CM0

@tzvi20@Old Bruce Thanks!
Would be great to get an announcement when it hits the beta, I'll jump on the possibility to test it.

Hi @CM0,
I've replicated the crash on your file and logged it with the developers, I also found that ungrouping the initial group at the top of the layer stack and repeating the test did not result in a crash. Thanks for your additional observations @PMan 🙂

To me Linked Layers is a must have in Designer. It's the most efficient way of doing complex symmetrical work and layer management. It is just too good of a feature for vector work to just have it be accessible only in Photo.

I can confirm that I've updated the development log to include this information and your file above - such that this can be correctly understood and resolved in a future update.
I hope this helps  

Not really needing any specific help at this point other than just getting the problem recognized and bug fixed.
I wanted to make sure the problem is understood so the right "fix" is applied. Which is why I wanted to make sure that it is understood Photo's default rendering is incorrect.
I'm just hoping a mod could confirm. Thanks.

Important note. I tried what you did above. Looks like you discovered an additional problem.
The rendering in Photo is broken. It completely ignores the blend ranges set on the group.
The correct rendering and export should be.

Hi @CM0,
Thanks for your report!
Interestingly with this file, I've found the following behaviour:
When opened within Affinity Publisher (or the Designer /Photo Personas of Affinity Publisher) the file renders differently on canvas compared to the export when using an Artboard. When using a regular canvas with a rectangle as the background colour, the file exports the same as is shown in the app.
When opened within Affinity Designer, the Artboard document renders the same as the exported image. When using a regular canvas the file renders the same as it's exported counterpart, though differently compared to the export of the Artboard document.
When opened within Affinity Photo, both the Artboard and canvas document render the same as the exported image.

I can't entirely explain this behaviour currently and I suspect the version that matches the exported file is correct and should be seen in all instances of app/artboard/canvas combinations - therefore I'll be logging this with our development team now for further investigation.
I hope this helps

Doesn't seem to matter. You can see the preview in export is already incorrect. Also, rasterizing the layer will result in incorrect pixel layer as well.
Nonetheless, was using PNG with defaults.

This is why I still think their scripting extension support will work out the best in the end. AI is just improving too fast for a company to make such an investment. It will be obsolete before they can even ship it. We probably will not need hosting servers for long. Nvidia's new Perfusion is demonstrating that we may soon have the ability to run these at a fraction of the resources currently needed.
https://research.nvidia.com/labs/par/Perfusion

There answer has been no. We can likely conclude due to legal uncertainties it will probably remain no. They don't have the resources that Adobe does and rights to their own data. The only availability will likely come through 3rd party integration when they release their scripting and extensions update.
This might be the best option anyway. At the pace AI is developing, hard for anyone to keep up. But community developed integrations will be able to adapt quicker.

I think that misses on a couple of points.
AI is not limited to only generative AI. The potential productivity improvements don't have any limits. New uses will continue to be discovered and applied. Neglecting a potential feature that is in high demand simply because some do not use that feature is of detriment also to those that don't use the feature. Why? because it brings lots of paying users to the application that in turn gives more resources to be applied to all features of the application.

I think that misses on a couple of points.
AI is not limited to only generative AI. The potential productivity improvements don't have any limits. New uses will continue to be discovered and applied. Neglecting a potential feature that is in high demand simply because some do not use that feature is of detriment also to those that don't use the feature. Why? because it brings lots of paying users to the application that in turn gives more resources to be applied to all features of the application.

The content fill is truly a revolutionary level game changer for compositing work. The difference between the tools has mostly been manageable, but AI is providing a separation in capabilities that is enormous.
However, as fast as they can be implemented, they can also be copied. As openAI recently stated, there is no longer a moat to the capabilities you build. Anyone can copy them rather easily.
IMO, the quickest path to these capabilities is for Affinity to focus on finishing their plugin/scripting capabilities. They are a small team compared to Adobe, so getting the API out there allows Affinity to leverage the community and 3rd parties to greatly expand Affinity's capabilities including integrations with AI.

Hello,
I just want to add me to the crowd that's pointing at this annoying bug. I just bought Affinity edges brushes to discover none of them works for squares or any closed shape as they should.
The brush tool definitely needs more love and features. I would love to see vector shape brushes as well - I dislike the png-workaround - pixel based brushes in a vector environment is just not the real thing.  
I reinstalled Illustrator for brush work now - actually hoped to got rid of AI for good - but real vector brushes offer so much more opportunities. So to fix this bug would not just be a fix - it can also be accompanied by a whole new bunch of brush features.

Just my two cents, thanks for reading.

