iconoclast

I can confirm what Walt already said. It is absolutely usual that your files get associated to new applications you install. That could also happen if you only install a new image viewer. But that doesn't change the files. It only says your operating system that those certain files shall be usually opened with this certain app (f.e. by double clicking). And it attaches the thumb nail of the new app to this certain files. As Walt said, you can easily change that, if you really want.

OK, I tested it once again. As I did it following a straight plan, it seemed to work as it should first. But as I tried to change some settings after that, jumping from one sub brush to another, it became very confusing. Not only because the highlighting didn't move. Hope you can see it in the video. Needs a little patience. SubBrushesIssue.mp4

Hi Dan, thanks for the answer! I supposed that this could be intended not to be possible, but I think that it would be nice if it would be. Would make brush design a little more flexible.

Hi NathanC! I was afraid that someone would ask me for that. I tried it some minutes ago, but it wasn't easy. At first it seemed to work as it should, but then, after I opened the Sub Editors again, some of the settings again were gone. Possibly especially the settings of Accumulation and Flow are affected. During the last days I made several experiments with it and it happened again and again. So I was surprised that it seemed to work at first in my last test. But finally it doesn't. Seams to be somehow instable. In addition to that, it also confuses that the highlighting doesn't move and, as it seems, also the preview of the brush on top of the editor doesn't show up correctly. Will keep an eye on it and report again later. If possible with a screen recording.

Hi! I noticed an annoying problem as I tried to create brushes with a few Sub Brushes. If I create more than one Sub Brush I have to close both Brush Editors first (the one for the Sub Brushes and the main one) to get the settings for one Sub Brush saved before I can adjust the settings for the next Sub Brush. Otherwise the settings will not be saved. That causes a lot of fiddling to get the right adjustments for all the single settings of the Sub Brushes. Finally it's possible to create the brush as you like it, but it is a lot of work, if you have to close and reopen the Editors again and again. Think it's a bug. Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5.1342

Hi everyone! During the last days I spent some time exploring the Brush Editor in Photo. It is really amazing, but I noticed some things I'm not sure if they are intended. Especially it seems that the Brush Dynamic "Shape Jitter" doesn't work with Intensity Brushes, Image Brushes and Brushes from Selection. As far as I could see, it works fine with Round Brushes and Rectangle Brushes, but not with brushes that use custom textures. Shouldn't it? Edit: I found this thread that seems to be related to the same topic, but it is still unanswered. Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5.1342

I think it will not be possible for Serif to satisfy all particular desires of all the users with special interests out there. Especially if they are so extensive as in this case. However, I sometimes have situations too, that I miss the opportunities of one of the apps in one of the others and am sad that I must switch than. I think that this will become smoother in the future, with the progress in development of the apps. Of course I would also like to get the apps for less money. Possibly for free? - A dream! 😀 But we should stay realistic and remember one of the main reasons why we put our backs to Adobe.

Normally a Graphics Designer doesn't need to switch constantly between three apps - if he knows what he does. Do you know any app that contains Image editing, vector graphics and DTP capabilities on a professional level in only one app? And if Serif would do that, it would of course result in a higher price. They don't develop software only for welfare. And the higher price would make the app less attractive for people who don't need the capabilities of the other apps. I don't think that it would be a clever solution. Neither for Serif, nor for the users.

I don't think that I would like all the stuff in only one app. I'm afraid that would make it very cluttered and would possibly cost performance. And it would blow up the price. And some people don't need all that stuff. Why should they pay for it? But I could imagine some progress in the Studiolink technology. For example that you don't need to install Assets, brushes, styles... for each app separately. That would be nice. Even because I'm afraid that I installed some Designer Brushes to Photo, that cost disc space now, without working or even appearing in the app.

I think it's "Ctrl+[" and "Ctrl+]" (without quotationmarks), like in many other apps. I customized it for me to "Ctrl+." and "Ctrl+," because this were the shortkeys for it as I learned Photoshop long time ago. Edit: Sorry, made a mistake. You don't need the Ctrl-key. Only "[" and "]" or in my case "." and ",". My customized settings are much more friendly for my tiny little hands. 😀 My personal tip for this "cycling through brushes"-problem. I created special brush categories for brushes I use for certain works. And I numbered them to have them on top of the brushes menu. My basic brushes are in category "0 - Basic Brushes".

