DavidMalcolm

I just had to google this to figure this out! I was using the help menu searching for transparency, remember using it before, thought I was losing my mind! If the devs are looking for feedback from a usability perspective. Making the word Noise/Opacity a toggleable menu (like the one for layers to switch between normal/screen/multiply) would improve discoverability 1000% fold. Nothing about a round circle of colour screams "This lets you switch between opacity and noise"

So I gotta say, in 2023 I'm kinda sad Designer's default pressure sensitivity for Wacom tablets is still kinda terrible I love the program for most things (I only do design work sometimes.) For most things I love it way more than I ever did Illustrator, but moving from Illustrator or Procreate to actually drawing with a stylus is just... really bad. I'm literally having to remind myself that I'm not shit at drawing because the way that the default settings render lines drawn from my Wacom make it look like I have some sort of hand tremor. The ends of lines end up being big small big small and have weird sharp corners, generally the stroke in between the start and end points look fine, but... I just don't see why even if this is an accurate impression of what the wacom is giving Designer whoever actually programmed it wouldn't just realize that within the first 5 and last 5 percent of a stroke, nobody is going to want to have their pressure fluctuate up and down by significant amounts? Like if you connect a Wacom to Illustrator, set pressure as the variable and give yourself a moderately sized brush it just feels elegant. Procreate too. But Affinity Designer? I feel like it's not even worth trying to use my Wacom with it.

Gonna be so hard not installing all the betas!

Hey all I've been working on a comic for the last few months and now that I'm posting episodes on Webtoon I figured I'd share it with the community here. The panel in the post is from what'll be episode 11 or 12. I'm really happy with how this one turned out. I do all the inking and most of the flatting in Procreate on my iPad Pro (just upgraded from the 9.7 inch Pro to the new 12.9!) then I bring it into Affinity Photo and do all the colour work. Sometimes I'll make a few vector objects in Designer. I've been doing all the lettering in Publisher. You can check out the webtoon link at https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/thicc-skinned/list?title_no=404235 and I'd love if you'd subscribe

Nice, very clean!

Ugh this is annoying. Part of me understands why they'd do this... but part of me is like... WHY!? My goal isn't to have two copies of all my documents and thus waste two times as much space on my SSD. By the time this project is done I suspect the final file size will be impractically large. I wonder if Publisher will start choking on it once I've got 150 pages. (Actually given that it takes a long time to open the file now that it's less than ten pages I suspect I'll have to export the linked files as jpegs or tiffs or something, and then I'll have to rebuild the whole document in a new file and just keep an editable working copy that runs in 20 page chunks or something...) It makes sense to me that Publisher might not want to be making a round trip to the linked documents every time, or they might be trying to prevent people from losing track of their resources and breaking their documents. But this all just feels like it isn't really being handled in a way that makes sense. The app literally calls it 'linked document' in the layers panel. When really it should be embedded document. (Which I realize is made clear in the name of the document when you've got tabs...) Whatever, it's still nicer than trying to do this project in InDesign.

Very cute

Holy crap, I'm looking at this and thinking, "How the heck did he do that with vectors?" And you said you're using a 2015 Mac mini?! Is that grass a brush of some kind? The only ways I can think to do that would leave my 2018 MacBook Pro chugging! Part of me wishes I could see your source file.

Thanks for the update, what will happen with old files that have updated copies in them? I've got a graphic novel I'm working on in Photo and Publisher, and I'm 7 pages in ... which doesn't sound like a lot, but there's between 5-7 separate detailed art assets on each page. I've been updating them in Publisher after the initial draft is done in Photo. (Often to clean up certain things once I see them all on the same page together. But none of the changes have been saved back. Plus my Publisher file is now like three gigs...

Glad to see the 'optimized for sidecar' in there :D Should this mean that I can update day one without experiencing problems? (Hopefeully?) I was recently prevented from doing a few days worth of Procreate work because iOS 13 broke the ability to switch brushes. (PITA!) I've been using Procreate on my iPad for inking a graphic novel I'm working on, and then Affinity Photo and Publisher on my Mac for colouring and page layout. (For whatever reason I find Procreate has a really good balance for stabilization, pressure curve, and a lack of wonky tails on lines when you pull the pencil from the screen. So for line work I find it better than the Affinity Suite. I suspect that I might be able to tweak the pressure settings in Affinity, but given that you start with new defaults on every document it seems, it just doesn't feel worth it.)

Good luck with that. I think you'd see an Android version of the iPad apps before you see a Linux version of the desktop apps... and I don't think you're ever going to see an Android version. The venn diagram of people on Linux who are willing to pay for software, people who are wanting to use graphics apps, and people who all have a similar enough system, is pretty small. I realize I don't know that much about Linux, especially these days but I know one of the reasons that other apps have often avoided doing linux ports is because of the various windowing systems and how you can't always rely on all the same resources being present. I know on Mac the Affinity Suite leverages tech like Metal, CoreImage and maybe even CoreML? (Is CoreImage still a thing? You know what I'm talking about, the GPU accelerated parts of macOS.) They're probably plugging into similar APIs on Windows, and I am not sure but I haven't heard about any fantastic graphics APIs on Linux. They'd probably have to fall back to using OpenGL or something. Unfortunately consumer software on Linux is hard to make good money in and has a lot of the pitfalls of developing for Android (tons of different variations on the same base, tons of things that could cause bugs that aren't in anyone's control). I'm sure they did some sort of cost benefit analysis and figured out that they'd have to pay X number of extra developers to ensure the Linux version would work, and that there probably aren't enough potential Linux users to cover the costs. Frankly as somebody who owns both the Mac and iPad versions of their apps, I'd rather they invest in the platforms where the bulk of their potential users are. (Mac, iOS and Windows.)

Okay so I was just working on painting in a project and suddenly noticed that my brush wasn't changing size based on pressure. So I had to turn it on. I confess I don't use Affinity Photo every day, honestly I haven't had any massive drawing projects since it came out (I guess maybe that says something?) But every time I open an Affinity app and start designing something I go through a time where I'm drawing and all my lines are super uniform and it takes a few seconds or minutes (depending on how essential size variation is) before it kicks in, "Damnit, my stylus isn't doing pressure sensitivity!" Pressure sensitivity is the default in Photoshop if I remember correctly it also was in Illustrator. ANYONE who buys a Wacom buys it because they want their work to look more like drawing not because they want a mouse shaped like a pencil. I feel like the number of people who don't use pressure sensitivity is dwarfed by the number who do. (Assuming they own a drawing tablet or Apple Pencil.) Why can't pressure sensitivity be the default? It is in every other drawing app. Heck it is in Apple's Notes! It just seems so bassackward to have it off by default.

So happy to see this finally out! I confess I'm at a point in my life where I'm not doing much graphic design, but a few years ago I'd have been using this regularly and probably even trying to teach some people in the non-profit sector how to use it. That said I still bought it day one because I can never have enough Affinity apps!

I seriously want Designer on the iPad already!

I'd kill for this. Procreate allows a quick double tap with two fingers to do it, and it feels super natural!