Interesting read; is Ai art theft, I would say no, the reason for that is, it doesn't take bits of each reference picture and blend them together to form a whole new image, it holds the picture's as a reference, like a person looks at a painting to work out how it was constructed, it refers to the pictures, it mimics and blends style, colouration, movement of stroke, placement of tone, shading, it looks at the prompt subject and constructs a referenced picture, not bits of pictures based on prompts, but digital strokes to build as a painter would.
Name a corporeal artist that doesn't do the same? All artist's have studied previous art, chosen a style they like and copied the style, created a style based on it, or been influenced in some way to make their style.
Everything we see, feel, smell, hear and taste build our human reference library, Ai only has an "see" that it learns from, so we are ahead of the game/Ai. If we paint an image; in whatever medium we choose, all of the experience's we have had up to that point, go into each stroke of the brush, pen, pencil, pastel etc, this is a subconscious action but nevertheless it influences our movement to create. You can have identical twins that are both artists/creators but they will never be able to make identical art because of their nuanced variation of experiences influence their mind and hand.

I am not sure everybody will want to have AI integrated into the products they use, particularly if it requires sending data back to some server somewhere in cyberspace where it might be collected & mined to be used for purposes that may not be in the user's best interests & done without their consent or knowledge.
There are also potential copyright & ownership issues that as yet have not really been explored much -- if some AI tool does much of the work then who is to say that the work is solely owned by the user? It isn't like a hammer that has no input of its own on the project being built; more like a collaborative effort with some of the input coming directly from the AI.

@R C-R absolutely. I think that’s why it’s important to allow people to choose whether they use any AI at all (many will want nothing to do with it), and if they do choose to, allowing them to decide which AIs they are comfortable with (ethically, personally, features, etc), and which ones they are not.
If AI is baked directly into the product that personal choice is essentially removed from the user, then making the decision about whether or not to use the product at all, a dilemma we’ve already witnessed with a number of Adobe users in recent months.

I think that misses on a couple of points.
AI is not limited to only generative AI. The potential productivity improvements don't have any limits. New uses will continue to be discovered and applied. Neglecting a potential feature that is in high demand simply because some do not use that feature is of detriment also to those that don't use the feature. Why? because it brings lots of paying users to the application that in turn gives more resources to be applied to all features of the application.

I agree, if they don't have the resources for direct integration presently, I would hope they could at least make a statement to the fact the use cases for integration will be incorporated into the new scripting API so that community could provide these enhancements.

Thanks everyone for all your suggestions - please keep them coming! They are all useful. 
Initially, we'll be concentrating on exposing existing functionality - primarily, manipulation of documents and their contents. 
Then later we will be able to move on to some of the "new feature" things that have been suggested: custom tools / shapes / brush engines / personas etc. 

Now that we have a open source AI generator.  Affinity could leverage this to provide integration directly into the product.
Potentially could provide for unique capabilities when combined such as AI brushes.  Imagine being able to paint trees, flowers as a brush AI generated etc.

We are planning to allow custom live filters at some point. It would be possible to write one that used GLSL.

It is the single most important feature for Affinity in years. I also believe it is paramount for the future success of the product. Furthermore, AI is eating the world and anything affinity can do to leverage the community to assist in providing integrations to AI capabilities is going to be essential. Going forward, products that don't have any type of API's or scripting that can leverage the productivity boost of AI are going to struggle immensely to be competitive.
Hopefully they will offer an alpha level preview for some of us developers so we could start working together to bring about the needed capabilities and start building some cool demo reels for promotions.

Immediately your article reminded me of Isaac Asimov's 1958 story "The Feeling of Power" in which one man discovers graphitics. He learns to calculate with pencil and paper. Doing arithmetic without computers obviously has military significance:  it makes manned missiles possible.
https://archive.org/details/1958-02_IF/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater
Even older is E. M. Forster's 1909 tale about the rediscovery of outdoor reality beyond one's room when "The Machine Stops."
https://archive.org/details/e.-m.-forster-the-machine-stops_202008
I hasten to add that while I purchased my copy of "If" from a newsstand in 1958, Forster's story was published before even I was born. I know of it only from an anthology I bought many decades ago. 
 

Adobe can track it because it is their own data, their own model and you are using their platform to create the images. They will likely count a generation as a use.
Yes, this was my position throughout last year and early this year. I found it all completely unusable for any professional work. However, PS has made a big step forward beyond Midjourney. I spent several hours watching what people are doing with it over the weekend. When used for compositing work combining real stock photo and some manipulation you can do some very impressive work that can be far more specific than anything you would get from Midjourney. Furthermore, it seems to be able to mimic any style of your current document even if not trained on it. So you could paint your own creation and it could add to it in a convincing manner.
However, when I say good enough for professional work, I'm still constraining that mostly when used as a complementary tool for blending, photo manipulation etc. It seems to do some excellent work there. Like a super advanced clone, blend and object removal. Nevertheless, for those who do a lot of that type of work, it will likely convert hours into minutes or seconds of work.
Now for other media, like video, as you mention it currently is terrible. However, so were images just over a year ago. I suspect it will be very different a year from now.