iconoclast

Not bad, but I don't like the lens flares on the left side. They don't look realistic. And I can't recognize Pennywise in this version. And, in my opinion, the shield doesn't need so much fog, because it is the part of the image that is closest to the beholder and should also be readable.

Yes, I heard that too, in a Youtube video. Maturin is an ancient god in shape of a turtle that is mentioned in several tales King wrote. And yes, brighter centers. If you like, also take a look at Texturelabs.org. They offer some nice lens flares for free as PNGs. You only need to remove their black backgrounds using Affinity's Mix Modes.

I think, I prefer the version without the lens flares. You could possibly make the eyes a little more glowing to emphasize the spooky aspects of those figures. But if you like the lens flares, you could simply duplicate their layers to get them more intensive. Or emphasize their centers. I read the book "IT" about thirty years ago and saw the TV-movies and the new Hollywood versions, but I can't remember that I ever stumbled upon the name "Maturin". Also the ship's doctor in the movie "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" (Paul Bettany) is called Maturin, and I think that they didn't only pick the name from a telephone book. But it's not important for your project anyway.

OK, maybe I don't really understand that, but if the lens flares are so dull and weak, what does this say about the powers of the three figures? But it looks a bit better in the last version. By the way, does this figur "Maturin" point at Charles Robert Maturin, author of "Melmoth the Wanderer", a gothic novel from the 19th century? Do you know anything about it?

Did you possibly lock the layer by accident?

Looks good. There is at first one thing that makes me think. Not that it looks bad, but it is unusual: the lens flares at the top of the poster are darker than the background. Is that somehow intended? And the dog looks a little bit too inserted. But that is not too important in this case, I think. I would possibly have placed the spooky house on the right side on the same height level as the house on the left., for a more harmonic composition This looks a little bit messy. But it is not a big problem.

But as far as I understand, you only used Designer to scale the document. That is not creative work. And it is not clever, because even you do it in a vector graphics software, pixel images loose quality if you scale them. Especially if you created the images with AI, it is not very clever, because the only way to scale (kind of) lossless is AI. So you should better think about your workflow.

You can of course do that, if you want, but none of the three Affinity apps is made for creative writing. Usually writers use text editors. And the writings they create will be loaded into a DTP software like Publisher to prepare them for printing. The work you do in Publisher is the design, the layout, not the text. It is even safer to follow this workflow to prevent mistakes. For creative writing I can recommend Focus Writer by the way. It is freeware and distraction free and very simple to use. But of course there are even other apps that can be used for that. Whatever you are, you are very stubborn spreading a topic over the forums here, that doesn't really concern the Affinity apps as they don't offer AI capabilities. You can create a feature request for it in the Feature Request Forum, if you don't already have done that. But that should be enough. What you do here in fact looks like trolling.

In my eyes, it is very easy. Affinity Photo is an image editing software, Designer is a vector graphics software and Publisher is a DTP software. Non of them is a presentation software. So if you use them only for presentation, as pretence to advertise for AI or to misuse other peoples work, it is not really your creative work and a violation of the forum guidelines. Are you Lobbyist for AI or just a troll?

Yepp, I played Civilization too, long time ago. Today I play Snowrunner, which is damn cool. A Truck-Simulation with several snaggy Trucks in the wildernesses of North America, Kanada, Alaska; Norway and Syberia. Very realistic and with a lot of atmosphere. And it has a photo feature to make photos of the actual scenes in the beautiful landscape. Check it on Youtube. By the way, you see how unappealing AI is, because we permanently talk about other things.

It is definitely not the same feeling as analogue, but as I experienced after some times - and I was surprised about that - I evolved some kind of feeling for the different brushes too. That's of course delusion, but it is helpful. The same by the way in Computer Games. Before I became a Computer user, I always thought that the digital world was the opposite of feeling. But you can evolve feeling for the behavior of e.g. digital brushes too. At least this is my experience. It is not a complete substitute to analogue painting, but it definitely has its advantages. But AI is another topic. It may have its advantages in many technical cases, but it is dangerous in many others. If it only is a tool that supports your creativity, it is okay, I think. But if it replaces your creativity and steals from the creative works of others, it is poison.

