iconoclast

Yes, the Kiwis are cool. Was seriously thinking about emigrating to New Zealand some years ago. But I think I'm too old meanwhile, for an adventure like that.

Your painting should be finished, if this is what you mean. You can't load the painting into Designer while it is still in progress. You can not only link the unfinished work into a document in Designer and then simply update it from time to time. As far as I know, ArtRage's PTG-format isn't supported by any other software than ArtRage anyway. ArtRage is developed by a relative small company in New Zealand (Ambient Design), not really a global player, so the PTG-format has no big importance to the worldwide digital graphic business. Even it is great software.

Yes, as usual you can save your painting in Artrage's own file format (PTG), while you are working on it, and then export it as PNG, JPEG, PSD, TIFF, BMP or GIF. But I wouldn't recommend the GIF. All the exported formats can be imported in Affinity Photo and Designer.

Do you mean the thing with the color management? ArtRage has no color management, that means, it only supports one color profile (sRGB, if I'm not wrong). For printing, you need to convert the colors of your images to CMYK (from the colors of light - RGB - to body colors - CMYK). Depending on the sort of paper, your painting shall be printed on, it needs special CMYK-color-profiles (e.G. different sorts of coated or uncoated paper, glossy...). That's a thing that ArtRage can't do, because it's only a painting app. You need an image editing software like Affinity Photo for this, or, as far as I know, even Krita can do this. Or you keep that to your trusted printer.

Looks very promising. It still doesn't seem to be perfect, if you look at the areas that contain very fine details like hair, as far as I could see. But it will make things much easier.

I can't say anything about the XP-Pen Artist tablet, but it looks very good, as far as I could see. One thing that is not clear to me is the weight of the stylus. The advertisement says, that it is rechargeable, so it seems to contain some sort of accumulator. Wacom styluses are very light weight, because they somehow don't contain anything that must be recharged or so. They are not heavier than an analogue pen or brush. My individual way to get as close as possible to the analogue feeling is to use my Cintiq with ArtRage for painting. ArtRage is presumably the painting app that is closest to analogue techniques. It is not the best for technical illustrations, I think, but great for Watercolors, Oils and Acrylics, Pastels, Pencil drawings and other techniques. But of course even there you have to push buttons and sliders to manipulate the behavior of the brushes and colors. And I personally have problems with touchscreen gestures, so that I still use the keyboard in addition, so that my desktop is pretty full. Wacom offers a compact add-on-device, to replace the keyboard, but it's expensive. And as far as I remember they also offer an add-on to make the tablet wireless. My favorite software for image editing is Affinity Photo, even to prepare my paintings for printing. Artrage has no color management. And Designer for technical illustrations and stuff like that. And Publisher for layouts. That's why I'm here.

Just to put in my two cents... It is not easy to recommend graphic tablets in a few words, because after all, it always depends on the necessities of the user. And the graphics tablet is not the only important thing, because it is only some kind of a very sophisticated mouse. You need a suitable app too, to satisfy your needs. In my case, I want to paint and draw as I did in the analogue world. And it should feel as analogue as possible. My first graphics tablet, I bought about 15 years ago from the well known IT specialist dealer ALDI. Officially it was sold as a Medion tablet, but it was in fact an Aiptek, and unfortunately completely useless. The stylus was thick and heavy as a trunk (because it needed a battery), and it was far from drawing precisely. My second one was a Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch. Simple, but OK. But the Touch functionality was a mess. It worked for me for many years, but it wasn't really like analogue painting, because the painting appeared on the monitor, while I painted on the tablet. That is still a bit peculiar to me. Some time ago I purchased a Wacom Cintiq 16, with display. That is very good. It is of course still not 100% like analogue painting, because e.G. if you want to rotate the paper a bit, as you used to do with analogue paper, this will not work. You can do this, depending on the app you use, in your app. But that is a thing you will have to get used to too. What I want to say: It will never be 100% like analogue painting. But you can come close to it with a good tablet and a good app. And you will even have some opportunities you didn't have in analogue painting. Unfortunately good tablets are expensive. My Cintiq did cost about 470 €. It was a special offer - normally it costs about 700 €. But I'm very satisfied to have it. For less money you can get a Wacom One, that has a display too. But I can't say if it really is recommendable. One important point may be that the canvas of tablets often get scratchy after a while. That was e.G. the case with my Bamboo too. The Cintiq has an etched surface, that is very resilient. I don't know if the Wacom One has that too. I'm afraid it doesn't. Finally it depends on your individual necessities what tablet is the right one. Possibly something like a Wacom Intuos - without display - is sufficient. By the way, one point that might be important for some users is that Wacom also supports Linux and Open Source Software like GIMP, Krita, Inkscape... very well.

Interesting. Must be a relative new option. But does it make sense? JPEG is a file format that uses lossy data-compression. That means, that each time you save a document as a JPEG, it will loose at least a bit of it's quality. Because of that, I would not recommend to save (export) images as JPEGs to work on them further.

