Fixx

Affinity devs should definitely straighten the procedures, after all there a clearly some results which are desired and commonly wanted, and others that are not useful at all. Software should offer help to achieve the usual wanted results and warn if selections would result unwanted results like not-100K text/vectors.

Thank you Fixx!!

OK, I did some test:
All what you suggested is true and has a certain sense.
But most of all, it works and that's it.
It is not so linear, because the Assign/Convert is counterintuitive, as well as the lock on the color slider palette.
However, knowing what to do make easy to adapt.
Hope that in the near future Affinity will smooth that particular. Color management is fundamental nowadays!
Thanks again for your precious help, it makes things clear!

(...)

Hello RainerH,
Click on the "Swatches" tab in the studio, expand the "hamburger" and choose "Create Palette from Document", then "As Application Palette" or "As Document Palette". This last option keeps the created palette available for future documents.
The "Create Palette from Image" option allows you to choose an image on the computer as well as the number of colors (up to 256) desired for the palette.

I can understand why they exist – a few clicks and your photo looks better without much effort, and that’s great – but that doesn’t tell me why they don’t create adjustment layers (or live filters) instead of making destructive changes, which was why I asked the question.
Having the software add an adjustment (or live filter) – which can be later changed or removed – instead of making a destructive change, does not change the user’s workflow as far as I can tell; they can still just make one click per enhancement.
However, by adding an adjustment/filter layer instead, the user also has the opportunity to change things later if they want to, thus giving the user more control if they feel the need for it without forcing them to do anything else if they don’t want to.
To try and reiterate, why do they do what they do in the way they do it? And is there a good reason why they shouldn’t do it another way?

Ran into the same problem, completely baffeled me as I tried to select a rectangular area and then delete it, which ended up deleting the entire layer. I tried this multiple times and eventually had to search online and find this to realize what was happening. After reading your explanations I understand why it's happening, but it's completely unexpected and very hard to understand for the user, especially when they're used to any other photo editor.
Basically, I think the problem is that when you paste in or drag in pixel graphics they're made into image objects. This has some benefits, but the problem is that it's not clearly indicated to the user, so they don't understand this is happening or expect that they won't be able to edit them without rasterizing them. Next complication is that when you make a rectangular selection the interface clearly signals to the user that this area is selected, and not the entire image layer. This makes it again very unexpected that Affinity actually considers the whole layer object selected and not the selection area and deletes the entire layer when you press delete.
So, a few ideas to make this easier to understand in future updates:
- Communicate more clearly that something you paste in is not a rasterized layer that you can edit the content of. Or maybe offer a setting on how pasted in images are handled.
- Communicate more clearly what is selected, or don't consider the entire layer selected when you make an area selection.
- Offer the offer to rasterize the layer if they try to edit it (like removing a part), or even better, just let the user edit the corresponding part of the transformed bitmap and keep it an image object.

Thank you.

Probably because lots of people like to just fire up new apps & see if they can figure out how everything works without wading through the documentation.

Adding to this, bottom line is no matter what dev says, replies, cites, or explains over and over, I can't find one post or comment online praising Affinity Photo alpha channel related features or workflow.
I however, as many other experienced AND HOBBYIST graphic artists, each time  trumped or frustrated when in need of an alpha channel in AP, can easely find writings about users not liking it, and worse, STILL not understand it any better.
just like me, as I just did.
 
Once again.
 
 

Hello there,
I was hoping the recent update would fix the overlapping panels issue… but sadly it doesn't
No second column of panels either…
Any other Mac user interested in these "features" ?
I can't believe I'm the only one who can't wait for the fix.

And currently all the Affinity apps are on sale for 50% of their normal price, so for example in the US Affinity Publisher is just $25.

Here comes an opinion, so take it how you will: I think some simple yet powerful HTML export could have its uses**, but speaking in as one who does both layout and web programming professionally as part of a small organization (and as my attention is split between the two, I am a true expert in neither field), I will be surprised if Publisher ever comes to the point where it can double as a "webpage designer". The process of making any WYSIWYG program to output faithful HTML (and of course CSS and perhaps Javascript) that performs reliably along multiple browsers, especially in the day of responsive design, is a task that is as big as the whole of Affinity Publisher itself. It would take a massive amount of work, and despite all the effort in development, its output would still often fail to be satisfactory. I say this just to temper expectations—I will not objet if Serif proves me wrong.
**Though I do not think I could expect full "webpage design" capabilities, I do not mean to say that HTML export is out of reach. I think some sort of HTML output is a worthy goal for Publisher once Serif gets some more of the hotly requested layout features nailed down. Just these past two weeks, I have used the HTML export of InDesign to output a very large document (1500 pages in print) in such a way that I could write a script to process the exported HTML to grab the text and semantic markup for the purposes of uploading the content to a database. I could not have done that project without some kind of HTML, XML, or similar.
My guess is that some kind of HTML export will eventually come, but later, certainly not in the 1.x development. And once some effort is made, then we can see how far it would be reasonable to take it.

If you turn off "command-click opens a link in a new tab" in Preferences -> Tabs then that is what you get.
I have that turned on, so for me it is option+shift+command+W, while the option+command+W shortcut is for Close Other Tabs.

Thank you so much for your answer. I hope developer will add the option to do that in future update.

Thanks for the replies. I'll check it out.

It leaves them where you put them. It will look in the three system font folders to start with, and you can make additional folders for fonts and tell it where to look, such as my example with Dropbox. Here is a quote from the support page:
 
I'm not 100% sure about that. I had some really old Postscript Type 1 fonts (the kind that come with a pair of files: FFIL & LWFN) that I thought didn't work in the past. However, it seems that they are showing up in Typeface now. I have one such font here where the file was last modified in 1993, and it is showing up in Typeface and is activated when I open an afpub document that uses it.
Since there is a free demo, and since it does not move fonts around, I think you could try it out yourself (not that I mind answering questions). The developer also seems to be reachable. I just wrote the dev today and got a very nice response soon after.

I agree. Remembering the user choice would be the best, but barring that, why should export as spreads be the default choice? It has its place, but it seems exporting pages to be the far more common operation.

No, I don’t. But I do think that with today’s computers, developers of new apps could opt to implement text composition based on the work from the 1970s and 1980s (Knuth, Karow, Zapf), and not just the 1880s (Mergenthaler). 

Yes, it would be modified.
Too bad. Of course it is possible to alter settings to something else than PDF/X-4. User should know.
Anyway, this is how InDesign works.

There should be a backup save which and Affinity should offer to recover when you start it again. But generally, keep hitting cmd-S.

There should be a backup save which and Affinity should offer to recover when you start it again. But generally, keep hitting cmd-S.

Thank you for the quick reply. You have been quite a help to many on this forum. (I had found those swatches, and going forward, will always make document specific pallet.)
To me, the issue is that clicking the RGB gray swatch indicates it is single color CMYK. Why would I assume anything other than that is how to is made?
There would be no question at all if the swatch popped up as a 4c gray.
Only the GRAY swatch pallet does this. The other pre-installed swatches (Apple, System Web etc) do not show a color mix when clicking. You must find the color mix from the FILL swatch at the top of the page, where you can pick your color space. I get that in the full color picker, I can see a swatch in all colorspaces, but the swatches pallet should show me the color as it is applied in my document.
 

See attachments.

1.afphoto

That's certainly a feature we're missing, needing to switch to PS or Gimp when needed where it's faster to be able to work like this.