mrqwak

Hmm thanks, but I'm struggling to see how it's good when the alternatives new ways are all more cumbersome! I'm becoming resigned to the fact that, while very pretty, and almost certainly great for some forms of digital art; AP is next to useless for game pixel art (compared with say, something like Aseprite). Sadly, it's only a handful of things that let it down, which I'm sure could be easily rectified; but it's just falling on deaf ears, dev team doesn't seem at all interested.

Hi Chris, has there been any movement on this? It's been a while..

Is there no option to change the default grid size? It seems, every time I open a new image or create a new document, I need to apply my own custom grid, in order to get the grid I want (and I want the same grid for all the images I'm editing). It's just one of many features I find missing, to the detriment of Affinity Photo.

Thank you for your workaround suggestions loukash. Those options do work, but they're quite cumbersome. If you're doing a lot of operations moving tiles or sprites around on a bitmap, and everything needs to be grid aligned; it's just a lot more work compared to using the Marquee Tool (assuming the devs had chosen to make it respect the snap to grid option). I believe it's a poor design choice on part of the developers; I'd love to hear why they chose to make it this way, and if there are other considerations which factor in, that I may not be aware of. I don't see why why they can't at least include a preference; 'marquee and pixel tool obey snap to grid' type thing.Then at least people could turn that on / off depending on their particular use case.

I'm using Affinity Photo to create graphics for 2D games. So there's a lot of tile-set work, or images where elements (e.g. sprites) are arranged in to a 16x16 or 32x32 pixel grid. 99.99% of the time I'm working on pixel layers, not shapes, or using the Pen tool etc. So, I may want to, for example, grab a 16x16 pixel area from a pixel layer, and copy or move it to another location on the bitmap layer; source and destination locations being aligned with the 16x16 pixel grid. Most pixel art oriented apps have no problem doing this; Gimp, Photoshop, Aesprite, Pro Motion, etc, all do this. Stunned that Affinity Photo doesn't; there really should be an option to turn this on.

Actually, I can not even get the selection marquee thing to snap to grid! Photoshop does this no problem. It seems like a curious design choice not to have the brush or selection tool snap to grid.

Thanks for the clarification. That's a pity, it would have been far more useful for it to do so. Is there absolutely no way (preference or shortcut key etc) to enable this functionality for the Pixel Tool or other brushes?

Hello! Should snapping work with the Pixel Tool? I have snap grid setup, and it works fine with the Pen Tool, but not at all with the Pixel Tool. Is this by design, or am I doing something wrong? Thanks,

Thanks Fixx. Yeah, I guessed as much. I would have needed a pixel accurate, not scaled-down, version of the composite image; so the preview idea probably wouldn't work for me. Turns out I don't need to access it in the end; I can have AP just save as .PSD format, which is fine for my needs.

Thank you Chris. I think if you ask most pixel artist; you'd pretty much universally get the same view, that it would be better. Fingers crossed! Also, thanks for passing my concern on to the devs.

Hi, Hope someone can help. I'm a developer and writing some code to read .afphoto files. Can anyone direct me to the specification for the .afphoto file format? I only need to access the image composite as it would appear if you opened it up in AP (i.e. not bothered about individual layers etc, just the composite of all visible layers and also canvas width and height etc). Thanks.

Thank you Chris. If you speak with developers, please let them know there is a serious usability concern with this. Not having the canvas update immediately when pressing the mouse button, feels very wrong. From a usability perspective, I'd seriously question the wisdom of the design decision to make it work the way it does. For pixel art, for me, this would be a deal breaker; which is a shame, because otherwise it's a very nice application.

I'm on a M1 Mac Mini, latest version of MacOS (11.2.1), latest version of Affinity Photo (1.9.0), no special hardware or software running, just using a normal mouse. With the Pixel Tool selected, if I press the mouse button to start drawing on the canvas; nothing happens until I start moving the mouse. I would expect the canvas to be drawn on immediately, without waiting for mouse movement. It's been suggested that this doesn't happen on the Windows version, so it's possibly a bug, rather than behaviour that the development team intended. I've described the bug (and included video etc) in the following thread:

I feel for pixel art it's quite off-putting (to the extent, where I'd use another app for pixel art). I imagine most graphic applications aimed at pixel art would instantly update the pixel space, as soon as you press down on the mouse (without waiting for the mouse to move before updating). Assuming, this is just how the development team have coded Affinity Photo, what's the best way to raise this as an issue for review (and hopefully a 'fix' in a future version)? Thanks.

Thank you all. I tried the suggested method; and it's still doing the same thing. When I press and hold the mouse button (with Pixel Tool selected), nothing happens until I actually move the mouse. Please see following video: I've zoomed in so you can see the pixels; while I am not pressing the mouse button, the pixel brush is visible; as I press the mouse button (but before I move the mouse) it disappears, finally as I move the mouse, I can see the pixels being placed. In the video, the vertical (green) line I make while moving the mouse; so there is no extended period of time where I have the mouse button pressed but not moving the mouse. Is this something that happens for everyone, or is there a problem with my install / setup? Thanks.

Hope someone can help. I'm trying to use Affinity Photo for pixel art; using the Pixel Tool. Everything seems great, however, there's one niggle; when I press the mouse button, nothing appears on the canvas until I start moving the mouse. I would like to have a pixel appear as soon as I press the mouse button down (i.e. before moving / dragging mouse about). Is that possible? I'm on a M1 Mac, using latest version of Affinity Photo. Thanks.