Usually each app has it's own file format to save things like guides, selections, layers and so on with it, so that you are able to keep that stuff while you are working on that document. In case of Photoshop this file format is *.psd, in case of GIMP the *.xcf, in case of Affinity Photo the *.afphoto. As far as I know even Photoshop doesn't allow to save guides with file formats like *.jpg, *.png, *.tif, *.gif... All these formats are end-formats - not to save your work while you are working on it. That's, by the way, the reason why there are different functions for "Save" (*afphoto...) and "Export" (*jpg, *png, *tif...).

You could give Darktable a try in the meantime. It's free and open source and not bad, as far as I know.

OK, Sorry, it seems that I confused it with AfPhoto. In AfPhoto, if you change the settings of a brush - even if you only click e.G. the brush size or the flow function in the context bar - the highlighting of the brush/brush preset disappears - because it is no longer the initial brush preset. Brushes and Brush Presets are not clearly separated from each other in Photo - there is no separate access to brushes and brush presets. But in Photo v2 each layer has a memory function that remembers what brushes were used - in one session (if you reopen the document, even this memory will be lost). Designer doesn't seem to have such a memory function anyway, but at least the brush/preset keeps being highlighted if you change the brush size. Could be a case for the "Feedback & Suggestions" section. Would of course be a helpful function.

It is because this are in fact not brushes, but brush presets. If you use a brush and change it's settings, the highlighting of the brush preset will disappear. It is logical behavior, because it is no longer the preset you chose. But I agree, it's annoying and that should be fixed in the future. Maybe at least in form of a tool history. This topic has been discussed here on the forum many times in the past.

Yes, you're right, seemed to work, but in fact it doesn't. Sad but true.

Try the following link by right click and "save as..." (on Windows, don't know how it works on MAC): https://cdn.dscape-llc.com/affinitygr/AffinityDreams.zip

At first, firstdefences hint is very good (as always). The second: for the normal High Pass Filter, you need two layers, even the duplicate. But both must be visible. If you apply the Highpass Filter to the top layer, it will only contain grey and some contrast informations of image objects taken from the image. If you apply this layer to the bottom layer, using the Blend Mode "Overlay", you will get the image sharpened. And you can adjust the sharpening with the opacity slider of the top layer. But, by the way, you can also use the Highpass layer to unsharpen the image if you use other Blend Modes, like e.G. "Subtract", as far as I remember. Only to clarify the method. As I said, firstdefence's hint should work. AfPhoto makes this workflow a little easier with it's Live Filter.

For a simple Passepartout, you only need to drag a rectangle that fits to the edges of your image document. Then remove its Fill and give it a Stroke (Outline), as thick as you want. Very easy. For squiggly frames, I would recommend to take a look into the Stock Panel or start a Google-Search for it.

I'm sure, it wouldn't be too difficult to solve this with an additional feature in the Brushes Editor. Hope this will come in the future. I think, Designer's brushes are a bit limited at the moment anyway.

A good way to get this kind of misty horizon is to use Assets. There once was a package with Mist and Fog Assets (and Rain, Snow and others too), that could be downloaded for free from Affinity. At least for owners of the software. I recently purchased James Ritson's "Atmosphere" package from the Affinity Store, that contains some nice Fog Assets too. But notice, that you should take care for realistic appearance. The small tower in your example looks too clear for me. It should be slightly covered by a little bit of fog too. Edit: There is also a Tutorial for how to use Ritson's Assets. You can find the link on the Affinity Store site.

This behavior is caused by the images the brush heads are based on. Texturized brush heads are based on pixel images (white on black). The edges of those images on the left and the right will always define the look of the ends of the brushstrokes. If you create brushes on your own, you could create two versions: one with those edges and another one with cutted edges. The last ones can be drawn seamless, but the first ones will always have this gaps at the ends of the brushstrokes. Hope that the developers will solve this problem in the future, but at the moment there doesn't seem to be another solution. At least in my experiences.

Ah okay, I misunderstood the task. I thought he wanted to create circles in a row. In that case my workflow would work. But you are right that it will not work with circles inside circles or any task with changes in the size of the shape. Sorry! It would be a nice additional feature, if you could even do this. I had that case several times, that I would have been glad to have this opportunity. Possibly I already made a feature request for it some time ago, I'm not sure. Otherwise I think, I, or someone else, should catch up on it.

If you want to have many circles with the same distance in a row, you can also use Power Duplicate: select the first circle, press Control + J on Windows or (I think) Command + J on MAC, enter the distance you want into the Transformation Panel and then simply press Control/Cmd + J again and again.

Hi! I'm not sure if I understand what you want to do, but what about the Smudge Brush Tool? It will blend colors into each other. But it will also distort details. So I'm not sure if this may be useful for you.

What about holding "Alt" to subtract? Works for me.

OK, now it seems to work for me with the Stroke Panel, but not with the Table (greyed out) and the Context Panel (greyed out). Must be a bug anyway.

The same to me on Windows with the latest version 2. All these functions are greyed out - even in the stroke panel.