Sotalo

He. But yes, fill opacity. And the workaround works pretty well. I can apply effects individually. Just seems strange it doesn't work using copy + paste FX.

Workaround - Select all objects (First, shift+last selection in layers panel), Quick FX > Fill Opacity.

When pasting FX, fill opacity doesn't get copied. One method I'm using for water is to make hundreds of vector strokes, copy and paste the 3D FX for each one (doing it for the layer/group causes all objects to be merged for the 3D effect, which is only applied once, not per stroke). The look of water comes by lowering the fill opacity of the object color, but keeping the specular at full opacity. Unfortunately, I have to do this per-stroke.

At the moment, the mirror feature only mirrors manual brushes and erasers. If I need to, say, move, rotate, and scale a hand, I cannot properly transform both hands at the same time over the mirrored axis. The process to fix both sides is tedious: delete the other half, copy the layer, flip, then realign exactly, and merge both layers together. If the transformation doesn't look good, then the process needs to be repeated. Any rotation/scaling/moving suffers the same problem. Option #1 - Mirror all transformations to the other side. While more difficult to implement, this would allow us to see the changes being made in realtime, and seamlessly accomplish our goals. Option #2 - Force mirrored area to not accept any art or design work on the layer, and update the mirror in realtime. This would allow realtime transformations to take place without the complexity of mirroring the transformations for each tool. But if an object needed to be unmirrored (I.E. lettering), enabling this mode would eliminate that possibility. Option #3 - As a simpler alternative, being able to quickly hit a button and get a mirror copy on the other side could help the workflow tremendously. No realtime updates at all here, but the process would be quick enough. As with before, anything unmirrored would be forcibly mirrored, so there would be drawbacks. It would be nice to see the mirror feature get some love. It's so useful, but some very real pain points make it difficult to use in serious practice.

I second this. It's so weird not being able to alt-drag and get a copy of some selected raster lines when manipulating linework. I do this for sketches and concepts all the time. The problem with Copy/Paste is it splits the new copy on a separate layer. And if you have effects running, you have to copy the effect style, group the two layers, rasterize, then paste the effect style in order to merge the duplicated objects together and retain the same number of layers and other effects. Alt+drag would be much easier.

Any camera will introduce both lens distortion and perspective issues, not to mention if the paper isn't perfectly flat you won't be getting the same results as a perfect high-res scan from a scanner. If your designs work then they work, but this process is NOT ideal for everyone. Drawings that require perspective, faces, and shapes that would be more sensitive to distortions would benefit far greater from a proper scan. I'm selling prints of drawings from graphite and ink/pen with textural details: cell phones don't capture that level of detail as cleanly or accurately as what I need. And working 13x19 at 600dpi with many layers and a mix of vectors and bitmaps kind of rules out the option to work totally on mobile. In a professional environment, everything that stands in the way of getting work done should be eliminated.

I tried researching what export formats it supports, and nowhere on Adobe's page does it specify export to SVG. All it mentions is saving to libraries. Needless to say, the program is intended for cell phone cameras and taking the results to a separate program rather than performing a quality scan. Cameras introduce distortion and perspective, you need scans. And if the drawing is generated initially from a digital raster program, it doesn't make sense to spit out to a cell phone to get the job done. Adobe Capture's vectorizing is VERY quick and dirty, not professional in any sense of the word. There are other features in that app more worthwhile, like finding fonts on printed media. But if you want to vectorize a drawing in Adobe's suite, just scan it and use Illustrator. Personally, I just use Inkscape because it's free. But a single program that can do it all would be Godlike.

1 - Adobe Capture is a mobile app for Android and iOS. It's not available on PC. 2 - App doesn't support exporting 😕 Assets are saved directly to Creative Cloud libraries for use in other programs. Your solution to this one missing feature doesn't even work in a professional environment, and it's far from an all-in-one package. It costs $600 per year to properly use and you took what is currently a two-program problem and made it three. Meanwhile, there are totally free programs that vectorize in a pro environment with export to any software, not just Adobe. This workflow is already DOA across many programs. I will continue to use free external software, but having it integrated in Designer would open up a lot of doors to making workflows even better.

To sum up what users want: Transparency of currently supported/unsupported features to current and potential users so they can make educated decisions about workflows and programs. Buying a program with the expectation of better workflows and features only to stumble because of a feature that doesn't exist is a huge cause of grievance. Roadmap so users know which features are being worked on, instead of being left to wonder. If we see something like Android/Chromebook development, or performance improvements in the works, that might make a lot of sense to schedule ahead of development for this feature. Without a roadmap, it just feels like nothing is happening, and every now and then we get a release dropped without the features we want. SOME kind of community interaction would be massively beneficial. A feature that's requested STRONGLY enough by the community should be given some kind of formal response. 17 pages of replies, over 7 years, for a feature found on most vector-editing programs and required for many workflows, but missing from Affinity, should receive some formal response a little more than "we won't do it unless it's done well," and then silence. Plugins for new features or filters to be added in by third parties and the community. Not just brushes and textures, but actual code that can allow Affinity to do things it can't otherwise do. This way, the program can expand far beyond the core developer's capacity.