I tested out the brush editor during the last few weeks too and it is really amazing what you can do with all the functions. At least in Photo. The Brush Editor of Designer is a little bit limited and buggy. Will you share your brushes with us? Dreams are really an interesting topic. I had many fantastic dreams in my youth. Of course I still dream at night even today, but it is mainly a chaotic mess I can't remember longer than a few minutes when I wake up. Only fragments. When I was young I had also some fascinating nightmares I still remember. I loved that stuff, because I was a fan of Horror stories, already in my early years. And my dreams were of course inspiration for some paintings and stories. I believe that dreaming is a kind of defragmentation of the hard disc in our heads. Old data gets organized in a new order, fragments of it show up to our inner senses. Redundant and useless data gets deleted. others are being stored... I don't know the book you are talking about, sounds very interesting, but do you know the "Dreamquest for the unknown Kadath" by H. P. Lovecraft? Very interesting, weird and creepy. And a little bit sick, like everything Lovecraft wrote. There are also two short stories of Lovecraft related to it, called "The Silver Key" and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", titles that indicate that there is a lot of symbolic behind the whole story. And a few other stories like "The Cats of Ulthar", "Celephais" and others that play in the Dream World. And Lovecraft also often aims at Theosophie. It plays an eminent role in "At the Mountains of Madness", "Call of Cthulhu" and the whole Cthulhu Myth. I'm not a big fan of esoteric and occult ideas, but it is interesting to explore and study Lovecraft's complex and weird world, especially if you compare it to his unlucky, messed up life. It is more a trip into Psychoanalysis for me, than into Philosophy, as he may have intended. But I'm afraid we are badly off topic in the meantime. Hope we don't cause anger.

OK, you unmasked me, I'm trying to make my own banknotes. 😄 The idea for the second pattern came indeed from banknotes. It is a kind of cloud. I created it in Designer with the Cloud Tool (a bit modified), and it was a lot of work, because I had to replicate every stroke and transform it by copying the same factor into the Transform panel one by one. Ctrl+ J alone doesn't work, because you get shrinking strokes and spaces, the more the more often you press Ctrl + J. The center of the cloud, by the way, is near the right corner of the image. Seemed to be the best place for it, because it is a bit obstrusive and disturbing, and the pattern is not big enough to place it outside the image. I prefer Frazetta, because his paintings are so full of grim power. Vallejo's paintings look brilliant, but so slick and inanimate. In fact, he told in an interview I read in a magazine, that he traces the basic drawings for his paintings from photographs he shoots before he starts painting. That might explain why the figures on his paintings look so static. And by the way, most of his heros look like himself, because he is his favorite model. Yes, Piranesi is really cool. I also have a picture book of his work, and it is very interesting. Seems that his impossible architecture was the result of an accident first. And then he took a fancy to it.

Thanks! But to be clear, the great photo of the man is not my work. I only used it to apply my patterns to it. Yeah, Frazetta also is one of my heros. Much better than Boris Vallejo, if you'd ask me. I love his somehow fierce, rough and wild style (f.e.the unbelievable "Death Dealer" paintings). Even he was not so perfect in anatomy as Hogarth was. But he was really great. I have two picture books with works from Frazetta. Definitely my favorite Fantasy painter.

Hi iuli! Thanks for the hint. Never heard of Halftoner. I remember that I had a free Photoshop Plugin about 10 years ago, that turned images into halftones. Don't remember its name. But as far as I remember, it was similar to Photos Halftones filter. So obsolete today anyway. This kind of halftones filters are pretty cool. But the varying stroke thickness is only one thing. If you look at f.e. Doré's illustrations, you can see that he was also playing with the directions of the strokes. For example the background (sky) had mostly horizontal strokes, while the strokes the shapes of persons and things in the foreground were modelled with followed their plastic forms. That is a thing I'd like to do too. I think I will need several layers and masks and different patterns for it. Will still need a lot of fiddling. But that's life!

The most work is to create the pattern. The point is that it needs to be blurred in a special way, so that the different brightness values of the strokes are computed with the ones of the image if you apply a blend mode to it. That results in the varying thicknesses of the stroke(s), like with a pressure-sensitive stylus. I got the idea for this method some time ago from a Photoshop Tutorial on TextureLabs.org. But it needed some experiments to find a way to do it with Affinity Photo, because some functions are not the same. Artstation is an interesting hint. Will explore it a bit. Looks very good. Thanx for that! Edit: One additional hint for people who want to learn better anatomic drawing, not only for comics. Burne Hogarth, the comic artist who illustrated the legendary "Tarzan" comics (from the 1930es to the 1950es), published some books about it that are the best stuff about this topic that I know. His illustrations always look very dynamic and vivid. Absolutely recommended! Edit: Here is another sample of the same image with another pattern.

Yes, Giger is still one of my biggest heros. And "Alien" one of my favorite movies. Of course I also have "Giger's Alien". Great book! And both "Necronomicom" picture-books and some more too. Unfortunately I know "RanXerox" only by name. Never read it. Two of my other favorite comic artists are Will Eisner ("The Spirit") and Herman Huppen ("Andy Morgan", "Jeremiah", "The Towers of Bos Maurie"). Eisner was a very movie-like story-teller too. His "Spirit" was a sort of Comic Noir, but often also very funny. Corben's biggest idol, as he confessed. And Herman sometimes used very movie-like sequences in his very epic comics too, and was a brilliant illustrator, almost as brilliant as Moebius, but not so crazy.

