iconoclast

That's an interesting problem. But I think it would lead to a very complex convention, only invited people would understand. As far as I know the heraldic hatching system only handles primary colors. So it only needs few different hatches. How many different smells do exist? And how to describe them?

Paint with cheese. 😄 But I'm afraid, we are not the first ones with that idea.

Yes, absolutely. Even there may be a minority that thinks that it is art to make war - "state of the art". But you are right, the term "art" is diffuse. Art and handicraft were not as separated from each other in the past as they are today. Artists like Rembrandt had workshops with lots of students that were painting his works, and it is often not easy to say what the master created himself. That is one of the reasons why the term "art" is not that serious and important to me.

As I was a student of arts about 20-30 years ago, I was mainly interested in comics and airbrush painting. I had problems with both at my art academy, because the most art professors (don't know the right term in english) didn't think that comics could be art and most of them didn't like airbrush painting. I think, of course comics can be art - they don't need to be, but they can - and the airbrush is nothing but a special sort of brush, so a tool you can create art with. Today, as far as I know, they also offer comic workshops at that academy. - Sometimes the early bird misses the worm, as it seems. It is the same with computers and apps. They are tools. What you create with them can be art, but it is not necessarily art. At least not high art. In german law we have a term called "Schöpfungshöhe", that is important for copyrights. It means something like originality. I think that this is an important point. The great artists in history all had a grade of originality in some things that made their work unique and recognizable. That is it what makes them great art, I think. To be honest, I don't make the rules. It is just my point of view. But it seems to make sense. If I watch the work that the most people create with digital apps, most of them seem to be interested in recreating analog art effects. That is very interesting to me, I'm often really impressed, and I often try to do it myself, but this alone is nothing that will save you a place in the history of arts. For that it needs some sort of relevant innovation in your work, I think. Think of Van Gogh's colors and wild strokes. Something like that was never seen before. Or think of Monet's handling of light and colors. Caravaggio's masterful Chiaroscuro. Goya's genius characterization of individuals. Picasso's deconstruction of natural shapes... All these are milestones in the evolution of art. Nonetheless of course many artists create art that has not this milestone character, but is really impressing anyway. Some of the things I love may be trash for many others. Doesn't matter to me. By the way, there is an interesting progress going on in our times. As I said in an earlier post, Picasso, Braque and some others invented the cubism as photography was invented. At the moment we reached a point where photography turns more and more into abstraction. Not only in the choice of the subjects for photographs, that are often abstract shapes in nature. Even in the opportunities image editing offers. "Sharper than reality" is one of the catchphrases for what I mean. Opportunities that create mannerisms. One day, I'm sure, people will see this kind of photographs, and they will say: "Ah, looks like early 21 century". I sometimes don't like this too sharp images, because there is a point where they begin to look static and lifeless. But that might be a matter of taste. In some german news forums, there are often discussions about if Photoshoping is legitimately. There are always many purists that say that it isn't and that it kills the art of photography. As often in social media, there is almost only black and white in the standpoints. I don't think so. I think it's a new form of art. But it depends on what kind of photography we are talking about. Wildlife photography f.e. shouldn't be sharper than reality, I think, because that is not natural, not "wildlife". And especially press photography has of course to be as unedited as possible, because it has to show reliable truth.

I know many examples like that. For example about twenty years ago or so a cleaning woman cleaned a bucket, that was greased with fat. The problem was that the place she did that was a museum, and the one who had greased the bucket was Joseph Beuys. A very funny catastrophe, I think. My compassion belongs to the poor cleaning woman. But I think, what she did probably somehow was the completion of this piece of art. The german Comedian Hape Kerkeling once had a genius performance as a classical reziter/singer, accompanied by a pianist on grand piano, in front of an audience of members of educated classes. His recital consisted of the dramatically intoned words "der Wolf, das Lamm... Hurz" ("the wolf, the lamb...hurz"). Even the main part of the audience wasn't very convinced to be witness of fine arts at the moment. In fact some got very angry. And that was really funny. I would say, this whole action was a piece of art - about art. But there are also examples that are not so funny. For example the case of Leopold and Loeb, two young guys from the american east coast upper class that were inspired by Nietzsches "Übermensch" and killed the 14 year old Bobby Franks, as a piece of art and to demonstrate their superiority. A case that probably inspired Alfred Hitchcock for his movie "Rope" (1948), that was of course also meant as an allusion on and reflection about the sick Nazi-ideology.

You could create some different frames and add them to the Assets panel. After that you could simply drag the frames you want from the panel onto your image whenever you need it.

