aitte

That would be the best way! Then all other techniques would also be non-destructive! What's needed in Affinity - Being able to create a "Virtual copy" layer and choosing to set the copy to "visible image below this layer" or to a specific layer or group. - Live filter version of edge detection. Then we could insert an Unsharp Mask, create a Virtual Copy pointed at "visible image below this layer" (below the unsharp mask), drag the virtual copy to be its mask, then apply live filter/adjustments to the virtual copy to make it into an edge mask. Wow......... that's more steps but still non-destructive and is way more powerful than what i proposed. No more need to constantly copy layers. Affinity, are you paying attention? :P

This GENIUS figured out a method that does edge-aware sharpening. The method is to do edge-detection on the image, and then using the detected edges as a mask to avoid sharpening the edges. It lets you massively sharpen textures while completely avoiding all halos around edges and it is the most amazing thing I have seen in a decade of photography. It's the biggest revolution since the invention of the Unsharp Mask. This technique is like the Yin to Unsharp Mask's Yang. The results are preferrable almost 100% of the time you want an unsharp mask. Because "haloed edges" are the bane of sharpened photos. If this is implemented, I would probably never use the regular Unsharp Mask again. Please consider creating a new "Edge-Aware Unsharp Mask" filter, which internally does all the work of finding edges and avoiding them when sharpening. So that we can keep all of the non-destructive power workflows of Affinity Photo, but still achieve this AMAZINGLY USEFUL new effect. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVgfbiH4-fw PS: I don't see the embedded video above. If someone has the same problem, type this URL manually instead, to see the technique: youtube.com/watch?v=iVgfbiH4-fw PPS: Here is how to currently achieve this in Affinity Photo, with many minutes of very destructive pixel-based steps: youtube.com/watch?v=7EVXy6fc_rE This incredible technique begs for a built-in non-destructive filter.

I think they've announced that Affinity Designer will have this feature, but not Photo. If I recall correctly, they said something about making it possible to stack multiple outline effects on a single layer.

Thanks for this information. MBd posted a message in my thread showing that my bug report is related to this one, so I am bumping yours with a backlink to my thread too: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/19065-affinity-photo-puts-sensitive-data-in-png-output/

I've seen this topic repeatedly appear. Why not add a line to the error-window that explains that if they've updated to the latest MAS version it makes any older betas obsolete? That way they don't have to ask on the forums why the beta is "invalid" suddenly. :p I've never seen the message so maybe it already explains that. But we sure see this topic a lot...

*tumbleweeds...* That's why the discussion drifted on to f.lux and iOS. There wasn't more to say without an official reply about the forum design. :lol: By the way, giving users access to directly submit bug reports is a disaster (look at large open source projects). They never fill them out right. They make 200x duplicates. They lump 15 issues into 1 bug report, etc. The reason is simple: The skills necessary to properly fill out a bug report are the same skills necessary to program a solution for the bug. It's better to let people talk about bugs on a forum and then developers can add them to an internal bug tracker if they're real, and simply tag the discussion threads with the internal bug IDs (which is often more than one per thread). It's so far working very well for Serif's Affinity division, a small company with only a few support staff. They could start adding volunteer/community moderators if things grow out of control. That works well for 1Password's forums, where several long-term members have been given moderator access to help out. But so far the community here is really mature and well behaved. :)

That's perfect. Great to see that we can set manual daylight times and the display temperature. I bet they will get the smooth, gradual cooling/warming curves at dusk and dawn "just right" too. I would not be surprised if it comes to OS X too. The f.lux developers haven't really got a product. In the words of Steve Jobs; "that's a feature, not a product". He said it about Dropbox trying to sell document syncing, which isn't unique, cannot be patented and most people wouldn't pay for it. F.lux is in the same spot. It's one of the best "feature, not an app" ever, and they deserve credit for being the first to do it. But they never took it beyond "screen dimming" to paid product. It could have been expanded into a product by integrating lifestyle management like reminding you to sleep, take computer breaks to do recommended stretches, and other things to help our health at the computer. I never knew why they didn't charge for it even on the Mac, but I love them for being gracious enough to give it out for free for all these years. I would have paid up to $200 for it. It's such an instant relief to see the screen soften at night, and I'll never uninstall f.lux unless Apple clones it. :P