Of course, if they publicly confirm they're not going to work on it for the foreseeable future, they'll lose a lot of potential buyers. People who rely on it as part of their workflow, designers who constantly get logos as bitmaps and need to vectorize them, etc. will be forced back into Adobe. Anyone working in a professional capacity is stuck with Adobe because they monopolized the pro market. But people deserve good tools, not just the 10% of designers who can afford the Adobe tax. If this hasn't been prioritized in 7 years, will it ever?

So, features that just flat out cause crashes wouldn't be released for beta. They'd be in alpha/beta/experimental phase if they didn't support all of the functions they needed to. Say we got Autotrace black and white first. Then we got limited color palettes. Finally, the feature was radically improved to support multithreading and large color palettes with excellent results and it moved to a production-ready status with the beta label removed. Continued performance and quality improvements can be made as minor updates after the feature is still considered production-ready. This kind of development path means we get to see and test new features and workflows before they reach 100%. This can improve workflows for some people while we wait for completion. As of now I still have to resort to another program for this stuff, should I ever need it.

Not a graphic design program, but Unreal Engine will release features in an alpha, beta, and experimental category with the promise of getting those features production-ready later. Raytracing released without support for foliage or instanced meshes and gained that support later on. They made a spreadsheet of what was supported in the latest version, and you saw more and more features go into production-ready status. If a feature is beta, you know it'll be production-ready soon. They're pretty consistent about that. If Affinity adopted the same model, highlighting features in orange or something with a Beta tag and an option to include or exclude features in Beta, it could give us a chance to test new features before they become fully complete. For instance, people who need to make black and white tracings from solid color ink splotches shouldn't have to wait for years until the tool is able to perform a 256-color portrait of a photograph. The beta version might only have limited support and not function as optimized as a production-ready release. Having features released in beta would also push devs to work on those and get them production-ready before moving onto other tasks. It just feels frustrating having to wait so long with 0 support. There are no better options at a reasonable price point.

In the meantime, we have nothing. They can release features in an alpha or beta state and iterate on it with future releases, but at the moment we have to do this: This is entirely the problem. We need to use other programs to get this one feature that has become standard everywhere, including totally free programs. I hate Inkscape with a passion, but I have to use it for bitmap tracing. There are workflows where converting with color palettes could actually become useful: converting a base color layer from raster to vector and saving tons of space, for instance. But at the moment, this workflow is interrupted by needing to leverage another program. I'm just wondering what the dev team is doing if their time is not spent on features that have become industry standard. 7 years without a trace is kind of a lot.

Really cool! But softer brushes mess up the effect... We'd need grayscale conversion to normals, or something more solid, like nDo... which seems to have been discontinued.

Photoshop is the WORST program to paint a 3D model. It paints right through to pieces on the other side. Not to mention the whole 3D thing is a horrible UI experience. They tried, they failed. But the normal generator is amazing. If Affinity Designer had a way to paint normal maps like nDo, that would be really cool!

All this, and more. My main process to make certain overlays required simplifying curves, but they completely broke the tool so anything you wish to simplify produces awful geo and removes way more points than necessary, even more points than what's required for the shape. Stuff like that really turns me off. The feature was fine, no one asked to change it, and instead of making the program better they just made everything worse.

Of course not, a video editor is a huge investment, especially considering how advanced they've become. But I'm willing to spend more money if it means getting out of Adobe's ecosystem altogether. Unfortunately, we have technical reasons to stick with Media Encoder... it permits things like resolutions not exact to buffer size which we need for some of our older hardware. That stuff will go by the wayside eventually, hopefully. This is why Adobe really sucks, you can't get everything in one program, you always need another to go with it, and they only charge rental for the suite, nothing is perpetual. And they've been grandfathered in. Some workflows still require their actions, their scripts, their technical output, plugins for their programs, etc. etc. Oh, and regarding GPU support, this has to be baked into the cost. If the programs can't develop ever because the team is too busy maintaining GPU support, they need to add capacity. Yes, it does need to be more expensive. They really should go after pros... or offer the pro option somehow.

AMAZING. Their marketing says free updates for 2 years, but the company decides everyone deserves free updates just paying for the software once. Even if you got it on COVID discount. And it does most things faster and better than Adobe ever could. The world really would be a lot better off without Adobe right now...