That's an interesting comparison. In fact some people are talking about "the art of war". But I don't think that it is common sense. It is a permanent discussion what art shall be allowed to do. Some say, everything. But in our laws, the freedom of art is only one of many laws. And it collides with some of them. For example, I think it is inacceptable if art harms human rights. So the "art of war" can't really be art. In the best case, handicraft.

Ah, the good old discussion about what is art and what is not. A never ending story. Even because the term "art" is subjected by a sort of evolution. So it is permanently changing. For hundreds of years artists struggled to create as authentic reflections of what they saw with their eyes. Then photography was invented and artists like Braque and Picasso reacted with the invention of Cubism. - Who could beat the naturalism of a photography! Someone once said that if you find enough people who pay applause to what you did - it's art. Today I would state it more precisely: If you find enough people who pay enough money for what you created - it's art. This is the definition of art in capitalism. And so the way the term "art" is handled today is a mirror to the reality of capitalism. And, damn(!), this is what art does: it is a mirror to the reality. Some time ago someone told me that Yoko Ono once exhibited an ordinary apple on one of her vernissages. And while the audience was watching "her work", some waitresses distributed apples of exactly the same sort in the exhibition hall - for free. How can an apple be expensive art if absolutely similar apples at the same time are thrown around for free? I think the answer is that the apple in fact isn't the piece of art. But the whole action is. The message. There are many people out there who can paint or can learn to paint like Rembrandt, Van Gogh or any other famous artist. But they will never be the originals. If they do it, it's only handicraft, not art. It is not relevant. About a year ago I saw a documentary on TV, about a painting international experts still struggle about if it is an original Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi). Very interesting, because the owner, a museum, of course is very interested in that it is an original. Financial interest and reputation. So the surveyors, after a lot of flip-flopping, finally came to the conclusion that it is an original. But it is still very doubtful. I personally don't think so. We must not be lucky with all this, and in fact this variant of art is not what I want to do, but I think it somehow makes sense.

Normally it is very easy, but at the moment there is a bug in the apps. So if you are on Windows, follow the instructions in my last post and it should work as it normally should. It is not really challenging. You just need to copy the config-file that is linked in my post into the mentioned folders for each app. After that, (re)start each app, and you should be able to register/sign in and then have access to the goodies. If you are on MAC, you should follow the concerning different workflow somewhere here in this thread.

Yes, and there is one very important thing too, that many people that want to create collages don't think of: if you want it to look authentic, you have to consider the lighting perspective. It will always look somehow weird if the light on the inserted object comes from a different side than the light on the background.

Probably yes. I never tried it that way

To release very fine details like hair from backgrounds is probably one of the most challenging things in image editing. How to do that depends on some preconditions like f.e. the contrast between the hair and the background and even the complexity of the background. Also the resolution of the image is important because if the single hairs are not much thicker than the pixels of the image, their colors will be a mix of the color of the hair and the background, so that it looks like a color blending. In many cases it is the better solution to erase the thin hairs and to restore them by painting. You can use thin brushes for this or prefabricated brushes with hairlocks and strands (that you can find on the web). You can take the colors you need for this directly from the hair, with the color picker. To release objects from backgrounds, I usually select objects roughly first (usually with the Selection Brush Tool), then refine it as much as possible automatically, apply a mask and then refine it manually by using a brush that fits to my needs. To add single hairs, I use a thin brush with slightly reduced opacity, flow and hardness. This will of course work much better if you have a graphic tablet. In that case you can also use dynamics to let the brush get a little more and less thicker and more and less opaque by varying the pen pressure. It will take some practice, good eyes and diligence. And you should not exaggerate. But I'm afraid, a one-click-solution for this problem doesn't exist. One additional hint: always judge the result by using the zoom factor 100% (1:1). Otherwise you could fiddle until the final day, without need.

It's just a panel to load reference images for painting. If you want to paint a portrait of a certain person for example, you can put a reference image on your screen. ArtRage has a very nice solution for this. You can place the reference panel absolutely free on the screen, it's freely resizable, and even the image inside the panel can be zoomed and resized. And you can rotate the panel. And if the cursor comes close to the panel, it blinds out temporarily, so that it is not in the way. I don't like the new version of ArtRage for some reasons, but this feature is very nice.

Can't this be realised by giving the text frame a size that forces the text into a vertical alignment? This should also work with columns, I think, if they are narrow enough. Precondition is of course that the character width are not too different. But that doesn't seem to be the case with this chinese letters, as far as I see.

