[PSD Export not working]

I can confirm PSD export failing in Publisher. The error message appears after roughly 1 Minute and is very unspecific: "An error occurred while exporting to: /Users/Alina/Downloads/Elsha of the Infinite.psd"

I can also confirm PSD export getting stuck in Designer. This is as far as it ever got, even after 3 minutes before I aborted it. Furthermore I was unable to even cancel the export, I force quit Designer after waiting for a minute after pressing cancel.

MacBook Pro 2018 with 2.7 GHz i7, 16 GB RAM, 235 GB free on internal SSD
macOS Big Sur 11.2.1 (20D74)
Affinity Publisher 1.9.0
Affiinity Designer 1.9.0

[Export to .BMP]

For me it's embedded systems with microcontrollers that can load and display BMPs from storage like SD cards easily without a library because almost no conversion has to be done. Example:

https://gamebuino.com/academy/standalone/add-images-to-your-games

Quote

Supported are BMP files with 4-bit, 24-bit and 32-bit bitdepth

 

[Modify stroke width / pressure profile directly on the line]

Hi,

I'm sure this must have been asked before but I couldn't easily find a similar topic.

Is there a way yet to modify the varying stroke width that a pressure profile creates, but directly on the curve? I've switched to Designer early after it came out and it's my day-to-day screen design tool now. For illustration and lettering work however I've always missed the ability to use a tool directly on my strokes and lines to fine tune their line thickness in place.

The only way I see at the moment is still the Pressure window next to the stroke properties window in the dialog that opens when you click the line thickness. There I can edit the pressure curve and see the result on my canvas. At times this feels a bit blunt though, because I'm editing widths in a tiny window for a potentially long stroke where I want certain variations in very particular places.

The node tool already shows a line perpendicular to the path when hovering over it that kind of looks like it could hint at a way to modify line thickness right there, but I was unable to find a combination of modifier keys to perform the action. I was hoping the newly added sculpt mode of the pencil tool may be what I need but it turns out to be something entirely different.

This is really the only feature I'm still missing from Designer compared to the tools I've used before, and thankfully Designer does a boat load more for me and my particular needs than any previous tool I've used, so it's hard for me to complain. Still, please add my vote for such a tool so that we'll be able to fine tune stroke thicknesses in place.

P.S.: Layering strokes of various blend modes and pressure profiles with the new multiple stroke feature yields amazing results.

[Using Publisher only as a combined Designer/Photo app]

I understand that the Photo Persona in Publisher isn't a fully featured copy of Affinity Photo. I'm just asking about the Photo Persona. How far away is Publisher's Photo Persona from Affinity Photo's Photo Persona? (And respectively how far away is Publisher's Designer Persona from Affinity Designer's Designer Persona?)

[Using Publisher only as a combined Designer/Photo app]

Hi everyone,

quickly right off the bat: Well done! I think Publisher looks like a great app for DTP and I assume it's only going to get better, like Designer and Photo did.

My question however is not about the new features of Publisher but about its Studio Link functionality, integrating the Desginer and Photo personas. I'm often in the situation where I'm working on a screen layout in Designer and I need to quickly retouch an image I just added, So I need to do the "Edit in Photo …" dance, adjust a part of my photo, then "Edit in Designer …". That this kind of workflow exists at all is already a huge help, but it'll open a new app and reload the document and maybe I lose my place or I need to hunt for something I had just selected. It's certainly not as seamless as Studio Link seems to be.

So now since Publisher has the Designer and Photo personas built in, I'm thinking: Could I do all my design work in Publisher, mainly staying in the Designer persona and only switching over to the Photo persona when needed? This would certainly streamline my workflow, as I only need the secondary personas of Designer and Photo rarely, mainly in the very beginning or the very end of my process. Are the personas integrated into Publisher in a fully featured way? Do I get all the things I'm used to from the Designer Persona in Affinity Designer and the Photo Persona from Affinity Photo? Are there any limitations when it comes to Artboards, global colors, symbols, constraints etc.?

Kind reagrds
-- Alina

[Export to .BMP]

As I was thinking about that I remembered that macOS has folder actions and I was actually able to plug together a very quick folder action in Automator that does just that! Thanks for giving me the idea

[Export to .BMP]

18 hours ago, Patrick Connor said:

What modern game engines do not support 8 bit PNG say? Also as has been said many times, there are plenty of free tools that will convert to the (very old) poorly compressed BMP format if your app ONLY takes it.

 

 

The Gamebuino library requires bitmaps for example, if you don't transcode them into source code yourself, see https://gamebuino.com/fr/academy/tutorials/images

It needs BMP if they're being read from SD card directly by the Arduino which has very limited processing power. That's why it needs as little compression as possible and trades off processing power for it.

