DannyBCreative

I'm posting this here, because I'm unsure of where else to post it. Does anyone know how to get into directly to the appropriate people at Serif about 3rd party developers wanting to develop plug-ins for Affinity Photo? I'm talking to a dev who created an amazing plug-in for Photoshop that handles OpenEXR files. He's expressed interest in wanting to develop this same plug-in for Affinity Photo and has asked me if I could pass this info up the chain. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

For those who are interested in the build process.

Ideas, ideas ideas....

The shadows of the foreground elements are cast by the same light casting the shadows of the background elements. They are all placed in scene so they pick up the same light. The thing that is impossible to see here is the distance. If you were to look at this from the top down, you'd see the shadows are very, very long. The buildings are very far from the subjects and by the time the shadow length reaches the foreground subjects, it has begun to soften. The shadows from the foreground elements are very close to the camera, but if you were able to zoom out to see them fully, you'd see that they too soften near the end. The color of the sky and haze were added after the fact of course, and yes, you could argue that they might affect the brightness of the suns (tatooine has two), but this place, or universe doesn't exist and we really don't know what having two suns would mean in an atmosphere, so it'll stand as completed.

Problem is UI. Publisher is a layout tool at its core, like InDesign, which I wouldn't use either for high-end photo manipulation or compositing work. I do own all three apps, and I do know how they can all be accessed from Publisher, but workflow would be drastically different, and in my opinion, counter to that of a professional workflow for this particular type of work. I do appreciate you taking the time to offer the suggestion, I just don't feel it's necessarily the right approach for the work I do. Thanks Walt!

So, as part of a timelapse video I'm making for YT, I went back and redid this image. This time with some custom assets and a wider aspect ratio. I like this one better.

Thanks, Walt. But for the work I do, jumping to Publisher doesn't seem like a reasonable option. I do own Publisher by the way, but I use it for what it it's intended for, and not that often. I use AP for high-end composite work, so jumping into Publisher, to scale an image layer just doesn't work well. Thanks for chiming in though. At least now I know that I can scale down and back up any layer without losing image quality. That was the more important question I had. For now, I can just eyeball the scale if/when needed.

Is there a way to see what the original dimensions were? For example, I have a layer that is 400x400px and I scale it down to 120x120, but then decide later that i want it back to its original size. Do I have to remember what my original size was, or is there some info setting that will show me its original size?

Interesting. Ok, so image layer or pixel layer, whatever the dimensions of the layer when the image is added to the scene, they'll remain constant and quality will not degrade if resized down, then back up, so long as the project is not exported? I imagine rasterizing will commit the resolution as well, which is probably why I was confused about this, seeing that pixel layers are rasterized layers. Thanks Old Bruce.

It already is. For example, for my composite work I rely heavily on OpenEXR Multi-Layer renders out of my 3D applications. Photoshop can not read this files. Photoshop on Windows can, but requires a 3rd party plug-in. This plug-in does not exist on the Mac, but that's sort of irrelevant as Photoshop should have this functionality built in. Affinity Photo on the other hand reads and works in these files perfectly and natively. In my book, that's a huge win for AP and something that has me considering officially disconnecting the remaining Adobe subs I have this year.

Yeah, optimization for M1 and Metal are key. If apps or plugins are not yet optimized for M1 you won't experience much improvement in performance. Affinity Photo however is significantly optimized for Metal and M1 so you shouldn't be experiencing any problems. I find that AP runs faster on my M1-Max than it does on my PC with an RTX GPU. If you're having issues in AP, something is off.

I routinely work in 32bit linear for my composites. This in fact why I use AP over PS, as PS will not read OpenEXR files. I've not found any hangups or lag in AP, and I'm on a MacaBook Pro M1-Max, which is pretty close to what you're using. I wonder if something else is going on.

Hey Guys, I know that when importing images in to AP, an (image) layer will maintain its original quality when scaling down then back for for example. I know once converted to a (pixel) layer, this will no longer be the case. Effectively, an (image) layer sort of works like a smart object in Photoshop, though not as powerful. My question is: Is it possible to convert a pixel layer to an image layer, so from that point forward it will retain its image quality as mentioned above, sort of like a Photoshop smart object. Thanks in advance!!

As Walt said, working in linear formats requires a special workflow. There are a couple of videos by James Ritson on this topic, on the AP site and YT. Bottom line is you'll need to end up with a 8 of 16 bit, non-linear file for it to look correct in a non-linear, color-managed file format such as PNG or JPEG.

I wouldn't consider myself a super fan either, but I do enjoy the films... mostly the original 3. The Wee Jedi and the sky are photographs. Everything else was created in 3D software. Thanks for the compliment!