[Affinity Photo beachball on quit? Is it saving recovery files?]

Okay, this is now starting to become a real issue. Right now I'm going to have to force quit and lose some work that took me a while, which is somewhat less than thrilling.

Maybe the screenshot below from Activity Monitor will offer some insight. All I did was tell it to save, and several minutes later it's still showing the beachball.

Again: Mac Studio Max, 64GB, 32-core GPU, Affinity Photo 2.0.3, macOS Ventura 13.1

Why would any program need to use 435.54 GB of virtual memory?

[Convert Pen Tool path into Selection in Affinity Photo?]

3 hours ago, NotMyFault said:

Yes, use „selection from layer“ via menu. But the path must be closed filled with color

I'm not in Affinity Photo this second, but I think you're just saying that it doesn't work over alpha channel areas?

[Affinity Photo beachball on quit? Is it saving recovery files?]

Also, it has no problems loading files into Affinity Photo ridiculously fast. And the program starts up (from the internal storage) in two seconds.

And I mean that literally - two seconds. It's really great!

[Affinity Photo beachball on quit? Is it saving recovery files?]

25 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Does it ever do it when the documents are stored on the internal SSD? If not, it points to something odd with the external one or the Thunderbolt connection.

I don't know, because I don't have the documents on the internal SSD.

But I use the external drive for all kinds of things, including very demanding music applications (specifically streaming large sample libraries, and you'd hear clicks and pops if there were any issues doing that), so I'm absolutely confident there's nothing wrong with the drive or the connection.

[Affinity Photo beachball on quit? Is it saving recovery files?]

10 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Are the file(s) that cause the beachballs stored anywhere else besides you internal SSD?  Is there anything in them that might be linked to other files that are not stored on the SSD?

The Affinity files are on an external SSD - again, a 4TB m.2 one in a Thunderbolt enclosure that does 2500 MB/S read and write. Yes, I'm guessing they are linked to recovery files on the internal storage.

And that shouldn't matter, even if the external SSD were SATA 2 (which has about 10% the transfer rate). Using external drives is a totally normal thing to do.

It's going to be hard to troubleshoot, because it doesn't do it every time. Just now it quit right away, for example.

For what it's worth, Saving As the 650MB file I have open right now (before quitting) takes ten seconds. The beachball on quit is much longer than that - long enough to make me force-quit the program.

 

[Affinity Photo beachball on quit? Is it saving recovery files?]

13 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

You have to chek and try out for some of your huge documents, where you made a bunch of changes to, if there's a difference in a plain save versus save as..., since the first will save incrementally to the/an existing file and the second will save to an entirely new created file in one go, before closing the app. - If there's a beachball in either of the two methods when closing the app, then it might be some Ventura related Affinity glitch here. - Check also how other apps do behave here in contrast to the Affinity apps.

Thanks. This happened a couple of days ago after I closed a file I'd opened by mistake, i.e. I made no changes and didn't Save or Save As. Or maybe I just quit, but either way I didn't save anything. And it's happened since, but I forget what the circumstances were.

It may well be a Ventura-related Affinity glitch. I don't have the same issue with other programs on this machine, including Logic Pro and DaVinci Resolve (the other two programs I use that can create large files).

By the way, Affinity's tech support nailed a similar issue I was having when copy/pasting layers with their first question - I had forgotten about the clipboard manager in BetterTouchTool, that otherwise magnificent utility. But that's still disabled for Affinity Photo 2, so it's not that this time.

[Affinity Photo beachball on quit? Is it saving recovery files?]

22 hours ago, v_kyr said:

No, the last clipboard contents is not saved within any file. You can easily try out, by creating an APh file copying something to the APh clipboard, saving the file, closing APh and restarting it and opening the previous saved file again (...there shouldn't be anything to paste back then).

Well, if you just close a file and not APh itself, then the last clipboard contents is still in APh's clipboard memory for reuse of course here.