I mainly painted with an Airbrush in my analogue days. That's a different experience too, because the analogue Airbrush never touches the ground. And the stylus doesn't simulate the Double Action (separate control for air flow and colour flow with just one lever/button). Wacom offers a digital hardware Airbrush for its graphics tablets ( I have a Cintiq), but I don't know how this works and feels, because I never tested it. It's expensive and I don't know if it's worth it. So my digital airbrushing absolutely doesn't feel like airbrushing, even it may look like it. But a definite advantage of digital airbrushing is that you don't need to clean and fill the airbrush again and again. That takes a lot of time and work in analogue airbrushing. But in my opinion, it is e.g. astounding how much it feels like wet colours mix I if you paint with digital watercolours or oil colours. From an objective point of view, it must always feel like a pencil, when you draw with the stylus. But imagination often does a good job.

I didn't ask if you bought "papers", but OK, you can't say if and how users can create canvases for Rebelle. Thanks anyway.

Hi! That sounds interesting. I didn't care for Rebelle the last weeks. For different reasons. One also was that at least Rebelle Pro - and that is the much more interesting one - needs a more powerful PC than mine. If I buy a new one next time it will possibly become worth thinking about Rebelle for me. At the moment it doesn't seem so. I feel confident about that it is a very good app. But using this opportunity: Can you create your own canvases, brushes... etc. for Rebelle? And is it difficult? I think I read somewhere about canvases and brushes created by users, but I'm not sure. I use to create a lot of stuff for all of my apps. And yes, in Artrage the stencils are simple PNGs too. But a very useful feature. There are also a Ruler mode and a Guideline mode for the stencils, that allow to exactly trace the edges of the stencils by hand. This feature to trace vectors with pixel brushes is something I recently asked for in the feature request section here. I think it will come in one of the next releases of AfPhoto. At least I hope so. I use to work with that feature in GIMP and Photoshop. It is of course even better if the tools you use for tracing have more options, So I'm convinced that Rebelle is better in these things. Artrage doesn't have that too. By the way, also Krita and MyPaint have this feature. MyPaint is a little bit rustic, but you can even paint nice paintings with it. Krita is very good and becomes better and better. But I prefer the brush system in Artrage, that is more handy and colour blending works much better.

I almost agree with you. I didn't test all those apps, but I'm an Artrage-User for many years, and that does a pretty nice job. I also have an eye on Rebelle since some years, which looks very interesting, but that is too expensive for me. Even because all the additional stuff like canvases, brushes and stencils cost a lot of money, and it is still not clear to me if you can create them on your own as easy as in other apps. But the drip and bleed functions look very promising, and this micropixel thing sounds good. That all works fine without AI. I also love Affinity Photo, but the simulation e.g. of watercolour effects is not really very haptic. Remember: in analogue painting, these effects are side effects that appear because of the properties of the medium and the tool you are working with. You don't paint the effects. They happen. In digital painting you have to paint the effects if you want them. There is no option in AfPhoto to blend colours right at the moment you paint with them, without changing the tool. You can create some natural looking effects, but that always needs some workaround and doesn't feel like analogue painting. Even in Artrage, there are still some things, adjustments you have to do, that still keep you from this "analogue feeling". I have no clear idea how to solve that, even with AI, but possibly there will be a solution somehow some day. Basicly I'm am very sceptic about AI, just like you. And I also want AI only as a tool, not to be creative instead of me, stealing the creative work of others.

I'm not sure, but I suppose that you have to do it for each single file, one by one. The better way would be to give the folder it's initial name again. And don't rename folders after you linked its files in Publisher, in the future.

Yes, I know that painting of Magritte. As I said, this feature will be useful to upscale in most cases. At least if you only want bigger photos for decorative purposes. But it will be a problem for press photos and evidence photos, because the upscaled photos no longer really represent the reality. But that is of course not the biggest problem with AI. It will cause a huge amount of fakes and lies. It already does. And it will make it easy for many people to falsly take all the credit for things they are in fact not able to create. I'm afraid creativity will loose it's meaning and we will be flooded with nice looking, but meaningless trash. It will become much more difficult to make a living with true creative work. Much more difficult than it already is. And these are only the problems concerning creatives. There will be a lot of problems in other ranges too. Think of, that also the Internet already turned out to be a huge multiplicator for lies. An instrument that enables muddleheads to become presidents.

