K2021

re: Also ability to drag and drop files from finder/explorer directly to the batch job dialog Absolutely agree.

The need to set ALL batch job settings AGAIN every time the dialogue is open is very BAD. Some form of persistence in user set settings is needed. Especially in case of input/output folders. If for example these settings persist between sessions, the user can have one folder for input, one for output and just replace input images, run appropriate macros on them, retrieve them from the output folder and repeat and not not worry about these settings in AP. K

Good point.

I second that. I know the beauty of such interface from my beloved Office XP from the year 2001 (that is 20 years ago). K

walt.farrell If you feel like writing about it, may I ask what you need it (going sub-pixel) for? I can't imagine any use of this for me. K

@walt.farrell Thank you very much for explaining your logic! I see what you mean in the left column of the Transform dialogue. I have never seen anything like this before. I don't think I will ever need such a feature, but I bet somebody does every day. Best K

SOLUTION SUMMARY: For anybody having issues with this, this is what works for me: "Force Pixel Alignment" and "Move by whole pixels" need to be in the states visible on the following screenshots. I don't know which state is ON and which is OFF and AP makes no effort to determine that neither in the Help nor in the Tooltip. When you first drag&drop and image, it will look smoothed (see sshot1) but when you move the layer, it will be crystal clear again (see sshot2). Don't ask me why 😄 Note that the way these buttons are (de)pressed will be kept when you restart AP. Hope it helps 🙂 K

😄 K

@Old Bruce Thanks for chipping in. At first, it does not seem like it works. The image nr2 is still blurred, but when I move the layer, it becomes crystal clear again (not smoothed). Thank you very much!! Now I am going to have a look around and hopefully see what these two functions actually do. I find the default effect quite baffling and not in a good way. Best K

@prophet Thank you for your kind reply. I am glad, you figured it out. I will have to research this function. I have never seen anything like it and have no idea what it could possibly do despite the Helps' "very comprehensive" explanation. Best K

@walt.farrell I don't agree that it will be faster but I will do what I can. so i have downloaded the source image from this thread i have then repeated the steps described in the original post i am uploading the saved afphoto with this post. now what you will do, i believe is this: you will first load the afphoto you will see the problem and you will try to repeat the effect you will use the source image from this thread to achieve that realizing the previous two steps were redundant so going this way actually takes both mine and your time, because the final afphoto does not matter. it is the process of achieving it that is the problem and the process can be checked only with the source image. anyway, here you go K snap02.afphoto

@NotMyFault I have deleted the .afphoto upon achieving my task so I cannot upload it. I have uploaded the source image instead. I don't see why you don't want to try to follow the three steps it takes to see the effect that I have described on your own machine.

Hi! There si no need. You can try it yourself with any screenshot. Just capture part of any window and do what I did. On the other hand, I have ClearType turned OFF so I will upload one screenshot from my OS. It is very clear using that. I am not sure what happens when the same process is repeated on OS with smoothed system fonts. K

Hi, I open image nr1. Then I drag image nr2 into AP and onto image nr1 so that nr2 creates another layer over image nr1. WOW affinity has just smoothed image nr2. Why? What? Is Earth still round? Can anybody kindly explain? See attachment. I placed a yellow layer between the two to distinguish between them. See, it's just windows screenshots of the same window and the one on the right, the layer, gets smoothed by AP. Thanks in advance for any help. K

I second that. We need to be able to do what Photopea/Edit/Auto-Align does, as explained here: or what Photoshop/File/Automate/Photomerge/Collage does, as mentioned here: There really isn't any dedicated software out there that does this. Hope to see it in AP K keywords: stitch, stitching, merge, merging, photomerge, blend, blending, overlap, overlapping

Here is the workflow in case anybody needs it. Hope to see such feature in AP! K

After 4 hours of searching and testing I have found a solution in an online editor Photopea. Here is the result, pixel-by-pixel identical to the source. K

Back with the result. MS ICE is pretty awesome in this issue's regard, sadly not perfect. It does not distort images, but introduces some kind of smoothing which is probably very fine for photographs (although still I cannot see a reason for that) but definitely not desired in any kind of line art. If anyone needs this, I used the following settings (see attachments) and I also provide the result, which is definitely better than anything so far (except for that thing with terrible pricing). Best regards, K

@PaulEC MS Research is absolutely awesome. Just watching their presentation videos makes one hope that there is some hope for a technologically better future. For anyone interested, here is more info on the app: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/computational-photography-applications/image-composite-editor/ The wayback machine link does not work for me, but I searched the link provided above in the web.archive.org and went back in time to 2019 and there is a download available. It seems the last version is from 2015 02 25. Did you find any later version, @PaulEC? The app looks very good. It reminds me of Autopano Giga, which was incredible and was sadly killed during corporate cutbacks before i could buy a copy for myself 😞 Off to do some testing. K

@loukash @R C-R I am very thankful for your sharing of your experiences. Since AP is still in active development, we may get this option one day. Until then I will look for another solution. I am certainly not paying the extortion money for the other software, sigh. Best of luck and as always... K

Thanks for your interest in this. I don't think it would work though and also I don't believe it is the right solution even if it works a bit. The problem is with the algorithm, IMHO. It really creates a photo panorama, It is not meant to merge images using overlap and reposition, rotate or perhaps scale but no perspective deforming. I have actually seen stuff like this in other apps. PS has literally a setting for this. In an old version that I used quite some time ago, it was here: File/Automate/Photomerge. See the attached screenshot for the available options and IMO It will suddenly make sense. The program needs to be made to do this, and sadly, I believe, AP is not made to do it yet. Maybe later. I was just hoping to be wrong and discover this option somewhere inside the menus. K

Hi and thanks for all replies!! @PaulEC The manual method is always a possibility. And t is exactly what I am trying to avoid 🙂 @R C-R I don't know how you do it, but it just does not work for me (see the attachment). AP is trying to correct the assumed lens distortion and introduces distortion into the resulting image. I use File/New Panorama/Add/Stitch Panorama. You can try it yourself with my screenshots from here: https://mega.nz/folder/NPoiQDzb#fVNUg2LcpKocG7In0mKysg Best regards! K

Hi, I wonder if there is a way to automatically join a bunch of images (e.g. screenshots) into one. PS can do it pretty well. AP handles panorama photos with lens-based distortion, but that is not what I am after. I think screenshots (e.g. several screenshots of a long scrolling document) are a good example. I have found this app that appears to do the job (http://enblend.sourceforge.net/), but I would prefere to stick with AP since I already own it. This is not the first time this issue has been raised here, but not recently. I hope the situation might have changed. Thanks in advance for any kind help! Best K

@loukash This a beautiful tutorial and I will try it. Thank you! (nebo mám napsat Díky! ? I might add that I am still a bit pessimistic as even paint.net seems so much arrow-friendlier than AP, but I will give this a reasonable shot. Many thanks again!! K

I could never get bored drawing straight lines. They are so... unpredictable. Thank you for being able to explain this feature even to me 😄 The fact that you need to click first, then press shift, then draw is not very intuitive to me. Hard to do with a pen, but fortunately I am also an owner of a mouse, which is more attuned to this kind of tablet gymnastics. Many thanks!! Best regards and strong health! K