moebis

Well, since the lack of a vectorizer doesn't impact you, and you really couldn't care if impact others, then why do you even care about a lacking flood fill tool in Affinity Designer? Just use Inkscape. You already stated it's not a problem to use another external application. And I don't mind using another tool to do flood fill, so my workflow should apply to you too. 🙄

Vector tracing has been done since the 16 bit days. It's not rocket science. Serif pretending like it would take an army to implement a feature that other packages have had for over 30 years is just bizarre. No line art tool is complete without a bitmap vector tracing tool. It should have been in version 1. The community was very vocal about it, they chose to ignore us, charge for a version 2 upgrade and give us vector flood fill? Are you kidding me?

Have we figured out how to include bitmap tracing tools in Affinity Designer yet? It's been 8 years now.

I can't believe we've paid for 2 versions of Affinity Designer over the last number of years, and here I see 2.1 out hoping they finally listened to the community and included a bitmap to vector tracing tool. Nope. A technology 30 years old and existing in CorelDRAW on Windows 3.1 is still missing from a modern graphics and design suite? Even the open source community has had many solutions for almost as long as Corel and Adobe. AI tools are now being released to vectorize bitmaps. How can you call this a line art, structured graphics design tool when we can't even access vectorizing tools? Bizarre. You realize half of logo design in the industry has been done like this in Illustrator for decades, and you want to compete? Speaking of AI, Adobe is embracing it, I don't see anything new or revolutionary from Serif. One of the reasons I switched off of Adobe and to Affinity Suite years ago was because I believes in this scrappy company and they would at least listen to us. Look at the 5+ years old threads where we were begging for vector tracing tools, and we simply ignored. We still paid to upgrade to 2.0, and now I see 2.1 with really nothing big.

Not all of us are perfectionists like you R C-R. Sometimes we need a quick and dirty method to scale a lo-res bitmap icon or something. I don't think there is a dispute here about this being a value add for a large portion of AD users. Just because you don't see any value doesn't mean there isn't any. There is a reason why this has been a staple feature in most vector art programs for the past 20 years. Unnecessary nodes? Yes, I know, I use Vector Magic, and although it's really good, it's not perfect, but I don't need perfect, I need a fast workflow. Thanks for your experience and feedback though. ;-)

Here is an almost 20 year old open source project: http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/index.html#intro There is also an app on the App Store called Super Vectorizer, that started out of a one man shop. This isn't tough. There are so many image processing libraries, I wouldn't be surprised to find out there is even example code for Xcode and swift to do this. My point is, even if it's basic B&W shape tracing, it would be a very welcome value add to any vector based drawing application. Affinity Designer should have this built-in as a core feature.

@R C-R: Understood. However, I think the point we're all trying to make is that these techniques have been around for a very long time. CorelDRAW from 1994 running on Windows 3.1 could do tracing. There are small one man shops that offer vector tracing software on the App Store. With all the amazing things the Affinity devs have done in Photo and Designer, this should be a piece of cake for them. Maybe it's just a prioritization thing. If enough of us say "Please add this!" then it will find it's way into the software. For line art software, it's kinda a must really.

Same problem here. Latest El Capitan public beta doesn't like either Affinity app and the betas don't work either.

What I find interesting is that Affinity Designer is trying to go head-to-head with Adobe Illustrator, and in so many ways its simply fantastic! However, and this is a big one, they obviously have in-house code to do vector tracing because Serif DrawPlus has it and they haven't figured out a way to incorporate it into Affinity Designer??? That's a shame, because you guys are getting so much good press, it's hard to convert people that are already entrenched in Illustrator, and you're just giving them more reasons not to take a second look. I would put this on your roadmap immediately and incorporate auto-trace ASAP. Just some friendly advice. Love your products! P.S. Another bit of unsolicited advice. Vector Magic is ancient, but good, really good. Maybe you guys can merge with them or license their technology. If you had the Vector Magic tracing engine inside Affinity Designer you would absolutely slaughter Adobe and Corel. Thats it, my two cents. ;-)