@MBd Wow thank you for that news. I have missed f.lux on my phone ever since I quit using jailbreaks. Every time I have to check my phone at night I wish I still had f.lux, and I have very often wondered why Apple never copied it. http://www.techtimes.com/articles/125029/20160116/f-lux-to-apple-let-us-back-in-developers-plead-for-ios-app.htm I bet Apple's Night Shift will have the usual Apple polish, and it sounds like it will have all of the major f.lux features: Setting the normal/night color temperatures manually if desired, being able to adjust the hours (so that it is not just following the sunrise/sunset of the geolocation), and being able to temporarily disable it. If it does all that, I'll be a very happy iOS user. Thanks for the news! :lol:

Looking at a white background is literally the same thing as staring into a lightbulb or the sun. The displays are tuned to the same color temperature. The backlit LCD display fires at maximum brightness when displaying white. That is why all the "flashlight" phone apps display a white background. It is horrible for your eyes and eyestrain. That is also why the iBooks app for iPhone has various white-on-black and dark gray backgrounds to help avoid burning eyes when reading. Black text on a white background is perfect for a newspaper, because a newspaper isn't printed on a lightbulb. A screen is. When I said that a tiny majority complained about the dark UIs of Affinity's products, I'm just reporting what I saw on this forum. The thread was very long but it was only a handful of people talking about it. Affinity has won Apple design awards and have tens of thousands of customers, so the white on black GUI is working for most people. And it's the defacto standard color scheme of pro apps, including video editors, 3D modeling and photo management. White on black has been confirmed in studies to cause less eye fatigue and helping make better decisions about color/photo editing. However, the same studies also revealed that black on white helps people with astigmatism (irregular corneas) when reading. Blurring black text on a white background is easier for them to read than blurring white text on a black background. It makes sense when I think about it. A blurred white blob on a dark background is less distinct/recognizable than a blurred black blob on a white background. Especially after a life of getting used to the shapes of the blurred black text in newspapers. I haven't got astigmatism and greatly prefer darker color schemes to avoid burning eyes, but there's actually another solution for this "staring into the sun of a white background" hell: Install https://justgetflux.comto protect your eyes from the white backgrounds, by making the computer screen reduce its color temperature to avoid damaging your eyes. They've got hundreds of links to research about the effects of white, bright computer screens on melatonin (sleep hormone) production, and how it actually inhibits the production, leading to worse sleep and later hours: https://justgetflux.com/research.html I recommend installing f.lux no matter what you guys do. It's free. :) I used to have it on my phone and had forgotten about it until now, and remembered that they have a Mac version too. I Installed it now and... WOAH! Instant relief from this forum and all other bright windows currently on the screen. Seeing the screen temperature fall to a natural, gentle color felt like I was sinking into sweet honey and the burning eyes stopped immediately. This will be a permanent installation on my machines from now on, and I'll only turn it off when editing photos. Wow. Even if this forum stays "black on white", try a darker background. I am a regular reader of the largest music production forum in the world at https://www.gearslutz.com/and while it isn't the prettiest forum theme, the colors themselves work very well. Most of the site has dark backgrounds, except the posts themselves, and those are slightly gray/blue which avoids some of the excessive brightness.

Haha, that "Interesting Rotation" is really funny. :lol:

@MEB: Cool, I didn't know about that option. It's Preferences > Tools > Tool UI Size. Putting it on Smallest is helpful. What I hope for is being able to disable the tool helpers completely, but easily enable them again. Via a view-menu dropdown option, or in the "Assistant" window. And have it bound to the keyboard too. Something like Shift+Spacebar to toggle the entire square frame + all the little balls permanently on/off so that we see no guides whatsoever. I realize that newbies may accidentally hit that, though. I also hope for something like this: " ctrl+drag = scale, ctrl+alt+drag = rotate, so that we can permanently work without the blue outlines. " Thanks for the temporary workaround MEB. It makes the problem better at least.

