GFS

Is that a promise?

So did you use Live Picture? If not, then how can you have an informed opinion about it? Either way, it makes no difference. Serif will do what works best for them. The only point I'm making, is that this sort of tool, existed 30 years ago, in an app, that sadly didn't survive the usual bunch of money grubbers that got their hands on it and the industry carried on with the likes of Adobe running their company as a 'buy and kill' machine. Sigh.

The past was just fine thank you. (Maybe you missed my little screen-grab-video of a 30yr old app where a brushstroke/shape/selection of any sort, is automatically a vector and therefore can be reshaped with a brush, or turned the opposite way into a shape with Nodes? FWIW, Adobe have never managed this either. Also FWIW, although it probably won't mean much to today's users... my very first job, using the software, was a 100mpx file, in 1995, on a Mac that could only just fit the file onto it's HD and despite that, LP ran in 'real-time'. Not even a hint of spinning beachballs. Everything, every gesture, was instant. Like painting on paper. The only wait time, was once finished, producing an output file, which could take a while. Maybe as much as 20mins, but usually only 2 or 3. You could batch output though.)

😊 Amazing that there's anything really. The last vs was produced in '97. There are so many things which it did so well and that are still unmatched today. Example: Imagine taking a 300megapixel 16-bit tiff, then, using a brush of 500megapixel size, distort your image in a single smooth, gentle brush-stroke... and ... the distortion is applied as you paint/brush in real-time. The instant you lift your brush, it's done. Even if you take your brush and do a frantic squiggle back and forth, it's done instantly. Not even a seconds pause. Instant.

Live Picture, by Live Picture (a bunch of recently graduated students). It was essentially a compositing software, which was conceived to be able to do on a Mac, what was until then, done in *extremely* expensive retouching houses, as they moved away from manual retouching (transparencies, scalpels, bleach and tiny-brush+ink). These large installations were pixel-pushers with the actual computers themselves in separate rooms due to their size and required air-conditioning. Typically 2x ~2metre cube sized units, on the floor. Cost ~£2million late80s + 1 year operator training. Cost to client ~£500 per hour. Obviously their use was almost 100% advertising. It was pretty crazy, i.e. loony.. to think it could be done on a Mac back then, but 2 years mathematical thinking, followed by 2 years programming and there it was. No other app has ever come close to what it could do, even though the patents have been over for a while. Happy to expand if anyone is interested.

Well, sort of. But as you can see, it paints like a pixel brush and not a vector brush. However, if you want to use your painting as a vector 'shape' with handles, then it makes a vector shape, with points/handles, from the paint. You can choose how exact you want the shape... how many pixels per point. However, it leaves the brushed paint untouched, with its normal stencil/mask. Basically ... think of every variation and it does it. Did I mention it's also unbelievably fast? 😊

As I pointed out ... it's a very old app. Back in those days, the UI wasn't as sophisticated as now, but yes you could manipulate your vector mask in the same way as today. Actually ... it is in fact a vector as you paint. Not in the sense you are used to, but it is a vectorial description and the only pixels involved are produced in order to draw it on the screen, as a UI description of the vectors.

Indeed I am. As I mentioned... it is all vectors except for screen-draw. The clip doesn't show working from a selection, but it's exactly the same. I could just make a selection and it would automatically be: mask / stencil / vectorial. Can AFP make paint into a vectorial mask/stencil, by dragging the mask icon?

Seems Windows 10 has issues with mp4. ( https://videoconvert.minitool.com/video-converter/windows-10-cant-play-mp4.html ) I've uploaded a .mov vs, which is 10x larger... but maybe it'll work. Mask-Stencil-mov Otherwise maybe you could try a different browser.

That's pretty weird.. What OS are you on? For me it just goes on loop in the forum software. (Quite annoying actually). Try this: Mask-Stencil

Actually ... it is entirely vector based. There are absolutely no pixels involved apart from screen-drawing/representation.

I'm showing what I could do in an app, almost 30 years ago. Yes, as you can see, paint already has a mask, made as you paint, which can instantly be toggled between a stencil and a mask and also drag-copied to any other layer, as a stencil and a mask. It's instant. It's easy. It's automatic. It's a good method. The point of this thread, is that this cannot be done in AF apps.

Almost 30 years ago... My demo's a little confusing, because I'm trying to show how versatile this is. (I made it a long time ago) Anyway ... you get the point. This is making a mask from a brush stroke, and/or a drag-shape, then toggling it between Stencil/Mask and copying from one layer to another. Basically it can do everything we could want, very easily. Almost 30 years ago...

I started working with selections automatically as vectors/masks/stencils in 1995. Just sayin'.

Just to add... A little further fiddling shows that, for me, AFP is not colour-managing colours from outside its own windows, although it does accept them. For non-imaging stuff, I use a little app called ColorSlurp, to manage palettes of colour and to simplify copying colours into an app. When I use it to copy the hex value of my Desktop background and paste that value into AFP, the colour is correct and when I simply read the RGB values in ColorSlurp and replicate them in AFP, the colour is correct. So in summary I'd say that what I said previously is correct. AFP does not colour-manage colours grabbed from outside its own windows. Basically, it doesn't know your outside its window.