 

Edit: Oh and it's also very recent, in fact the Gamebuino Meta for which this is especially relevant came out in February.

 

It would be amazing if I could just use continuous BMP export of my game / app assets directly from Affinity Designer without needing to take extra steps of encoding and having to remember to do it every time for every asset I have changed.

[Exporting PSD with layers. How?]

By the way, I think that a hidden Threshold layer would cause the export into a layered format to be flattened sounds very unintuitive to me and I would have expected to just be exported like any other layer in a hidden state

[Exporting PSD with layers. How?]

Awesome! That solved my issue. Many thanks

[Exporting PSD with layers. How?]

Hello,

 

I have a web layout that I've created using Affinity Designer and I want to export it as a PSD with layers (preferrably editable where possible) so someone I'm working with who only has and knows Photoshop can make changes.

 

However, when I export the layout no matter which preset I choose (even PSD preserve editability) it always exports flattened to one pixel background layer. I'm opening the result in Photoshop CC 2018.

 

What do I need to change so that it will export my document to layers?

[Export to .BMP]

Please add me to the list.

The toolsets I use for wearables and handheld game systems, embedded systems in general, often only take bmp files. As it is right now I have to resort to using additional tools converting images saved out of Affinity software

[AP starts up with only a grey screen in certain conditions]

When AP has previously been in a mode where the interface isn't shown (e.g. after pressing Tab), and has been quit in that state, the next time I start it it starts up like in the screenshot below with just a huge grey surface. Initially I thought I had a broken executable and I reinstalled AP, and when it came up grey again I was already about to delete the preferences, but then I noticed I can open files, and once I had a file open and saw how the window looked then, it dawned on me that I just have to hit Tab.

 

I think this can be avoided if when opening AD without a document, it always defaults to showing the interface.

[Handling multi-page TIFF files (TIFFs with sub-files)]

Hi there,

 

from time to time I encounter TIFF files that contain multiple "pages". E.g. our HP scan software produces multi-page TIFF files when scanning multiple pages, instead of saving each page into a separate file. Reading about this online this seems to be known either as "multipage TIFF" or "TIFF sub-files".

 

Apple Preview handles those files as expected similar to multi-page PDFs displaying all images in the sidebar. To open the multiple pages in Affinity Designer or Photo, the only way right now seems to re-save the TIFF into single files using Preview, via drag-and-drop out of the sidebar into Finder. I'd love if opening those files was handled in a way similar to multi-page PDFs instead. Right now Affinity Designer and Photo both only open the first page, never even acknowledging that there is more.

 

Attached is such a TIFF containing two pages, right out of the afforementioned HP scan software.

 

Kind regards

-- Alina

Scannen0001.tif

[adding more export options for SVG]

actually unchecking Set Viewbox may help in my case, thanks. It sets the width and height and in turn removes the viewbox attribute.

[adding more export options for SVG]

Hi,

 

I'd like to propose additional export options for exporting SVG from Affinity Designer that would be very helpful for inline web-use.

 

Right now, when I have a shape that is part of a dashboard and I export SVG for web this is the result:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd">
<svg width="100%" height="100%" viewBox="0 0 231 272" version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xml:space="preserve" style="fill-rule:evenodd;clip-rule:evenodd;stroke-linejoin:round;stroke-miterlimit:1.41421;">
    <rect id="Artboard1" x="0" y="0" width="231" height="272" style="fill:none;"/>
    <clipPath id="_clip1">
        <rect x="0" y="0" width="231" height="272"/>
    </clipPath>
    <g clip-path="url(#_clip1)">
        <path d="M31,48l-75,84l192,140l83,-116l-50,-156l-74,109l-76,-61Z"/>
    </g>
</svg>

this is great for loading SVG into a website as img src attribute or using CSS, however more often than not I find myself needing to use SVG inline, i.e. directly in my html

 

In that case an output that would help me much more would be:

<svg width="231" height="272" viewBox="0 0 231 272" version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xml:space="preserve" style="fill-rule:evenodd;clip-rule:evenodd;stroke-linejoin:round;stroke-miterlimit:1.41421;">
    <path d="M31,48l-75,84l192,140l83,-116l-50,-156l-74,109l-76,-61Z"/>
</svg>

Instead of having to edit my SVGs by hand, I'd love if I could achieve the above export by setting the following options, that do not yet exist:

 

[_] export artboard as clipping path

[_] include XML declaration and doctype

[x] set absolute width and height

 

(the default would then be the inverse of my selections)

 

 

Please consider adding these in the advanced SVG export settings

Cheers

-- Alina

[Exporting palettized PNG-8 with alpha]

Hello,

 

I'm sorely missing the feature to export palettized PNG-8 with alpha from Affinity Designer for web development. I can export PNG-24 with alpha or PNG-8 with binary (on or off) transparency, but not PNG-8 using a palette in which the colors of the palette have alpha values attached. This is a feature that's supported by both the standalone tool ImageAlpha (converts PNG-24 to PNG-8 with alpha) and by Photoshop's Export dialog that you get by right-clicking layers.