If Affinity is willing to expand into video encoding and editing programs, add scripts, and just get a couple things necessary for my full time job, I can recommend our business switches to Affinity. It's not there yet, but it's close. VERY close.

Once again if you pay once for the Affinity suite you get free updates for 2 years. The program notifies you when an update is available, it downloads and installs very quickly. Not a problem. No issues. Same thing as CC's updates. What you're doing right now is trying to justify $636 a year for an inferior desktop publishing experience. Designer and Photo worked flawlessly while the new update a couple years back broke Illustrator, and the latest PS update practically broke our workflow. I've printed RAW photos in Adobe RGB on a Canon Image Prograf straight from Photo without export, so good luck trying to justify Adobe's worth in a world that would be, for the most part, better off without them. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to own my software, and my car, and my house, not rent it.

Really? How long do you think professionals are going to put up with not having vector and raster together? How long will they put up with performance decrements and stagnating features? How long will everyone continue to stay behind the times? Sure, there's no doubt in my mind many professionals will pay the Adobe tax and buy into the idea that a print shop doesn't know how to print a PDF. They might also believe the best photo editing experience is Photoshop and the best vector experience is Illustrator because that's all they know. They can continue to believe that. But they're wrong. I edited all my photos for my blog in Affinity Photo with better results much faster than I could in Photoshop. I handled all my scans in Photo and some image tracing in Inkscape, and the results are better than I could hope for attempting to do the same thing between Photoshop and Illustrator. I do all my vectors in Designer, and layouts in Publisher, and everything links beautifully. Everything I do personally is 100% Affinity or free software, and I'm getting better results faster than I ever could with Adobe. Despite decades of experience in Adobe, my training in Adobe, my whole life in Adobe, a year with Affinity made me turn another leaf. I will never draw in Photoshop ever again, I will never vector in Illustrator ever again, I will never do any layouts in InDesign ever again. Professionals can continue to be stubborn, My work will be better and easier.

If people get 2 years of updates for free and the program stays affordable, that's literally not a problem. I paid $75 for the suite and I'm set for two years. Adobe's tactics were to force people off of perpetual licenses and turned them into subscriptions. And the subscription fee for their suite is $53 a month. I don't mind paying $150 every 2 years to stay current with Affinity. When Adobe updated their software before, it used to cost $1,500 for the master collection which had marginal updates every year. Corel Draw is similarly expensive. Anyone starting now really needs to get on Affinity pronto. When the last 10 years of updates to Photoshop have been a free plugin and stuff a $55 program does better, there will come a day when the other programs take over. We just need a few pros on Serif's team to recommend things like game-dev-centric workflows, and now you've just captured an entire rapidly growing field. Not just hobby artists.

Adobe used to sell perpetual student licenses: I paid $600 for the student version of the design bundle CS4, and that was acceptable for commercial work. But I noticed something odd: the new versions from then on didn't add much new features. Maybe one good new feature in Photoshop per year, and that's fine because most of it is backwards compatible. But InDesign would totally break compatibility. Illustrator too, if you actually use one of the major features every release. Fact is if you made something in InDesign years ago and your business switched to a continual license, you will no longer be able to use the perpetual software anymore. Something you totally got incorrect, Adobe is forcing people into subscribing to software that used to be sold for a one-time fee. And do the programs work better? No. 90% of what I use in Photoshop and Illustrator I can get in Affinity, and most of the stuff I love about Affinity, Photoshop and Illustrator were never and will never be able to do. Adobe is grandfathered in from decades of being an industry leader, but at this very moment they aren't leading. I updated Photoshop and lost features, how are they still in the lead? Only because everyone uses them. Only because InDesign files totally break compatibility with older versions, even within the CC suite. Adobe was a leader with perpetual software for years without issue, now all of a sudden you're telling me there will be issues with perpetual software. WOW. FYI, I purchased Affinity a year ago, the whole suite for $75, and I'm still getting free updates without issue. Adobe would never. The problem is everyone considers Adobe the default, and it shouldn't be that way. CS6 brought content aware fill nearly a decade ago: that was the last major improvement to Photoshop. A free plugin for GIMP. Now their best new feature is neural filters, inferior to Affinity in every way. The only other changes beyond that were decrements, some of which brought the program to a screeching halt. Adobe plateaued in an industry that is continuing to tower over their shoulders. Respect should be given to those who earn it, and Adobe 100% totally lost mine. If Affinity gets support for actions, plugins, and fixes a few of the workflow issues, they absolutely will destroy Adobe. Like I said, professionally, I don't really need much. Professionals need Adobe mainly because other professionals use Adobe. Not because the program is totally superior. The Adobe house is falling. Once Affinity's few issues are fixed, designers will realize they need to get out of the sinking house and get a new one. I wouldn't mind paying $200 per program if it can totally replace Adobe. It does 90% what we need it to do. But that remaining 10% is the problem. Affinity is not there yet, but I really want them to be. My side business is 100% Affinity and it's been a really good experience.

