Fixx

Exposure & Brightness is weird stuff... I wonder why photographers insist on using such tools (or maybe it is just developers who think photographers want them?). Here is some explanation what is going on: https://www.lightxapp.com/difference-between-brightness-and-exposure/ I would much prefer to operate just with white point, black point and gamma. And curve when more control is needed. And hilight recovery and shadow controls :-D I guess some apps apply advanced curve controls when exposure and brightness are used (think manipulating "knee" and "elbow" points in density curves of photographic film). Anyway I do not think AP develop tools are very easily understood. I sure am not confident with them.

Not commercially.. more like testing environments or hobbies.

Devs should add a popup menu which remembers last entered equations/sets.

It is quite quick also to place pictures manually if the images are named alphabetical order. Select all images in Place command and place 1, move to next page, place next and so on.

Halftone filter can do this. It results though greyscale (or b&w) image so you have to colorize white and black to orange and red. Takes some fiddling with fill layers and blend modes. Surely there are other means for colorizing too. Text/glasses have to be separate layer as it is not halftoned.

Please do. We can use such a tool.

I think the core problem is that CAD software does not group or layer objects in PDF any useful way, but rather randomly. It may be because CAD developers see PDF only as delivery format, not a transfer format. I usually work CAD to PDF exports in Designer.

It would be wonderful if devs would develop this kind of style automation but so far no one has implemented such. It would be a great time saver to apply rule based styles to whole publication.

Photo is a tool for manipulating images. Cropping removes unwanted parts of the image. Now, if you want to replace unwanted parts with transparent areas or white, that is another function. Not too hard either.

You can open and save files from/to external drives as you please. You though have no control over scratch disks, I suppose system handles that part and uses just startup disk for scratch.

Libre does not open DWG. FreeCAD imports DWG to filelist but crashes when I try to open the file to a window. I will check those online converters but I suppose they are just googled ones, you do not really use them, do you #v_kyr? At least Autodesk Viewer does not print or export vector data.

Have you found any clever tools for converting DWG to Designer? I have tried some of those chinese DWG > PDF converters that Mac App Store offers but so far either they have no working trial or they are unable to keep scale. I suppose can use heavy CAD apps for converting but I would rather use something light and simple. Mac is my platform of choice.

Seems there is not yet a way to scale all numerically?

You can place docx to Publisher.

If you search this forum you will find an InDesign script that will batch convert your INDD files to IDML that publisher can read.

I have noticed Designer often slows very much when working with CAD generated PDFs. I guess usually it is because CAD apps generate very large amount of vector objects and Affinity just cant handle such a load, even if the file size looks moderate. If you know there is something to be done with file structure to ease the problem let us know.

With 128 colours he problems seems to be dithering. AP could no use simple flat 128 colours but added dither anyway. I would not use Affinity for any colour reduction work.

AP uses also automatic palette, which is optimized for image colours. There is no way around dithering though if here is anything in he image that can be dithered. Simple clear shapes should not dither (though sometimes they do in AP). I tested simple 600X800 pixels 2 colour image which has left side green and right size red. PS compressed it to 1 891 bytes. AP compressed the same image to 611 bytes. PS had 2 colour palette, in AP 2 colour palette did not work (got grey image) so I used 4 colours. Are you sure you did choose NOT to include colour profile AND metadata?

Conventional method would be to use a batch converter like XnConvert.

You can move an item by simply dragging UNLESS it is part of a group. If it is a grouped item you have to select it in layer palette. BUT if you have once selected it, you can drag also the next items in a group WITHOUT layer palette activation.

I do not think there are bad artefacts in the image but it needs sharpening.

Yes, it is a word processor feature. In page layout apps it has not been available long.

There is valid reason why Photo should not merge image layers. After all, it merges image layers happily if you select "Merge Visible" or "Flatten".

Activity Monitor does not display much useful information as OS is designed to assign ALL free memory to applications, and free it not until it is needed elsewhere. Thus part of the memory is assigned but contains only unnecessary data. Basically you would be just fine with Mac Mini 16GB RAM, or similar iMac. Apps you use are not too demanding. If you want be safe you could buy M1 Pro 32GB instead but I am not sure you would see much difference. I kinda wish next Mac Mini version would be M1/M2 Pro which might be my next upgrade.

Once upon a time when computer generated images did not always produce antialiased images there was an application called JAG (Jaggies Are Gone). It did have a really good algorithm for smoothing jagged edges to smooth but sharp antialiased edges. I have not seen as good antialiasing solutions since. Have to say that demand for separate antialiasing solution is not so urgent nowadays.