Here is an example for what I mean, of an experiment with a copper engraving look. It is inspired by an artist (can't remember his name at the moment) who made a print graphic that consisted of only one stroke, starting as a spiral from one eye in a portrait of Jesus Christ in that case. I chose a more profane motif from Pexels for this experiment. I created the spiral pattern in Inkscape (it has a spiral tool), refined it in Photo and applied it to the image in Photo also. Still not perfect, but a good start, I think.

It is sometimes a weird thing with comparisons people make. In my early Heavy Metal comic days, I was mostly impressed by the comics of Richard Corben. Not because of his pornographic tendencies. I liked the very movie-like narrative style, the partly very sculptural painting style and the atmosphere. But retrospectively I must say that only a lesser part of his work had the quality I admired him for. However, at that time many people said that my paintings reminded them to Richard Corben. Even people who didn't know that I was a fan of him. That was a thing I wasn't aware of. The same as I explored Giger. Even looking at my ink drawings many people associated them with Giger. I still can't see that, but it must somehow be true. But of course not in the quality. My main idol in inking is Gustave Doré. He was a genius anyway, in many ways. But his mastership in creating atmosphere, lights and shadows and depth of space in his illustrations - only with black strokes on white paper - impressed me so much that I try to emulate it since I first saw them decades ago. With analogue nibs and also digital. Concerning the first drawing: it's okay. Don't worry about it. It is a good image anyway. But this perspective thing with the zombies is a detail that catches the eye and causes irritation. Could of course also been interpreted as intended.

Ah, great, that makes it clear. In fact the guides still appear on objects that are not grouped with the Artboard, as I see now. And if I group them to it, the guides are on the Artboard too. Seems I didn't really understand what Artboards are. Thank you very much!

Hi! I just noticed something, I'm not sure about if this may be normal or possibly a bug. I suppose it's a bug. I created a simple but precise shape (a rectangle with rounded corners). It has white edges and no filling. And I created a black rectangle as background, meant to be converted to an Artboard, below the rounded rectangle. The problem is that all guidelines disappear in the moment I convert the background layer to an Artboard. They are not only invisible, they are also lost from the Guides Manager. Or, if I had created the Artboard before I created the guides, they disappear in the moment I create a new shape or curve after that. I'm on Windows 10 with Designer vs. 1.10.5.1342.

Very nice artwork! It reminds me to the days I discovered the Heavy Metal comics (in germany published as "Schwermetall"; initially, in France, published as "Metal Hurlant"). Moebius, Druillet, Caza... Stuff like that. Great times - loved it! And even later, my explorations in the Myst-Universe (It's a shame that I can't get those divine games to run under Windows 10 - really miss them, especially "Uru"). And of course it also reminds me to the old YES-covers, created by Roger Dean, and Rodney Mathews' genius work. But however, Hens is right: the right Zombie in the first picture should be much smaller (or the left one bigger), because of the perspective. That is irritating.

I think I have found a way to make the step disappear. If you create the brush head as an image, that basic space (the Artboard) is wider than the brush head itself, the result doesn't create this step. Means, there must be some empty (black) space before and after the image informations of the brush head. Maybe it is somehow logical or intended, can't really say that. Edit: In my case, the Artboard was 1600 px wide and the brush head 700 px. Too less space doesn't work. Edit again: It also worked with a 1110 px x 500 px Artboard and a 550 px x 500 px brushhead on it. Possibly the Artboard must have at least the double space as the brushhead itself. The disadvantage of this is, that the curve begins and ends out off the range of the drawn stroke. And they don't have the same distance to the strokes start/end, so I think that there is a bug anyway.

It's the same for me. Definitely a bug, I think. The problem already shows up in the Brush Editing panel. If I drag the Opacity Variance slider to "1", this little step mostly disappears. But only in the Brush Editing panel, not in the drawing. Edit: Even if I type "0,5" into the Opacity Variance field, the step almost disappears - even the value "0,5" doesn't really work and is replaced by "0" immediately. Other adjustments in the Brush Editing panel don't have any effect on this problem.

That's a good idea. I'm planing to build one on my own, customized to my needs. But I'm planing it as a base for my Laptop, so that I am still able to use the keyboard. With space for a Mouse pad on the right side (doesn't need much space) and possibly also a shelf (or so) for an external DVD-/Harddisc-Drive. But of course it shouldn't become too huge and heavy. Still thinking about it. But we are off topic now.

I totally agree with you, trackpads drive me crazy. But I wouldn't buy a small mouse, because they are very unwieldy. I had one and hated it. I use a normal wireless mouse now, on my laptop. The problem is, that you need some sort of table to work on with the mouse.