GFS

I stopped using AFPhoto 18 months ago, due to the extensive masking bugs. None fixed to date. I bought but never used AFPhoto iPad, but decided to give it a try out a few days ago, as I had to work on a legacy file. Disappointed to find more masking/brushes bugs and tools which lack functionality compared to the desktop version. When Serif first launched the AFDesigner/Photo betas, the company performance and responsiveness to comments, bug reports and feature requests was phenomenal. I think they've made strategic mistakes in expanding too fast, though obviously they would completely disagree ... it's incredibly hard to build a good reputation, but very easy to loose it. My own view is they need to build bug free apps, before they move onto more (presumably bug filled) apps.

And there I was thinking that the cross between Michael Jackson and Fagin look was so appealing. So why is this even an option?? I have to say though, that after almost 25 years working with a Wacom, it’s kind of strange to be working directly on the screen. Difficult without a circle showing where the brush is though.

I’ve been trying out the iPad vs of AFP (I moved away from AFP Mac 15months ago, due to its numerous masking issues ... still unresolved). However, having to work on some legacy files in the last week or two, I thought I’d give the iPad vs a go. I’d bought, but never used it. I have the 12.9 Pro and Apple Pencil. However! Using the Apple Pencil, I’ve found it really hard to avoid accidental input on the iPad and it can be a nightmare for messing up work. The problem is that your ‘pinky’ can be inputting without you noticing, or even I think, the side of the palm. I’ve even seen it happening in some of the Affinity instructional videos. So ... being old enough to recall darkrooms and the handling of negs and trannies, I happen to have some white cotton gloves lying around. The perfect solution? Not only does it work perfectly, but you have the added bonus of constantly polishing your screen!! Cost? ~2€. No complicated programming or software revisions required, only a pair of sharp scissors. Machine washable. Good for cold winter days. Eco-friendly. ‘It just works’. Maybe Serif could do their own cool designs? Michael Jackson eat your heart out:

18 months, no comment from Serif? Sigh ...

Hi MEB, thanks for jumping in. The colour picker is indeed the problem, but the bug actually goes beyond that. Obviously, you wouldn’t choose RGB sliders to change the colour from white to grey to black (3 sliders instead of 1). But playing around with them, I find that the HSL sliders are also buggy (which is what I normally use and therefore why I tried another colour model when I found it not working correctly). Sometimes the HSL choice is refusing to paint at all, when white is selected. I switch to black and it’s as expected, back to white ... nothing. In fact, right now, switching around, I can’t get HSL to paint with white.

Any chance of a reply from someone at Serif on this?

OK, here's a couple of grabs ... Mac & iPad. I can't find anything on the iPad that I'm doing wrong. Opacity set to 100% etc. GFS-AFP-iPad-2.mp4 GFS-AFP-iPad.mp4

Bumb on this ... where do I send the screen-recordings?

Hi Lee, can I send you the grabs?

Perhaps there is something that I am not understanding about the iPad vs, which I've had for a long time, but am only just trying out now. I have a file, that I can brush a mask in and out with black and white on the desktop vs. and it behaves as expected. When I transfer the file to iPad and do the exact same thing, it behaves as if the brush is grey, whether I choose black or white. Does anyone have any idea where I may be going wrong ... or is this a bug?

I've been working with pixel-shift (previously known as multi-shot) since the year 2000. In answer to your question ... No. Pixel-shift works by moving the chip by 1 or 0.5 pixel increments, in order to capture full-colour at each and every pixel site. This is because of the way a Bayer Pattern works. Each pixel has only one colour (RGGB). When you take a picture, the Bayer demosaicing 'interpolates' (makes up) the missing colour for the varying pixels according to their colour (RGGB). This process can only be done at the chip/demosaicing stage. It is not the same as having 4 images and blending them together, although as it happens, blending several images together will reduce noise. This is because noise is random and so is equalised (reduced) when several images are blended together. What pixel-shift gives you, is a non-interpolated, pure colour image. It is only useable for stationary subjects, although the Pentax K-1 (and new K-11) can automatically replace movement artefacts, by replacing those areas with one of the 4 single-shot files that are used to produce the pixel-shift image.