The discussion about AI is very interesting and ambivalent, I think. AI has Pros and Cons. Of course, it would often be nice if we could e.g. upscale any photo without losses in quality. But is it really good what Ai does and what we use it for? Does it really upscale without a loss of quality? Even if the upscaled photos look very good - are they still photos anyway? Or are they, properly speaking, collages? And if I only need to tell a software in a few words what image I want to have, and it creates that image for me - am I the author? Or is the software the author? Or all the artists out there, the software used as source for it's piece of art? I think, it would be nice if AI could help e.g. to create tools that are able to simulate the behavior of analog painting tools and colours in a more haptic way. E.g. watercolour effects. To make the look & feel of painting on graphics tablets as much realistic as possible. But I don't want a software that is creative instead of me. That could in fact be the end of art, in my opinion. Because painting is not only to produce certain results, but it's also to learn how things work - light, colour, perspective, proportions, atmosphere, anatomy... Also the journey is the destination. I would steal myself the chance to learn all these things if I would delegate that process to a software. Even the pocket calculator enabled the most people to easily add, subtract, multiply, divide..., it didn't help the people to learn calculating. As the latest PISA-studies approved.

Possibly it wasn't a change by purpose. Sometimes small mistakes slip in the codes when the developers work on it. Sometimes only one sign can cause that certain features don't work or don't even appear in the GUI. I have no deeper understanding of programming, but I had lessons in HTML, CSS and Javascript some years ago, which is somehow similar to programming. And this problem exists there too. Sometimes it is e.G. necessary to deactivate certain lines of code temporarily, so you set clamps or something like that (can't clearly remember). And if you forget to delete these clamps after you finished programming, the feature, the line of code is meant for, doesn't work. Imagine how many lines of code are in such a software like Affinity Photo, Designer or Publisher. It is nearly impossible to create something like that without any errors. And it is often like the hunt for the needle in the haystack to find these wrong signs in the code.

Too late, I recently requested it again.

Hi! Sometimes I miss an option to stroke vector curves in Affinity Photo with its pixel brushes. It is a very helpful feature to e. G. give text a brush outline or for clean and smooth drawing and retouching with every tool. Of course it is possible to do a part of this in Designer, with its brushes. But that is a bit limited, I think. I used to work with this feature in GIMP and Photoshop for a long time and I would like to have it in Photo too.

I don't know if "Magnetic Brush" is the right term. GIMP has this feature since at least fifteen years or even longer, as far as I remember. And I suppose Photoshop too. You can let every brush trace vector curves there. That's e.G. nice to give text brush stroke outlines, but even for very clean and smooth drawing with every brush you want. And even with other tools than the paintbrush: Dodge and Burn, Blur and Sharpen... It does basically the same as the most brushes in Designer do. But, as you certainly know too, the brushes in Photo have much more settings and can do much more than the Designer brushes. It is certainly not the most important feature for Photo to have, but I had several opportunities in the past, when I missed it. In that cases I had to change to GIMP, that does that very well and supports Photoshop Brushes too. Yes, maybe I should write a feature request. Even I would suppose that there already must be one.

I'm not sure if I understand what you mean. If I want to trace a vector curve with one of Photos pixel brushes, why should I create a style or asset in Designer with a vector brush? If your workflow would work (haven't tested it), would there be a difference between it and to draw the traced curve in Designer, without using Photo? To say it again, what I want to do is to trace a vector curve with one of Photo's pixel brushes. Not with Designer's "vector" brushes.

Hi Walt! OK, I will check that out. Interesting hint. But it would be nice to have that option in Photo too, because there are so many nice brushes that can't be used for tracing strokes. Designer's "Vector"-brushes are a little bit limited compared to the pixel brushes in Photo.

I think what he means is the option to align pixel brushes in Photo to a vector curve. I miss that option too. It would e.G. allow to trace the contours of letters with every pixel brush you want. GIMP has such an option. As far as I remember, Photoshop has it too. And because there is this brush icon in the stroke options, I think Photo should have it too, but by some reason it still doesn't work.