Joe Kohlmann

Here's a common operation I've done in the past with Photoshop: 1. Create a mask for a layer 2. Extract the mask as a regular pixel layer by copying the mask channel contents to a new pixel layer 3. Use filters and adjustments to refine the pixel layer (I find that Levels does a great job of uniformly hardening edges, for example) 4. Select all and copy the refined pixel layer 5. Paste the clipboard contents back into the mask channel, thereby applying the refined mask I'm trying to adapt this workflow to Affinity Photo, and I've noticed that adjustment layers can supposedly be applied to pixel mask layers by making the adjustment layer a "child" layer to the mask. However, I'm not seeing the adjustment affect the mask. This leads me to two questions: 1. Can adjustments, filters, and adjustment layers be applied to pixel mask layers, as if they were a non-mask pixel layer? 2. If not, would you consider a feature request to have adjustments, filters, and adjustment layers (when dragged onto a pixel mask layer, thereby appearing as a child layer to the pixel mask) operate on pixel masks in this way? 3. Is there some other way I may be able to accomplish this workflow already? My one requirement is that it doesn't involve re-selecting and filling the selection on a pixel layer; while this is possible, it's far too error-prone in my opinion. Thanks, Joe P.S. For clarity, I've attached a screenshot of what I mean by making an adjustment layer a "child layer" of a pixel mask layer. Unfortunately I'm not sure what the correct terminology is for this is.

Hi Serif folks, This is a nitpick, but an important one. I'm honestly excited to share Affinity Photo and Designer with my design team at work, but four of the eight the sample documents in the Welcome panel are of retouched female models. Two of these four have the title "bang | Photography", giving them an overtly sexual connotation. This kind of social messaging may very well have a negative impact on these brilliant products' appeal to women designers—seeing this kind of imagery as "the kinds of things people create with Affinity Photo" may feel exclusionary to them. With regards to the use of models in general, I get that retouching is an important use case for Affinity Photo, but my concern is that these sample documents overwhelmingly cater to a male demographic. Furthermore, their presence is not negated by the more whimsical imagery in the other samples; those are simply neutral by comparison. Replacing even half of those model-based sample documents with male models would be an improvement, but a step further would be samples that, no matter who's depicted, avoid overtly sexual and exclusionary imagery / messaging. The Affinity product page is already using wonderful other-worldly imagery to advertise the applications, so I'd say, more of that please! I say this as someone who's, again, very excited about the Affinity application line and wants to help the team recognize and remove unnecessary barriers to achieving wide appeal amongst all sorts of designers. If I'm out of line here, my sincere apologies. Hopefully I've been able to communicate the positive intentions of this feedback. Cheers, Joe

Hi MEB, That's a great point, and just from using the product itself I can guess the whole team is ambitious about improving the quality and robustness of PSD support. That said, these are practical issues that can make it difficult to verify the "integrity" (i.e. state of editability, etc.) or potential "data loss" (by way of rasterization) within documents when working within a larger, multi-person workflow (which may or may not involve trips back to Photoshop, especially if, say, only one person is currently using AP). Hence, added clarity in some form or another would go a long way in helping new users establish trust with the application (which is already pretty high for me, to be fair).

Affinity Photo (henceforth "AP") does a stellar job of importing from PSDs, but there are some usability improvements that would help to properly set user's expectations about the nature of the import process. For example, AP appears to rasterize Vector Smart Objects and Embedded Smart Objects into "pixel layers". Fortunately the user can determine the type of an imported layer quite easily by looking at the parenthetical text following its name, but AP's attempt to preserve layer names has the potential to set false expectations at-a-glance, as this image describes: As also noted in the above image, this can have significant usability implications for exporting to PSD, as rasterized layers may keep their default names (as imported by AP), but are in fact be pixel layers within the exported PSD. This confused me the first time I exported to PSD after initially importing from one. There are similar caveats for the layer names of other imported layers. For example: type layers are imported with their names, which suppresses AP's automatic layer naming for type layers based on their text content. It's likely that these layer names originated as auto-generated names in Photoshop to begin with. – Based on these observations, I have a few recommendations in the form of optional PSD import options for layer names: A "PSD Import" option to append " (Rasterized by Affinity Photo)" to the end of layers in a PSD that become pixel layers upon import into Affinity Photo A "PSD Import" option to remove names of type layers if the entire layer name exists as a substring in the type layer's text content, starting from the first character An option to review layers that have been rasterized upon importing a PSD Cheers, Joe