Indeed. Aperture is a tool designed specifically for photographers, although iView Media Pro was designed as a general media asset management tool. I think if you’re talking about managing a wide range of assets in the context of a design agency or advertising agency, then you are talking about a completely different set of problems. First off, it needs to be networked and you need more than just media asset tools. You need to include email, text and presentation tools too. Something like Extensis Portfolio is designed to do much of this, but wouldn’t be able to handle the communication and text file, or presentations side of things. For that you would need to add-on some sort of database, like Filemaker Pro, which incidentally, has the very strong advantage of being cross-platform and cross-device and in the cloud (if you want). Coincidentally, in the last year or so, I’ve thought about writing a Filemaker solution for myself, for cataloguing/DAM to replace Aperture. Obviously there would be no retouching tools, but in terms of managing the assets, it would be excellent ... better than Aperture and with the incredible advantage, that you can make it do anything you want. It can also work as managed or referenced and it can be made to open files in whichever app you want. But until Aperture finally breaks (could take years) and unless at that time there is no equivalent to migrate to, then there is no deed to do so. As for the Finder. It is actually much more powerful than most people realise. I use Tags quite extensively. These are really powerful. You can use these for asset management. For example, you could create a new Tag for say; ‘Client-X’. This Tag is then available system wide for all files. So, Tag some files and then add the Tag to the Finder’s Sidebar and you have a super-fast, one-click way of gathering ALL those assets into a single Finder window in a fraction of a second. Also ... Tags are synced via iCloud and your AppleID, so if you’re working in AFPhoto for iPad, then they work across your devices. There is no limit on the number of Tags you can create. (I should note though, that Custom Tags, are not preserved when sharing files with other users, so they are not suitable for a collaborative work environment). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stood next to someone trying to find something on their Mac. Going through endless hierarchical Folder structures, sometimes giving up in frustration. It’s like the worst database management you can imagine. I gave up on that years ago. AFAIC, the modern way, is to use Tags and Metadata and Smart Folders. It is so much more efficient and so much faster. Even on the most basic level, in database terms, it is a far better system. (Smart Folders are actually just searches, but can be extremely powerful searches). For example ... I only use Smart Folders in Mail. The great advantage here, in database terms, is that using Smart Folders, a single item, can exist in many places. With conventional Folder management, a single item can only exist in one place ... and at some point you have to decide where that place is ... and then you forget. Say you work with an old friend called Peter, who is married to your sister. Do you file his emails in Work, Friends or Family? All my Mail just stays in InBox and Sent, but with Smart Folders, Peter’s emails would show up in all 3 of those folders. Actually, I hardly organise any files in the Finder and similarly, in Aperture I have quite a large number of Referenced files, which reside on an external hard-drive. I don’t put these in Folders on that drive, instead, everything is simply dumped at root level. The advantage of this, is that you will never loose a file, because should anything happen to your Aperture file and you have to rebuild or something awful, you just point Aperture at the drive and it will find everything. No searching through Folders. So the Finder with Tags and Smart Folders ... but ... there is also Spotlight Comments in the Finder. So you can very easily add metadata to any file of any kind. As many keywords as you want. When you combine this with Tags and Smart Folders, you have a very powerful system for file management and amazingly ... you don’t actually have to organise anything, if you don’t want to. You could top all this off by building your own Services (Contextual Menu) very easily using Automator, e.g. for Batch adding of Spotlight Comments, which is a single step Automator Action ... nothing to actually build. Using this you can set, or append to, or clear, or in any other way alter, Spotlight Comments for thousands of files in just a few seconds. Equally, you could have a Folder with a Folder Action, which tags and adds Comments automatically to anything dropped into it (so you don’t forget! ) I actually use Smart Folders extensively in Aperture, as I find them much easier and more malleable than the Search Bar, which can only do one search at a time. With Smart Folders, you can have as many searches as you want, just one click away.

The real thing for me JoJu, was Aperture. Unfortunately it is still the best, even years after Apple, for some crazy reason, killed it off. It’s hard to write software that good and Adobe have certainly not managed with Lr, although it is adequate for many people and everyone of course, must pick one of the tools that are available. One day someone will write something as good as Aperture and I will switch with much relief ... but in the mean time, until the workarounds become worse than the alternatives, I’ll stick with them and Aperture.

That’s a good point Fixx and it certainly facilitates the task. As you say Adobe’s converter should do a good job and Aperture has DNG support. But DNG is quite a complex format and I’m not certain that Aperture’s support for it will be up-to-date with what Adobe’s converter outputs. Either way, for me personally it’s not an option, since Adobe’s converter cannot convert my principle format anyway.

