happened for you (and what you expected to happen) The drawn lines that are disappearing are thin, but it it is reasonable to expect them to render. If I view this in XnView, for example, or other photo-editing software, I can see the lines. It's only in Affinity Photo that it disappears. Did this same thing used to work and if so have you changed anything recently? (software or hardware) No, this is my first trial of Photo. Thank you for reading. untitled.afphoto

Hi, I'm a trial user evaluating Affinity Photo 2. I am having strange rendering clipping when I zoom out. The uploaded image attached to this post should describe what I'm seeing. I've tried several variations in the Settings > Performance: View Quality is Bilinear (Best Quality) Dither gradients is enabled User precise clipping is enabled Retina rendering (although I am on Windows) is High Quality I have experimented enabling/disabling hardware acceleration I have experimented changing renderer to my RTX 3060 and WARP. None of these have improved the rendering. Any ideas what could be wrong? Thank you for reading.