nickbatz

Oh, I don't think I am running out of available memory. The issue is system instability - really just slowing down rather than crashing - after I quit Affinity Photo. All these memory displays are just correlation, not necessarily the cause,

All of that is good advice, but booting in safe mode and then trying to run Affinity Photo... that's not going to tell me anything, unfortunately. Again: this is only after quitting Affinity Photo. Everything I have running is important, and I've had all these things running all day long for 50 years. Okay, maybe only 49. But I have no intention of disabling anything I have running anyway, so it's sort of moot. It's not because I'm ornery - which I am - it's because I need things like BetterTouchTool, the driver for my audio interface, SwitchResX, iDrive, Dropbox... all that stuff. Memory Clean doesn't do anything invasive unless you run a Clean operation. I did install an update recently, but this predates that. Since I'm the only one reporting this, my hunch is that it's either the way Affinity Photo caches files for recovery (a feature, not a bug!) or just a glitch in my system.

Ah, you're right, it's not running in the first one. But you can see in the second screenshot that it's taking up less than 1GB of RAM. I have 64GB installed, so it's irrelevant here in any case.

Except that this only happens after quitting Affinity Photo. I need everything that's running to be running - it's absolutely not gratuitous junk, for example iDrive is a cloud backup. Thanks though.

And after restarting, same programs open. Why was it using 41.78GB of RAM above? I should add that after posting above, I launched Logic Pro X. Logic wasn't unstable, but it was running very slowly. Of course, it's quite possible that something funny is going on in my system. But it is only affecting Affinity Photo, or I should say only affecting my system after quitting AP. AP is running absolutely fine, so it doesn't seem likely to be a corrupted installation.

Update: here's a screenshot showing Activity Monitor and Memory Clean after quitting Affinity Photo (having had a large picture with many layers open). The only programs I have open here are Activity Monitor itself, some small utility apps that always run when I start up (BetterTouchTool, etc.), Apple Mail, and the app that controls my audio interface. Normally I'd have maybe 50GB available, not 22. (Will restart and edit the 50GB to the actual amount; suffice it to say, it's way more than 22GB.) I still can't figure out what's going on.

Well, the demo crashed, so I guess the gods don't want me to try it. It could be a system requirements issue, dunno, but that's moot (because I'm not in a position to install a newer macOS on this machine).

Gigapixel AI is $99, so the prices are comparable. But I'm just downloading the demo of PhotoZoom just to test (I hadn't heard of it).

I have no doubt that what they're saying is absolutely true, but can they do that on fine art paper? Giclée? It's always a matter of context. If you look at gelatin silver prints at a museum, they're just stunning. (I'm assuming those are the same sort of thing.) But inkjet prints can be equally stunning, just in different ways. Also, my understanding is that the expensive pigment ink used in printers like mine (Canon Pro-1000) aren't going to fade anytime soon if you use the right paper and spray them with [whatever the protectant is called - I forget]. *** If you're going to use Gigapixel AI - as I do often - the time to use it is before bringing a picture into Affinity Photo to do a lot of manipulation - depending on what you're doing; if you plan to distort sections, etc., it's better to start with the higher-res picture. That's my experience, anyway, not claiming that everyone has to obey me.

Unless something has changed, the Gigapixel AI plug-in doesn't work in Affinity Photo. I bought AP from this site, and the plug-in wasn't recognized last time I tried. You just have to export a file and run it through Gigapixel that way. Update: confirmed, see below.

I've done what Lisbon wrote, only simpler: just reduce the top layer's opacity temporarily.

James Ritson's official tutorial videos are fantastic. As others have said, they're available under the Help menu. And as Blende21 says, Olivio is very good too. But start with the official ones.

This relates to why I posted a feature request a while ago: the ability to draw a source path for the clone brush to follow. Of course, it was met with people trying to explain why I don't want that. But it would be a great feature.

Hey EJ, what's the name of the Facebook group, if you wouldn't mind? Thanks.