You might want to take a look at MediaPro SE, which PhaseOne bought from Microsoft, who bought it from iView Multimedia (a UK based company) and which goes all the way back to the mid-90s as a Mac app. It is a Finder replacement for handling media files, not just images. I don't think it has really been developed since MS bought it ... but I'm sure it still works, because Phase would have had to update it for current OS's prior to putting it on sale. As for Aperture ... it is still working fine in High-Sierra, with a couple of hiccups ... e.g. new RAW formats are not supported. However, what I use it for is cataloguing. It also works as a Finder replacement in the same way that iView Media does, if you choose to use it that way. So you can either have images as Managed or Referenced. You can very easily move your images between the two options and if you are working with Referenced, you can use Aperture to move them around in the Finder too. If your Aperture Library is behaving oddly, try making a new empty library and then Importing your old library into it. This will build a completely new database and I have found that it fixes problems that are not fixed by repairing the existing library. If that doesn't work, then try exporting Projects as new Libraries and importing them into a new clean Library from there. I think you'll find that this will fix pretty much everything except the unsupported RAW formats. For the problem with unsupported RAW formats, I work around this in two ways. I shoot jpeg to one card and raw to the other (my cameras have 2 slots) and I use other RAW developers for the actual RAW conversion, e.g. RAW Power (written by an ex project-lead of Aperture). So I import the jpegs into the Aperture library as Managed and I import the RAWs into a Finder folder. I do all the necessary image selection and perhaps experimenting with Adjustments on the JPEGs, then when I have made an image choice, I use the Show in Finder ... menu item, to open the enclosing Folder of the corresponding RAW file, then open it directly in another RAW processing software, from where I save to Tiff and work on it in whatever software I want from there. To be honest, although it would be better in many ways to be able to convert the RAW in Aperture, I have found over the years, that *utterly horrible* as ALL proprietary RAW processing software is, e.g., Nikon's Capture NX-D ... when push comes to shove, they are the best RAW processors when it comes to their own proprietary format. So having pixel peeped on many of these over the years and reached this conclusion, it is ironic that although Aperture's inability to process recent RAW formats ... for all the images that are work related 'picks' I'd probably not be using it for them anyway! So, although I've tried AFPhoto's RAW processing, mostly I've spent that time comparing it to others and to the manufacturer's and end up using the manufacturer's. So the Develop Persona in AFPhoto is of no interest to me at all really, except that it's sometimes useful to have those tools available for Pixel Layers. So, conclusion for me, is that as long as Aperture keeps working as a cataloguing tool, I'll keep using it ... because it does it so beautifully and is such a pleasure to use. NB ... I use it extensively in this sense, for all 'finished' files, which I import as Tiffs, e.g. after completing work in AFPhoto. I suppose I could just import JPEGs for this purpose, but, hey, what's wrong with having 'just one more' backup file? FWIW.

Ha! Correct Roger C!!

Ha! Well done toltec. Top marks. Maybe there should be a sub-forum for ‘cryptic half posts ... guess the answer’ with points awarded for best answer ... and of course, what would points mean?

Found the answer ... I suppose I should be asking how to delete a post now ...

Hi MEB, thanks very much for the converted file. Regarding the problem ... why doesn't AFD ask me what profile I want to assign when I'm opening a document with no profile? Instead it is deciding that the document is greyscale ... which it is not. Seems like an obvious thing to do ... offer the choice when opening.

I have this same question. There seems to be inconsistency with the Sources Panel. Sometimes I can close the file and upon re-opening, it's empty. Other times it re-opens showing the Sources. Is there an answer to why this happens?

Hi MEB, file is uploaded. Headers say it is Illustrator 16

So, is the answer to this, that there is no answer? Do I need to request a native Illustrator file instead?

Thanks v_Kyr, That is exactly the problem! However having read the various threads, I'm none the wiser about how to open the file in colour Is there something that the client needs to do when exporting? (I'm a photographer and I have no experience of Illustrator ... nor much of AFD)

A client has sent me an EPS from PS and it's opening in greyscale. The Finder preview is fine. Anyone know how to open/import into either Designer or Photo and retain the correct colours?

Thanks Lee. It would be good to have this option, or if not, to be able to duplicate brushes ... or both.