Yes, that could be usefull. Krita and ArtRage have this feature too. I often use it. As a tip for the meantime: you can also use the image viewer freeware IrfanView as reference window. It has an option to always keep it in front of all opened windows and apps.

Hi Ana! Have you tried the workaround (for Windows) below? For me it worked.

Yes, sorry, I always forget that. That's really sad.

There are really many ways to turn colored images into greyscales. If you don't like the filters "Black/White" and "HSL", you can also create an additional pixel layer, fill it with some sort of grey (even black or white) and apply the blend mode "Saturation" to it. Another nice opportunity, I used for a long time, is the filter "Simulate Film" in the "Color" category of the free G'MIC plugin (more than 500 additional filters). It contains a list of different presets that simulate classic black&white photo films. But unfortunately this is a destructive method. There are also some other filters in this plugin that can desaturate an image. Another opportunity could be to use a LUT. This would be a very easy and non-destructive way, if you can find a LUT that fits your needs. The roughest way would be of course to change the color space into greyscales.

Hi jave! Usually this block pattern means that there is no background. It is the way to show transparency. You can test it by putting an image layer below the layer with the blood drops. If there is transparency, you should see there the image on the layer below.

Could the image files possibly be "read-only" protected? Don't really know, just an idea.

OK, but why this discussion? The basic point I was talking about in my first post was that it is a misunderstanding that one can upscale a pixel image in a better quality if he/her converts it into a vector graphic. Vector graphics are well known for the opportunity of lossless scaling (SVG="Scalable Vector Graphics"). But that is the source of the misunderstanding, because the source image still consists of pixels, and they will not disappear wonderously just by autotracing. They will also be in the vector graphic. But vectorised. So you will not get a poster in high end photo quality from a small image you downloaded from web. That is what I was talking about. Because it is a wide spread misunderstanding I already was confronted with several times. And I thought that possibly this was what the threat starter wanted to do.

Realy nice LUTs! Very useful! Many Thanks for that! By the way, for those who can't get enough of LUTs (like I do), take a look a the free G'MIC plugin. In the category "Colors" there is a filter called "Color Presets" with a huge amount of very good LUTs. In the same category are also some other functions for CLUTs (Cube-LUTs), f.e. to create your own or to use external ones.

If you make a photo with your camera, it is like laying a raster over whatever you are photographing. What details of the reality you are shooting can be displayed on the photo, depends on the size of the details in proportion to the resolution of the photo. Exemplarily hair, branches and other fine stuff like that. Depending on the proportion they will be displayed as aliased lines with diffuse blended colors - the pixels are a mix of the color of the hair and of the background, because the single pixels interleave both. Or the single hair, branch etc. can't be displayed at all, if it is too small. Logical? If you vectorise pixel images, you always get more or less posterised images, depending on the threshold settings you choose. The point is that to get a vector image of a photographic quality, converted from a pixel image, you would need to vectorise each single pixel. And this would only work in the same quality if you forgo scaling, because otherwise the vectorised pixels would become visible. And the resulting file would be very complex and much bigger than the pixel image. So it doesn't make sense. Vector dates are dates like points in a coordinate system, angles, curvatures... Vector graphics are made for graphic images, not for photographs or paintings with many details. To think you can upscale photos lossless by converting them to vector images - because vector images can be scaled lossless - is a fatal fallacy. If that would work, it would be more like witchcraft than physics. Nontheless it is not really the first time I have this discussion. As I said, it's a classical misunderstanding. By the way, sorry for my bad english. Hope it's understandable anyway.

It is a classical misunderstanding to believe that you can upscale a small pixel image to a big high quality image by converting it into a vector graphic. Pixel images consist of pixels. Pixels are small squares. Each single square contains only one color. So pixel images in fact are tesselated images, mosaics. If you convert a pixel image into vectors, you will convert pixels into vector. And if you upscale that, you will upscale the pixels, so that the quality will get even worse, the more you upscale (aliasing). Another point is that pixel images can't contain details that are smaller than the pixels. If you could upscale a pixel image without aliasing, you would have to perceive that the result has an irritating loss of details, because where should they come from if they can't be on the source image? So, it's true that you can scale vector images lossless, but you can't fool reality by converting a pixel image into vectors to upscale it lossless. If you think about it a little, you will see that it is irrational.

I'm not sure if this topic has to do with it, but since last year Type-1 fonts are no longer supported - even by Adobe. It's outdated. I don't know if Affinity still supports Type 1. But I don't think so. What font format is your Mrs Eaves font?