If you just close APh without let's say having saved a document you were working on, then APh will create an autosave (recovery) file on it's close. Depending on the documents contents size (...many huge layers etc.), so if it is a huge one and saving with history is enabled or snapshots are used, it can be slower in saving as usual. - Though on your used hardware it should usually be either way fast here.

Thanks. And yes, of course you're right about the clipboard. I wasn't thinking.

The recovery file must be the answer, and I agree that it should be fast on my machine, between the computer horsepower and the storage.

And presumably the recovery files are saved on the internal storage, which is ridiculously fast. But my external m.2 drive with my Affinity files is in a Thunderbolt enclosure that's still very fast, even though it benchmarks at a little under half the speed of the ridiculously expensive internal storage.

So I think there's an issue. Is it just me?

[Affinity Photo beachball on quit? Is it saving recovery files?]

I mean exactly what I asked: whether it's saved for recall with a file. And you say no. I didn't think it was. Thanks.

And since I just opened a file and then closed it, that means Bruce's theory is probably not what's happening, at least it's not the only thing happening - which surprises me, because I was having problems 

This seems like a glitch. I'll narrow down the problem and then file a support ticket.

[Affinity Photo beachball on quit? Is it saving recovery files?]

Question: is the clipboard content saved with a file?

I just opened up a picture, closed it because it was the wrong on, and got the spinning ball.

it could also just be that each layer is saved. Like all my pictures, this one has a lot of them.

[Affinity Photo beachball on quit? Is it saving recovery files?]

4 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

This could be caused by a large amount of data on the clipboard. Before closing make a tiny selection and copy it but remember to deselect after copying as the selection will be retained.

That sounds totally plausible. Thanks.

That's not to say that it's normal for a clipboard to have this effect on a program, but it does seem like a very likely culprit. I do copy and paste a lot of very large chunks.

[Affinity Photo beachball on quit? Is it saving recovery files?]

In general the program is responsive on this machine. It's clearly confused when I quit - but not always, just some of the time.

[Affinity Photo beachball on quit? Is it saving recovery files?]

Mac Studio Max, 64GB, 32-core GPU, Affinity Photo 2.0.3, macOS Ventura 13.1

It often hangs for a good 20 seconds on quit, but only when I've closed a large file (as my files tend to be).

Come to think of it, this may happen when I just close the file too, I forget. But it's only when I have a file open, i.e. if I just open the program and quit right away it doesn't do that.

Is it saving a recovery file? Even that seems slow, considering the speed of the storage on these machines.

Not a show-stopper, I just want to see whether there's anything I can do to make the program happier.

[Affinity Photo: change selection that adjustment was applied to after the fact?]

Just now, h_d said:

Deselect to remove the pixel selection, then click on the HSL Shift Adjustment layer and paint on it in black or white. (It's a mask.)

A mask! That's the answer. Thanks so much.

There's still so much I don't know about this program, even after using it a lot for a year.

 

[Affinity Photo: change selection that adjustment was applied to after the fact?]

I *think* what's going on here is that I applied this HSL adjustment to a selection of the pixel layer below it rather than the whole thing.

What did I do here? I sort of like the effect, but I'd want to do a lot of tweaking to the selection it's being applied to.

This is just a fragment of the picture. The top is what I'm asking about, below is what it looks like without the HSL adjustment to half the picture.

TIA

[Print quality less than Display]

Well, I can only repeat what I posted already.

Nothing wrong with monitor calibration, but that's talking about what accent color to paint a dining room wall in a house that has no plaster on the walls.

[Print quality less than Display]

And to put a finer point on it, my sense is that issues like the printer simply not being able to produce a particular color you feed it dwarf monitor calibration. (The Pro-1000 has 11 colors, and it doesn't produce some shades of blue, it turns some maroon shades brown, etc.)

