Corgi

When comparing small, agile businesses to large, established businesses, it's seems logical to expect that the smaller company will: Create products which generally have fewer features than the larger company, but will gradually close the gap over time. Be the first to incorporate some disruptive technologies. Be more likely to tip their hand about future product evolution, to draw interest and create buzz. Although the Affinity suite is very good and boasts certain capabilities that Adobe can't match, it feels as if the feature gap is growing rather than shrinking. And this is most evident in the case of AI - both generative, and the LIghtroom productivity features. The gap is unnerving, as is the lack of a good sense of Affinity's future direction. At least we now know that there are no immediate plans for generative AI, and can plan (and provide feedback) accordingly. Even so, I plan to continue to use the Affinity suite, and can always supplement with third-party tools when necessary, for AI, vector trace, image organization, et al. Yet I will miss the ease-of-use that comes with integration.

It's also a bug (2.1.0, Windows 10) in that upon starting Designer and going into the Export window for the first time, the Matte thumbnail is pure white (no red slash through it) even though there is no matte actually selected. Following the suggestion from @debraspicher of selecting the "no matte" option in the Swatch panel fixes this. Closing Designer and re-opening it can restore the default of "no matte" as well, even though the color thumbnail is incorrect.

I tend to doubt there are many people who are happier to have their content scaled down smaller than the thumbnail square in order to fit blank areas due to a rotated bounding box. Can anyone think of a situation in which the current implementation is really helpful? But in any case, I suggested it as an option, which would give users their preference (though perhaps not making developers themselves happy 😑) Thanks for the link -- that thread seemed to reference a different situation, in which the aspect ratio of the content doesn't match the aspect ratio of the thumbnail. I don't have any issue with the way that's treated currently.

Minor suggestion (for all apps, presumably). Right now, it appears that the size of the contents displayed in the Layer panel thumbnail depends on the size/orientation of the bounding box, rather than the size of the contents themselves. This can make objects appear to be different sizes when they're not, and doesn't make full use of the space available in the thumbnail display. For example, create a perfect circle and the thumbnail will be filled with the circle edge-to-edge. Now rotate the circle 45 degrees and the thumbnail display shows a smaller circle, presumably about 70% of its full size. So it might be nice, at least optionally, to scale the thumbnail to fit-to-contents rather than fit-to-bounding-box. When you're dealing with thumbnails this small, every little bit of detail helps.

It would be nice to formalize the ability to use gradients with the Paint Brush, not just solid colors. While it is evidently already possible to do this, it's an awkward process, and apparently an unsupported feature. From what I can tell, the only way to paint with a given gradient in AP is to already have it pre-defined as a Swatch or Recent color (i.e., there is no way to define or edit a gradient with the Paint Brush selected). So it would seem helpful to have the option to create and edit gradients from within the Color Chooser. Please refer to this topic:

Thank you, Lee. Please let me know if using this unintended feature is liable to cause problems, and/or whether I should submit an explicit feature request in the Feedback forum. Among other things, it's a great way to paint clouds. 🙂

Thanks, Lee, but that's not quite what I was asking about. My mistake, since I used the wrong terminology; I shouldn't have said "fill" since it's really the stroke I'm interested in. I can already use the paint brush and paint with a gradient stroke: ... The way I did this was to use the gradient tool to create a gradient, solely to get the gradient I wanted into the "Recent" swatch list. Then I chose that Recent swatch as the stroke color. As you can see above, I'm able to use the Paint Brush with that gradient. However, I don't see how to modify the stroke gradient. If I double-click the stroke color in the Color or Swatches panel, I get the Color Chooser, rather than a dialog where I can change the gradient properties. So I'm wondering whether there's a more direct way to create and edit a gradient as a stroke color, since using the Swatches and Recent colors is cumbersome for this.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but here goes. In Affinity Photo (v2.0.4, Windows 10) after activating the Paint Brush, is there a way to create or modify a gradient fill color so that I can paint with the gradient? It seems that I can't do that unless I've previously created the gradient in the Swatches panel. All I can see for the Paint Brush are options to set a solid fill color. Thanks!

Thanks, @carl123 and @garryp. At least on my system (Windows 10, v2), in order to use the arrow keys or mouse wheel to run through the Preview modes, I need to first click on the word "Preview" or click once or twice on an option to activate the field. So although those are easy workarounds, they're not clean or obvious (at least, to me :-)) Also, in experimenting, I see what might be a bug. When the Refine Section dialog opens, if I immediately hit an arrow key (before clicking on anything), the main window selection preview disappears and the dialog box becomes inoperative. If anyone can reproduce this, I'll submit a bug report. UPDATE: I can't reproduce this at will in v2, only in v1, so maybe it was UBD. Never mind.

Minor suggestion: Presently, when using the Refine Selection tool, in order to change the Preview mode the user has to click on the Overlay drop-down, then click on the new Preview mode to see its effect. This is okay, but in cases where I'm not sure which Preview mode is best, it's clumsy since it involves a lot of clicking. In the spirit of live previewing, it would seem better to allow the user to click-drag or mouseover up and down the drop-down field to instantly observe the different Preview options before committing to a choice. Previewing the Preview mode, if you will.

I know you've already worked around the problem, but you can kinda achieve the desired effect quickly by adding the Invert adjustment and then setting the blend range so that only the pure black is affected. It's not perfect, although you could make the "Police Academy" text smoother by making a copy of the layer with the blend range a little less sharp, and masking everything except the text.

Thank you, Patrick. This is what I'd been presuming, as it didn't seem likely that it was routine preparation for a 2.1 Beta.

It seems people aren't understanding my question, because this doesn't really cover what I'm asking. If I had to guess, it would be that they might restructure the whole thing. Instead of the three top forums being Designer/Photo/Publisher, there will be only two top-level forums: v2 and [Archived]. Then the original three top-level forums will appear under v2. This isn't really an important topic. I was just concerned. There was no beta for 2.0.4, and Serif would have avoided some big problems if they'd had a Beta for v2.0.0. Betas are super-valuable.

Not sure what part of that thread is relevant, but I might have missed it. The point I'm trying to make is that levels of the forum hierarchy (which wouldn't need to disappear if there are going to be further v2 betas) have indeed disappeared. For example, the 2.0.4 stuff could be archived without deleting the entire Affinity Designer Beta Forums tree. Just looking to see if someone from Serif explains.

Sorry, I mean Designer 2. It's gone, as are Photo 2 and Publisher 2. There are only archived forums at this moment.