Oh wow that's fantastic news! Thank you so much. I look forward to seeing how you solved it. It'll be great to see the filesizes shrink like a reverse "all you can eat" contest! :D You're doing incredible work with Affinity. I have left Adobe forever.

Excellent progress, Andy! I've been silently checking the release notes of the past few betas since I didn't want to bump our old discussion. I hope the thumbnail feature wasn't accidentally forgotten again, but it's understandable with all the other work. Other features/fixes are more important, so I don't care if it takes a year, as long as I know for sure that it's on the list. ;) Hope the new year is treating you well. :)

It can be quite hard to change colors since other GUI elements often clash as a result, and you end up making lots of deeper theme edits and compromises, but I hope they do something. Their main site is so slick and the forum is so bright. :D I've thought that from day one of joining this forum. PS: LOL I had forgotten about the complaints about the Dark UIs for the Affinity Apps. Those users were in a tiny minority though. There's nothing better than dark UIs for photography. It lets the content pop from the screen without distracting you with a bright "frame" around it.

Hehe, check out what I just found. A dark photography theme. Imagine this with a custom Affinity background. Slick slick slick, and its responsive design works on all devices: http://www.xenfocus.com/skins/aperture/index.php In use: http://xenfocus.com/demo/index.php?misc/style&style_id=17&redirect=/demo/index.php Example of a thread (there's only one demo user posting, it'd be even better with lots of different avatars): http://xenfocus.com/demo/index.php?misc/style&style_id=17&redirect=/demo/index.php%3Fthreads/this-is-the-topic-title.1/ And you can do tagging of threads in XenForo which seems to be the way Affinity links threads to bug reports. Best of all? https://xenforo.com/help/importing/ You can import all current IP.Board users, threads, tags, etc to XenForo. It can even redirect all old forum traffic to the new one (see the bottom of the last link).

I hope Discourse has other themes, because the default one is just a huge wall of text on a white background. It burns my eyes, I get dizzy and blinded and don't have energy to read anything in the example thread I linked to (https://discourse.omnigroup.com/t/omnifocus-vs-2do/13882/). The issue is that Discourse lacks contrast. There needs to be contrast, colored headers/dividers for each post, bigger avatars, etc, to make the content easier to skim through (knowing when to stop scrolling , seeing at a glance who wrote something, etc). If I want to read a Discourse forum, I need to constantly keep my eyes on the avatar column to the left to see where the post dividers are, and then skim back to the right to check if the post seems worth reading, then back to the left, etc. I think that's why I get dizzy and fatigued so quickly on their forums. It has really modern features like infinite scroll, but it's honestly the worst readability of any forum I've seen since the internet first arrived. I can't think of anything worse ever before. Maybe that is why it's so rare to see it used by companies; I've only seen it by the Omni Group and I was active on their forum in 2014 and it was absolutely tedious to constantly have to scroll around and try to follow the discussions. Forums are tedious enough, with so much useless noise in all discussions. Let's not make it even harder to follow what's going on. I wouldn't mind seeing Affinity re-skin their current software, though. A dark, "pro photography" theme matching their slick website would be awesome. It's glaring to say the least, to go from https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/to this bright forum. I browsed many other alternative forums now and discarded them all until I found XenForo, here are examples of responsive themes for it: http://xenfocus.com. If I started a forum I'd use that one. It's got great contrast and the link I provided is just one of many theme makers. Discourse on the other hand has no themes, just some people doing CSS reskins manually.

The current forum isn't optimal but it's pretty good, even on mobile. Despite what you say, it has a mobile theme. Discourse is very modern looking and out of the ones you list above, it is the one I'd pick. But it feels very disjointed to me. Just scroll through this example thread. I find it hard to follow who is talking to who, etc: https://discourse.omnigroup.com/t/omnifocus-vs-2do/13882/

Everyone at Affinity should look at your attached thumbnail, @laneallen. "Adjust, spacebar, adjust, spacebar, zoom, move to different location, spacebar, zoom out, spacebar, adjust, spacebar..." represents my workflow too. It's silly.

