[Glossary]

On 1/14/2019 at 5:14 AM, David007 said:

I am new to Affinity [but I have used Paint Shop Pro for a long time]. I am really struggling at the moment to find a Glossary that will explain your many different “tiers” and how they relate to each other. So far I have found the following in the Help information :-

Artboards ……are discrete design areas, of any shape and size, within the same document, on which you can place design elements.

Documents. …….Artboards can be created with new documents or added to your current document at a preset or custom size at any time

Pasteboards.   ……. artboards can be re-positioned anywhere on the pasteboard and resized at any time to suit your needs

Canvas …..‘Clip to Canvas’ restricts the document view, so you can only see objects which are placed on the page.

Page. ………‘Clip to Canvas’ restricts the document view, so you can only see objects which are placed on the page

Layers let you organize the contents of your design into a logical tiered structure for better creative composition and object management.

Image layers are a special layer type that retains all the original image data

Background Layer  [When I ‘paste’ additional images onto an existing image in the working area, they all seem to be classified as ‘background’ layers. I would have thought you could only have one background and the rest would be ordinary layers.]

Workspace ……….Within Affinity Designer, each active Persona has its own workspace layout

I also looked on the forum and saw that I am not the only one who would benefit from a Glossary. Your reply was :-

but none of your links explain the above terms and how they relate to each other. Perhaps you could rethink the need for the Glossary?...or at least provide an explanation of how your “tier” system works please. 

Thank you

6 years ago yes but still I suspect topical? A search for 'Glossary' only returns this post of yours.

   

[Layer Panel: Visibilty tickboxes not shown initially]

On 12/10/2020 at 12:59 PM, stokerg said:

Hi @OookLout and Welcome to the Forums,

Thanks for reporting this.  I'll confirm this with the QA Team, who should have access to the M1 hardware and get it logged with the Dev team, if it isn't already  

In Preferences for Affinity on User Interface, 'Automatically lock background layer on import'.  If you disable that, it won't be locked.

Do you have a example of the type of area you are trying to select and delete?  You could try the Inpainting Brush to remove something and Affinity will try to cover of it with the surrounding areas.  You could also just make a selection and use Edit>Inpaint which will do a similar thing.  More information on Inpainting can be found here.

1) << Thanks for reporting this.  I'll confirm this with the QA Team>> 

FYI I have an M1 13inch MacBook so maybe it's the small screen I haven't tried it on my big screen yet (need a USB-C display cable!)

2)  Af Photo and AF Designer have the same initially-hidden Visibility tickbox behaviour   

3) Thanks I'll check I am not trying to edit a locked layer. 

[Layer Panel: Visibilty tickboxes not shown initially]

On MacBook Air M1 Big Sur, AP ver 1.8.6 did not initially show Layer Panel Visibilty tickboxes.

After some tutorial work had been done the tickboxes eventually appeared, triggered by manually widening the panel area. The tickboxes remained visible even after the panel area was narrowed again.     

Note I have remained an Affinity Photo novice user for many years, could only ever used AP for the simplest of jobs, like JPG to transparent  PNG conversion. This is probably because of certain non-intuitive UI/operating features which I have not yet seen explained in a tutorial. I recently decided to study the tutorials in the hope that these secrets would be accidentally revealed.   

Not coming from a Photoshop background, more Paintshop Pro and similar, it is not obvious how to do simple things like selecting an area and deleting it to reveal the background. The tutorials all assume that you already know certain things, mainly that you can't do anything in AP  without layers, because the initially imported bitmap is protected. There is no 'locked' icon on each layer, just a padlock above which changes subtly as each layer is selected.