But there's also an angry mob of printing nerds gathered outside my office with pitchforks, so don't take anything I say as gospel. I've only been serious about printing for about a year.

Put another way, I'm confident that Robert's issues are much more fundamental.

[Print quality less than Display]

18 hours ago, debraspicher said:

Ideally you would have a calibrator for both display and printer

I guess, but my garden variety Samsung monitor with the plebeian stock profile and the output of my Canon Pro-1000 (using the ICC profiles for the two different fine art papers I use) are as closely matched as you're going to get.

That could be dumb luck, and I'm certainly not snorting at the concept. But my sense is that in this "why do my prints look lousy" case it would be shooting flies with an anti-aircraft gun.

[Print quality less than Display]

There are a lot of potential causes for lousy prints, and you're talking about color spaces rather than resolution. Is the color the problem?

One issue could be that you're using the Mac system print driver, which is at best just okay. The installation details are going to be different for your Epson printer than for a Canon one, but you need to select the right ICC profile for the printer and paper you're using to get the right colors.

That's in any case, whether you use the Mac driver or not. And that leads to the next suggestion: download a trial of Binarten Qimage One and see whether that improves the quality.

If the problem is low resolution, probably the first thing to check is the DPI inside Affinity Photo: Document->Resize Document, then set it to 300 DPI. I've been using the Bicubic resampling algorithm.

Just a few things off the top of my head.

 

[White or black brush on mask, no difference]

5 hours ago, - S - said:

Your "white" is set to 0% opacity in the Colour panel.  If you change it to 100% opacity, it will then show as 55% grey (or whatever the slider is set to).

 

Duh. Thanks!

It's always something simple...

[White or black brush on mask, no difference]

I can't figure out whether this is a glitch or something I'm missing. Probably the latter, but as you can see, it makes no difference whether I've painted the maskl with white or black on this mask.

(This may have been a bad spot to show as an example, but what's underneath really is different, and the fact that the thumbnails show alpha stuff to the right is irrelevant - this is the behavior I'm getting everywhere on the picture.)

Mac Studio, macOS Ventura 13.1, AP 2.0.3

TIA

 

[Qu'est-ce que c'est Affinity Photo wants to record my machine's screen and audio?]

Interesting. Thanks.

[Qu'est-ce que c'est Affinity Photo wants to record my machine's screen and audio?]

What's this about? Did I hit some funny things on the keyboard by mistake?

It feels like it wants to record a macro maybe?

I did give it permission, but of course that's easy to reverse.

TIA

Mac Studio, Ventura 13.1, Affinity Photo 2.0.3.

[Question before making it a feature request]

35 minutes ago, loukash said:

 

Looks similar to KM with more focus on gestures as trigger.
I'm more the "keyboard shortcuts type"…  

I’m more the both type, including gestures + keyboard modifiers. 

[Question before making it a feature request]

1 hour ago, loukash said:

I just realized that long time ago I have excluded Affinity v1 in Keyboard Maestro as well, but not Affinity v2 yet. I didn't even notice any slowdowns with v2. But then again, I'm not yet using v2 for production either, only for "toying" so far…

 

To be clear, it's only the clipboard manager feature in BetterTouchTool that needs to be turned off for Affinity Photo. That's what I'd forgotten about - I use BTT for all kinds of gesture and keyboard shortcuts all day long (although not in AP, but that may change). It's brilliant.

[Question before making it a feature request]

1 hour ago, loukash said:

Fair enough. 
Personally, I'm using a clipboard cache (via Keyboard Maestro), so I can always go dozens of clipboards back to reuse content that may be days or even weeks old. That doesn't always work with proprietary content like Affinity objects though.

Yes, I was having drastic slowdowns copy/pasting on my new Mac Studio. Affinity’s very impressive tech support person nailed the problem with his first question.

it turned out that I’d forgotten about BetterTouchTool’s clipboard manager. Disabling that feature for Affinity Photo was all it took to solve the problem.