@william7: Thanks for the tip about large file storage for Git. Could be useful but my files aren't that big. @Andy: Looking forward to the beta with this feature in it. I'll keep an eye out. Thanks for taking care of it. :)

Hehe it's understandable, Andy. You've worked your butt off to finish the new versions. I just saw AD & AP 1.4 on the App Store. Congratulations. :) Looking forward to the thumbnail improvements when you have time.

Being a software developer myself, I know that even a small thing like "not embedding massive thumbnails" can be very hard to get to when every day is filled with critical fixes and features. I see that this got (rightfully) put to the side to deal with the countless important fixes in Designer. Congrats on getting ready to ship the next Gold Master for the App Store! Could you please let us know what'll happen with vector filesizes, though? Any potential timeframe for when a fix can be investigated? Knowing even a rough estimate would be helpful. Thanks :)

@Andy: Have you had a chance to see if this thumbnail optimization would be doable without breaking backwards compatibility?

With this, I could design so many LSD snailshells!

@Andy: Oh wow. I think I am in love with you. Tell your wife to get out. :wub: :lol: Being able to version-control afdesign files together with the rest of the design/site code, without ballooning the Git repository size by +200kb each time I save a revision of any file, would be a dream come true. Hopefully the thumbnail can just be omitted completely, but if the old Finder preview-extension chokes on that I suppose you could embed a 1x1 pixel one (which in my tests just takes up 91 bytes for RGB and 89 bytes for Grayscale). Or at worst, a 512x512 white PNG (which takes up 1117 bytes for RGB or 609 bytes for Grayscale). The next version of the Finder-preview extension could detect the document-flag telling it to ignore that embedded thumbnail and just display a default document icon. Older extensions would just show the white square in the Finder until people upgrade. So it seems like all of this should be solvable. Fingers crossed...

@MEB: Thanks for replying. The question wasn't about SVG though, and I see now that the post I linked you wasn't 100% clear on that and could have been interpreted as relating to SVG... Sorry :-( The problem is the size of .afdesign files. Let's say I create a logo with *only* a few curves and layer effects. I and others have noticed that if we save it as .afdesign we get a file that is hundreds of kilobytes (seems to depend on document resolution used, and graphical complexity). If we export it as as SVG we get just the vectors (maybe 1-2kb). That solves the filesize issue, but then we lose the ability to easily edit the file later. Since .afdesign always adds hundreds of kilobytes of "fluff" to the filesize I suspect that it is saving an embedded Finder thumbnail jpeg? With multiple .afdesign files stored in a Git repo (for revision tracking) it really balloons the repo filesize. Every revision of a file adds hundreds of kilobytes to the repo. I would happily skip the embedded thumbnail to make .afdesign files (with just vectors and layer FX settings) in the 1-5kb range instead. I would love an advanced option for this, if you would consider it. There is already "File - Save history with document" to toggle undo history on/off. How about "File - Document setup - Advanced - Embed Finder document thumbnail"? If documents have no thumbnail, it would just show a default document icon for that file. For backwards compatibility with old versions of Affinity products it could embed a 1x1 pixel white jpeg, so that old Finder extensions/apps can still preview and open those files. So this is totally solvable, and I sincerely hope you will consider it. Edit: PROOF! :) Here is a document with *just* a single rectangle shape. In one file, I set the fill to pure black and saved it as "blackrectangle.afdesign": 4,439 bytes Then I set the fill to a complex circular gradient: "gradients.afdesign": 166,142 bytes. Next, I exported them as SVG to see what happens: "blackrectangle.svg": 502 bytes. And "gradients.svg": 1,056 bytes. To think about this in context: SVG is a very verbose, text-based XML format which is extremely inefficient at saving designs, needing up to 10 bytes per vector coordinate. Meanwhile, .afdesign is a binary format with extreme efficiency. And yet the afdesign file for a black rectangle is 8.8x bigger than an SVG, and for the colored gradient rings it's 157x bigger than an SVG. This huge afdesign filesize is a problem for some of us (and a very big problem for me). Could we please disable the document preview thumbnail? It's making .afdesign filesizes massive for no worthwhile reason at all. :( blackrectangle.afdesign blackrectangle.svg gradients.afdesign gradients.svg