Paul Mc

Nicely done, Henry. I like the texture idea. I was wondering what to do with portrait shots on the TV.

Hi @henryanthony, that sounds like you were very organised. I have a few issues that are now becoming apparent as I start the work. The first is that a good number of shots have no "meta data" i.e. I have no idea who took them, the date, where it was taken (although I can guess a few), and there are often strangers in the shots. Sorting into chronological order like you did would be nice but I think it is going to be impossible. I would agree about negatives taking a lot more work. They are taking about twice as long to prepare, cleaning being an issue as there's lots of dust and hairs in the collection! But so far I have to say that the quality is good. I've a few shots that I have both the print and the negative for and the negative is giving superior results - being the original with a greater range of contrast and colour I assume. My scanner is an Epson V850 and although it has the one button click scan feature it is a bit dumb and doesn't give you the fine control that you get with the "pro" user interface. I'm content with that as I'm a bit of a control freak with this kind of work. Although I do see this now as being a three year project given the progress over recent days. 😂 I like your numbering idea. I'm taking the opportunity to clean the negatives and catalogue them in archive pages with numbers which match the automated scan number in the saved filenames. Hopefully when the family request prints or digital copies I can find things easily if there is a need to rescan. Although TV playback has already been requested I'm going for a slightly higher resolution than you. 4K minimum and sometimes even larger so that I can easily do 6"x5" reprints later at the best quality. Anything that has a personal connection I'm making sure to scan so that I can print at 12"x10". Regarding backups I agree completely. Many years ago I lost work due to a power surge fritzing my PC and destroying the hard disk controller. Now I have RAID 1 on my PC for project work and a big QNAP taking backups every 24 hours. I also "archive" stuff off to Blu-ray disks occasionally that I think I might not need again.

Thanks @firstdefence This morning I'm continuing my search and also doing some test scans. I have found that for one (so far) very old Kodak B&W print ICE is having no effect. Also, a B&W negative for around the same time is behaving similarly. For the older colours ones ICE seems to do a good job. I've just read that the silver fools the IR scan that ICE uses and so causes it to fail. I can see that Dust & Scratch Removal needs to be in the the list of steps even if it gets discounted because it's not required on some shots. Thanks for the Photoshop suggestion - I don't know why I didn't think of that.

So I've been dropped in at the deep end and I'm a little out of my comfort zone! Being the family "graphics" person I must be good at this, no? 😂 I've been given the task of scanning photos and negatives which cover the last 70 years - around 1000. They are both colour and B&W, and of various types, sizes and condition. I've searched the forums on here and elsewhere and although there are really good snippets for specific restorations I can't find anyone describing a general workflow. I'm specifically looking for the order that things should be done and the rationale. For example, one tut said do the dust and scratch removal as a late/last step but my scanner has ICE and that does a pretty good job at that point early on in the workflow. Some of the photos are in good shape and will only need a little colour correction or B&W point adjustment, others are in poor shape and will need lots of work. Does anyone know of any tutorials, blog posts or documentation, especially if it uses Affinity Photo, that covers this type of workflow? TIA.

I've learned not to rely on the font set shipped with the OS. These can vary between OS versions and I've also encountered a case when installing an unrelated app mangled an installed font. The Mac/Windows font sets overlap a tad but only by about 20. Then you've got the Arial/Helvetica debate and the arcane knowledge surrounding their differences. I have clients who use both Macs and Windows PCs so I have to be careful. It may not apply to you so maybe things are fine in your world.

It all depends on the client and the requirement. For anything where there is no pre-specified font and there is a need to share the designs without reducing text to curves then I will tend to start with Google Fonts. https://fonts.google.com/ This is a really good collection of curated fonts that satisfy a lot of client needs in my work. Then there is a big ravine to cross to get to my more prestigious clients where the font is more precious and is specified in a style sheet or design rules document. In that case I have no choice but to go and invest in it (rarely do these companies use free fonts). One big problem is clients who are moving old work to me for rework and they've previously used a designer or agency that uses Adobe products. Adobe Fonts are wrapped up in their eco system and a lot of them have no equivalents outside of it that you can buy or download. Negotiations around that issue can be challenging. If a lot of your work is of this type then maybe and Adobe sub is the way forward - but I suspect that flies in the face of your not to expensive requirement. At that point I always try to find the original source of the typeface, buy directly and roll the cost into the client fee.

I've also found that snapping and it's settings can also make a big difference to how smooth the dragging motion can be. Maybe turn it off as a test and see if that is playing a part in this. If you find that things are smoother with it off then maybe try turning it back on and then toggling options within the snapping settings.

@walt.farrell maybe, but then we start the speculative guessing game. It needs insight from someone familiar with the inner workings of the code. Sadly, because there is no saved file (that I'm aware of) then there is probably no evidence of what exactly happened. I checked the folder referenced in the error message and it exists but is empty - hence my interpretation.

Hi @R C-R I didn't save the file before trying to switch applications. This might be the issue. I think that given the pathname quoted in the error message there is likely to be a permissions issue with that location. My guess is that AP wrote a file to that location - but failed, and the error wasn't trapped and handled and no file was saved to disk. Then AD is launched and expected the file to be there but it wasn't and so produces the above error but that's downstream of the original error (IMHO 😊).

Sorry, I should have mentioned that this is on Windows 10. The release is the recent v2.03 update. I've done this step many times (100s) without any issue as it is part of a recurrent workflow I use. This error is new. Yes, Saving is clearly the missing step here 😂 I've now redone the work by saving the AP file and then opening it in AD i.e. not using the Edit in... method. This is not an issue for now as I will not use that feature in the short-term. I am wondering if anyone from Serif can comment on the error message. Is this something peculiar to my setup or a known issue?

I started work on a photo in AP (v2.0.3) and then needed to work on a vector overlay so selected Edit in Designer... which launched Designer and then displayed this error message. Any idea how to interpret it? Neither application shows any of the file I was working on so is my previous work now lost?

Did changing that setting solve the problem?

Do you have Controlled Folder Access turned on? This might be a false positive for your Affinity apps that prevents them from writing to files. Type "Controlled Folder Access" into the search box and you should be able to see the setting. I have mine off and everything works fine.

I've been doing some more experimentation and I'm seeing a similar result.

That is interesting. I feel that can't be expected behaviour. It is as if the selection boundary is bound to the wrong layer. My expectation would be that it would follow the paste and only appear as a selection boundary without any impact on it. I can see how this relates to other operations that I use as expected though so it is not a big leap but still surprising. In any case I'm through it now with a work around noted. Thanks for looking at this.