Literally the only reason people are using Adobe is because these programs have been grandfathered in. I played with Photoshop 7, trained on Photoshop/Ill/InDesign CS3 and I used Illustrator CS2 onward, and got invested in the CS5.5 and CS6 suites in college, but Affinity blew them all away. If desktop publishing started today, there's no doubt in my mind everyone would be using Affinity and Adobe would be laughed out of the room. The saving grace for Photoshop is actions. Illustrator's saving grace, I guess, would have to be effects. Plus the stability of these programs when going to print. But Affinity's workflow is much better, and I feel it's inches away from rendering Adobe completely and totally obsolete. File versions don't matter if the program is inexpensive. Adobe Photoshop Professional alone used to cost over $1,000. For that price you can buy the entire Affinity suite several times over, it's no wonder people were pirating Adobe. They got complacent. They felt they're the only option. They set up a ridiculous certification program with minor tweaks every year to sell educational instruction books every year and quit perpetual licenses so they can rake in more money every year. They thought they could get away with it. They were wrong. I want to see Affinity where they rightfully belong. Fixing these little things will push them over the top. And if they want to create brand new versions, go ahead. I'll pay $55 for a program that crushes Adobe. But not unless they fix the things that actually need fixing. Not just a hobby program, but one that really sticks it to Adobe.

If you work at an industrial capacity, the price is not a problem. But most creatives do not drum up enough business to warrant the price. I'm talking the kind of people who go to Michaels and purchase beads and leather string to make a bracelet. Also, students, and the recently graduated. Plus, the fact of the matter is I had a better drawing experience using Krita, a free program, than I ever had in Photoshop. And Affinity Designer allows the blending of raster shading with vector linework, NOT A SINGLE Adobe program is even capable of that. Not unless you want to consider Photoshop and Indesign's HORRIFIC pen tools a "vector editor." For many years Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign were the holy trinity of desktop publishing. You did your photo manipulation and corrections/editing in Photoshop, your logo and vector design in Illustrator, and your layouts and publishing in InDesign. And for many years that was the best experience, and the features added to the capacity: Illustrator got a 3D perspective grid to assist in 3D views for, say, a cityscape. And Photoshop got quick select, a tool that made me wonder how we ever lived without. But then those features died: perspective, of course, was very difficult to use, Illustrator is not Sketchup. And truth be told, my experience with Affinity Photo is so smooth and clean that I don't often find the need to use selections to make spot changes. The developing process for full photos is extremely fast and clean, the need for constantly selecting and masking adjustment layers goes way down. For everything, Affinity is just better. Photoshop has plateaued to the point of death. The newest big feature, "Neural Filters," which are still in development, do exactly the same thing Affinity Photo is already capable of doing, but even faster with even better results. Noise reduction? Come on. I can get amazing noise reduction in 1 second just dragging one slider in Affinity Photo, and it doesn't just blur everything like Photoshop. And yes, when Illustrator had those buggy issues I wasn't able to do what our business needed. I had to load in a very large 4800x3000 image to manually go over in vector, and the program just kept crashing. Then the simplify tool obliterated all my geo so I couldn't use my normal workflow anymore. Compared to Affinity Designer which I have some rather complex pieces with tons of layers, vector layers, and lighting/shading and adjustment layers stacked on top and in-between each other and aside from some slowdowns changing the views, the program I purchased for $25 runs more reliably and with better features than Adobe Illustrator, which requires a monthly donation to Adobe so their dumb teams can continue to wreck themselves. So, to be clear, I position Affinity in a much higher order than Adobe right now. It does everything I need better than Adobe, and there are workflows and processes that are literally impossible to accomplish without it. And to the dumb team developing Adobe, if they really want to fix the stubborn attitude of the decades-old program that we've since moved on, charging $53 a month to get rid of the percentage slider and ruin features is not the way to do it. But seriously, even a free vector program like Inkscape has image trace. There are just a few nit-picky things in Affinity's suite that block workflows, and if those things were changed it would be perfect. And I don't think these things are that difficult to implement. Redrawing a selected line to fix it? Copy+pasting in individual channels for mask export for games? Allow us to position images for print? Small nitpicks, but a good enough selection to completely block utility of the program. I now have it in my process to take my images to Inkscape just for the image trace, and then take that back to Affinity for everything else. If Serif doesn't have enough money for better development, at least let me buy a plugin so I can do this now!