I was curious, so I just tried it with Safari. It works for me. This is the colour of your nose - F5DDD6 One thing to be aware of, is your colour management settings. If your Mac and Affinity do not happen to be profiled in a similar way, then maybe Affinity is not doing any colour conversion when a colour is copied from outside of its space. So if you're working in cmyk in Affinity, perhaps colours grabbed from Safari/Desktop/others, which will be in RGB, are not being converted?? I have no idea if this is the case, since I've been working in AdobeRGB or as close as I can get, since forever and so, both spaces would be very similar for me. That said... I've just tried my Desktop colour (which is a flat colour) and it does not show *identically* if I copy it into Affinity, but it's close. So I'd guess I'm maybe right about the profiles.

As I pointed out in another thread... there is another way if you use Time Machine. IMHO every Mac user should have it turned on, even if they have separate backup/archival systems (as I do). In the case of Bynah and using a MacBook Pro, ironically, the backups would probably be on the Mac itself, as portables store the most recent backups locally... space permitting.

Here's a Spin Dump and a Sample Process in case it may be of use. AFP-crashing.zip

Just in case it may be of help here... I had this problem. Crashing constantly, high cpu etc. Even simply opening the Export... dialog would result in a total hang/crash. If you're running Time Machine (which you should be) then going back to 1.10.1 solves the problem for the time being.

Ahhh... stumped. Thanks for the info Walt. FWIW... Time Machine has saved the day once again, in the short term. 1.10.1 works fine.

I have a retail purchase. I bought it on the Mac App Store. I've run the betas frequently in the past. Particularly in the early days. The question is... how do I get Affinity Photo to recognise that my purchase is installed ... and even running??? Yes, I downloaded 1.9.3 from Serif website and ran it as a Trial. Yes.

I bought Affinity Photo in 2015 from the Mac App Store. (I have the email receipt) I can't remember when, but quite some time ago it stopped being recognised by Affinity Photo's account process, which appears during update. I'm not interested in the extras, so I just carried on regardless. Unfortunately!!! I now find with the update to 1.10.3 that AFP has a major problem and is crashing constantly. Simply opening the Export As... dialog, crashes the app. So... I downloaded the current beta, to see if it would work. It is asking me for an Account ID and a Product key. I'm guessing that I've never had a product key, since I purchased through the Mac App Store. So I'm stuck in a vicious circle. It doesn't recognise the Mac App Store vs as being installed even though I have it open/running!!! Could someone please tell me how I can get AFP (and perhaps AFD which I also have) to recognise the Mac App Store purchases? My client would be very grateful if I could send him his images today! (Okay... I got around the exporting by downloading 1.9.3... but still).

As I noted, you can alter metadata in a RAW file, which theoretically may be a problem, however, you cannot edit/alter the image itself.

You never alter a RAW. You can't. I think it may be a common misconception, where people make copies so as to leave the original 'untouched', but in fact, the original is always untouched. RAW editors are always using 'sidecar' files, it's just that you don't see them. The argument for sidecar to be kept alongside a RAW, is that metadata could, in theory, corrupt a file. However, if you are using a DAM like Aperture, or Apple Photos, then all of those bits and pieces are indeed kept separately... but out of sight. So for example, in Photos, you can make duplicates of your RAW, to have different looks, but secretly there is still only 1 RAW which just sits there, unaltered. You'd notice that they have the same name. Aperture was more professional with its UI and made Versions instead of Duplicates... as many as you wanted. But there was still only 1 RAW.

About 90% of my work in the last 10 years, involves focus stacking. I used Helicon for years. It's a good app, but AFP is superior for focus stacking. With Helicon, I always had to spend time 'cleaning up' the stack manually. This is sometimes very hard to get right with Helicon and you are sometimes working with using 2 or 3 stacks made with different settings, in order to use the best bits of each. The bug described by John Rostron in this thread re: AFP focus stacking (Focus Merge) is is an annoying waste of time and is representative of other areas of AFP, where bugs just linger on... My only criticism of AFP Focus Merge (aside from this bug) is the way it handles specular highlights, which it leaves as a kind of 'glowing blur'. Sort of as if there's a soft focus filter applied to the highlights. Ironically, this can actually be really nice in some cases ... although I would guess it was not intended behaviour, but I would very much like to have the choice of having *sharp* specular highlights when I want them. I waste a lot of time with AFP focus merge, cleaning up these blurred highlights, by manually brushing in the same actual area used by the automated merge, but even with this extra wasted time, it is still faster and better in the end, than Helicon. As is often the case, I expect the problem may lie with the fact that the people making software, don't actually use it, so they're unaware of these, slightly 'off the beaten track' bugs.