Affinity Photo is the right program to use for this. It does take a while to figure out, but it's time well spent and it eventually does all fall into place. I've been working with the program a lot for the past six months. While it's helped me produce a lot of really good work along the way, I'm still asking embarrassing questions. To remove dust: - Make sure you have a Pixel layer selected. If you opened the photo as an Image, right-click and rasterize it (because Images can't be edited). - The easiest way to remove dust is probably by painting over it with the Clone Brush tool. It paints from one part of the image onto another, hence the name "clone." Adjust the brush size with the [ and ] keys, then option-click (alt on Windows) on the source area you want to paint over the dust with, then just click on the dust. It may be helpful to set the Hardness to 0 so the painting blends in.

Okay, this is what I'm talking about: The article I wrote with all the pros and cons I could think of, asking our viewers for their opinions: https://synthandsoftware.com/2022/05/subscription-software-yes-or-no/ And the evidence I was talking about : https://synthandsoftware.com/2022/05/subscription-software-nope/

I didn't know that! But I'm glad.

Not sure where the appropriate sub-forum for this is, but I want to shout loudly that: 1. I truly love Affinity Photo, so much so that I bought Affinity Designer just to support the company (even though I rarely use vector graphics). 2. The day you switch to a subscription model is the day I will switch to another program. I'd be happy to explain why, but I don't expect anyone to be interested. Suffice it to say that I'm far from alone in hating subscription software - and I have the evidence to prove that it's incredibly unpopular.

It would be annoying if you didn't have to use a modifier (Option), at least I wouldn't like it at all. My suggestion is to download BetterTouchTool and program the mouse to zoom when you slide with two fingers, or a similar gesture. BTT can assign sets of actions to individual programs, so this wouldn't have to be systemwide.

This is subjective. I own and have been using both literally all day long for many years, and I couldn't disagree more. The Magic Mouse is fantastic in my opinion. You can get much more use out of it (and the Magic Trackpad) using BetterTouchTool, an inexpensive utility that assigns commands to gestures.

Soundflower is for audio loopback - routing audio between programs.

Simple to you! Sounds very useful. And yes, audio system set-up is important - all the more so with hardware coming back in vogue, needing to be integrated.

Right, and you have to use many instances of Alchemy and Diva for that to be totally relevant. It does tell you that CPU is unlikely to be a bottleneck with an Apple Silicon Mac. But musicians typically use instrument and processing plug-ins from multiple companies. Some run on a single core (at least on Intel Macs), others don't. In some cases, sample library developers license Native Instruments Kontakt sampler to play their libraries. They're always heavily scripted, and the complexity of the scripting is a major variable. So is the size and number of samples being streamed simultaneously. And the effects being used inside Kontakt. Logic itself has quirks about how things get assigned to processors, in fact a lot of musicians (me included) often use another program - Vienna Ensemble Pro - as a plug-in host on local machines, streaming into Logic. It also works over a network when you use multiple computers, so they effectively act like another program running on the local machine. VE Pro is fantastic, and sometimes instruments that strain inside Logic have more breathing room inside VE Pro. Anyway, my point is that anecdotal reports about how things work on various machines are also useful. My only objection to benchmarks is when people think quoting them makes them sound intelligent.

Obviously every event in the universe happens in time! Realtime means things with timing that has to correspond to real time - video and audio. There can be a small amount of latency, but it has to remain perfectly constant. As to benchmarks, like many specs they’re a useful guide - some more than others, but they don’t always put real world use in perspective. I seem to remember Affinity Photo’s benchmark panel having a similar disclaimer, in fact.

Well, in my experience with music and audio software, even quite specific benchmark tests don't necessarily mean a whole lot. There's one going around for Logic Pro X that... okay, now I forget, but they run 50 billion reverbs or something. There's one with a number of tracks count... maybe the same one. But aside from the fact that you're unlikely to push your computer all the way in those directions, your storage subsystem makes a huge difference, so does whether you're running plug-ins that tax a single processor rather than ones that are divided... there are many factors that determine whether you're going to bring a computer to its knees. Benchmarks can certainly be useful for comparisons, but more often they're just a rough guide.