nickbatz

Another way would be to use Select Sampled Color - black - and then invert the selection. You just have to be careful not to include the dark grey stuff in that pixel thing.

I haven't (because I don't export PDFs), but even if this were an issue, all you'd have to do is right-click on a file in the Finder and use the Quick Action to convert it. My prediction is that you'll be fine with Sonoma - which isn't to say that the version before 14.4.1 wasn't a total mess, because it was!

I updated my Mac Studio M1 Max from Ventura to Sonoma 14.4.1 a couple of weeks ago. No deal breaking bugs. The only issue I'm having is that once in a while with certain files Affinity Photo doesn't relinquish all the RAM it grabs when I quit the program. But the way I use the program pushes it harder than most people are likely to push. These are files with >75 layers, and they use a large percentage of the 64GB in my machine.

To me that's the exact opposite of progress.

There's plenty to say about sharpness, sharpening, contrast, resolution, destination formats... most of which are interactive. And scale is a hugely important artistic parameter, i.e. different pictures want to be different sizes (Claes Oldenburg demonstrated that effect pretty dramatically). But here's the same picture shown large (a bunch of unidentifiable squares) and small (clearly [sic] a bush). No resolution change, just... well, I'm not sure how this could not be beyond obvious: if you're going to make a large print, you need to start with a sharp file (unless you're after a blurry effect).

I just mean you're shrinking it. Of course removing pixels removes pixels!

Everything is closer together = pixels are less spread out = everything is sharper = the earth is round.

Well, downsizing is going to sharpen things by definition, since everything is smaller! But yeah, when enlarging the question is where the line between artifacts and acceptable results is. Oh, and I should get in a dig while we're on the subject: Gigapixel AI is no longer in my good graces. It would be if I were taking pictures of birds, but for abstract modern art... failure.

Now, here I resized it to 300 DPI and resampled it using the bicubic algorithm. After that i used a very little bit of two sharpening live filters: unsharp mask (very little) and clarity. Had this been real, I'd probably get rid of the unsharp mask. It's borderline passable when shrunken way down. Borderline. (I had to try this - I was curious why a smaller file would look like total arse, when normally it's when you enlarge questionable images that you run into problems.)

If the results were good hundreds of times, that just means you started with higher-res pictures. There's no mystery here - the problem is that... this one sucks. Look at those pixels. Nasty! I did nothing to the file - I just zoomed in a little.

...because the screen resolution is what counts. But resampling while you resize sharpens the image, and - correct me if I'm wrong - it never creates artifacts.

It still doesn't hurt to know. Off-topic alert: I never really worked on Windows, I just had those machines dedicated to streaming sample libraries in my music project studio. When that was new, the big limitation was RAM access, so you needed 2-3 machines to have everything you wanted cued up and ready to play. While my Windows 7 PC has 24GB of RAM, the XP machines of 20 years ago could only load about 1.5GB of instruments into the required head-start RAM buffers, and you had to do some tweaks to load even that much. Hans Zimmer (prominent film composer) had at least 12 of those machines in every room, probably more. PCs have one big advantage: you can put together the exact machine, no more no less, to do what you need. For example, you don't need a powerful graphics card for this application. In these days of 64-bit computing, that's all water under the bridge. I have 64GB in my Mac, which is all I need (for both music and art), but there are people who still complain that 192GB isn't enough. (They typically mix several mic positions in their sampled orchestras - close up, back in the hall, etc., so each note you play triggers several notes and requires multiples of the computer resources it takes to trigger one.)

Yeah, I'm not just closing the window, I'm quitting the program. Thanks though. Interestingly, I haven't seen the same behavior since posting here, so this could just have been a glitch - although I did restart and run Disk Utility just for good measure. Also, while I haven't booted my new Windows machine (a 2009 custom one running Windows 7 ) for a couple of years - let alone any of my stack of P4s with XP - but actually I remember it being pretty easy to make the mistake you're talking about in Windows too. You click the — to move windows to the taskbar, but usually closing the window quits the program. What could be confusing people is that some Mac programs, typically utilities such as System Preferences and the calculator, do quit when you close their window.

I don't doubt it. Of course. Will check next time. Thanks Dan. I can't send you my files, but I'll see what I can do.

It's just regular Quit. You can have programs running with their windows hidden (or on a separate desktop), in which case they remain active in the Dock. That's no different from Windows. I always have multiple programs open - email, a browser, messages, the software for my audio interface, the program that monitors my UPS, often a word processor, often some music software... and there's nothing abnormal about that. But Affinity Photo isn't always releasing all its RAM under macOS Sonoma when you quit it, and it was under Ventura. It does seem to have something to do with specific files, though.