 

I'm using PNG-8 with alpha for image size optimization, especially for spritesheets and graphics that would not quite work as SVG.

 

At the moment my workflow is: Export PNG-24, open each PNG in ImageAlpha, manually adjust the settings there, save.

I have to repeat this in parts every time I change a graphic, cancelling the benefits continuous export would provide me with.

 

Please add this feature

Cheers

-- Alina

 

ImageAlpha is using "pngquant and pngnq-s9 and alpha-channel-aware posterizer."

ImageAlpha: https://pngmini.com

[Guetzli: A New Open Source JPEG Encoder]

+1 for optional Guetzli encoding

 

edit: on closer inspection, I retract my +1 ... with both high and low detail images I found that the JPG export result from Affinity Photo actually looks better overall compared to what Guetzli produces with similar file sizes.

 

My test procedure:

1. Load high quality photo into Affinity Photo
2. Downsize to web-typical sizes (e.g. 800px wide, 480px wide)
3. Export as PNG-24 and also as JPG with 85% quality from Affinity Photo.
4. Run the AFP-exported JPG through ImageOptim to strip it of its meta data that may bloat the file size. This operation does not change the appearance of the image
5. Run Guetzli on the PNG with quality settings between 85 and 95
6. Run the Guetzli-generated JPGs through ImageOptim to strip them of their meta data
7. Find the Guetzli-generated and optimized JPG with the closest file size to the AFP-exported JPG
8. Compare visually, switching back and forth

Result: While it is true that in high frequency areas the ringing artefacts are reduced in the Guetzli output, similarly colored lower-detail surfaces with subtler structures get muddied, details are lost (most apparent in stone surfaces, wood grain, shadows on plain colored walls, skies).

 

I actually prefer what Affinity already does.

[Pespective in Affinity Designer for Windows video]

If it were a skew and crop the horizontal edge of "IBIZA" and of "THE WHITE ISLE" (added later in the video) should be parallel but to my eye are quite clearly at different angles, which you can see if you place them against horizontal lines

[Pespective in Affinity Designer for Windows video]

Hey,

 

I've noticed in the video trailer for the Affinity Designer Windows beta that at 1:00 the Ibiza design on the side of the sky scraper has been distorted towards a vanishing point, i.e. using perspective.

 

I've been wondering if we're able to do this in Affinity Designer for the Mac already (and if so how), or if this will come to us, soon. Perspective distort, and particularly distorting embedded documents like this is the top thing on my wish list for Affinity Designer. I've not been able to find a feature like that in the current version or the 1.5 beta so far.

 

Cheers

[Draw persona brush body-mode "ping pong"]

Hi,

 

I love how easy creating brushes is and how easy it is to preserve the head and tail of a brush.

 

I wish though that alongside the stretch and repeat body modes there was also one named "ping pong" that behaved like repeat but flipped every other repeated segment.

 

So if I had a brush made up from this:

 

<___/"""">

 

repeat would create a stroke like this:

 

<___/""""___/""""___/""""___/"""">

 

and ping pong would create one something like this:

 

<__/""""""\_____/""""""\_____/""">

 

 

■ = head/tail

■ = regular segment

■ = flipped segment

 

 

it would need to keep track of the number of segments displayed so that the head and tail would line up (always displaying an odd number of segments so the first and last ones are the right way around to line up)

 

I'd love to see this happen in a future version of AD

 

Cheers

-- Alina

 

[Perspective and the Vertical Grid]

You can select the mode dropdown that says "destination" and switch it to "source", adjust the grid without modifying the image, then switch it to "destination". Does that help?

[3D "hollow" effect?]

To illustrate Justin's example:

 

[Why do we not get the same brushes across Personas?]

Hey,

 

I'd like to use one of the brushes in Pixel Persona as a line on a vector object, but have not found a way to do so. Since there are Image brushes in Draw Persona, would it be easy to make brushes from the Pixel Persona available for us to outline vector objects with?

[Strokes (as compared with Illustrator)]

Playing devil's advocate here: What's the purpose of the Stroke effect if (when) lines can do all the same things? Especially once you nailed multiple outlines.

Can this effect then not be removed to clear things up?

[1 bit Tiff Transparency and Coloring]

You guys are on fire, man!