LDB

I got the email about Affinity 2 and wanted to check back and see if they ever fixed the gradient tool - evidently they have not. This is a complete deflection from the issue. We're not asking to be able to replicate exact workflows, we're asking that Affinity makes a tool faster to use since some of our workflows depend so heavily on it. Even one extra click per tool is catastrophic for some of us. Looks like I will continue to not buy the entire Affinity suite, and as well continue to not recommend it for any comic book creators because they don't have one-click destructive gradients.

@Medical Officer BonesFunny, I may wind up using ClipStudioPaint now that I can't use Affinity! The flatting tool honestly didn't help me *that* much. A really amazing invention for sure, but I close all my lines and draw with a nib essentially like a rapidograph, with a completely non-expressive weight; it was really not much faster than just using selections. Though if I was coloring literally any other kind of art, it would have been fantastic! (You can thank me for Krita having a threshold tool, though. I managed to convince the devs to put one in for us old-fashioned inkers after they conceded that it wouldn't be much work to do so. Affinity's silence on this issue is a real disappointment, in contrast. Especially since I was ready to pay real cashmoney for this program and tell all my social media followers why they should pay cashmoney for it too.)

@Medical Officer Bones For pros in other kinds of work environments, I can absolutely see why you'd be right. I have a lot of friends who work for IDW and there's a lot about this program that would drive them up the wall! I don't do work for publishers anymore, I'm entirely an independent creator who has spent a lot of time whittling down my workflow to the very barest bones, so if Affinity had this gradient thing sorted out, as far as I could tell, I'd personally be golden. I spent the better part of a year challenging to produce my comic with nothing but Gimp and Krita, and in the end they also had non-negotiable problems. I even started lettering by hand because Krita's text tool was non-existent! (And I do much prefer the results.) The other problem there was the jpeg compression for web publishing was not good either. But that's neither here nor there...

Oh dear. Evidently this answers my question about gradients. This is a very, very badly needed tool. As a comic book artist who primarily works with flats, a dead-simple, one-click, 2 second destructive raster gradient tool that works like a brush rather than a vector object is a MUST. It is absolutely essential to my workflow, I will use this tool dozens of times during a 30-minute coloring illustration job, maybe a hundred times on a full comic book page, and if I have to struggle with the tool for even 10 seconds each time I need to use it, this easily doubles the amount of work and is an utter deal-breaker. Saving my presets as a style is a non-answer, I need to be able to change colors, angles, and transparency on the fly. I cannot purchase this program unless and until this tool is added. Affinity is useless to me as a professional without it.

And one more question: is there a way to force a tool to "remember" your context selections? (For instance, when I use the selection tool, I almost always need it set to "add", but it reverts upon switching tools.) Thank you for creating such a great program! I look forward to migrating from Adobe entirely.

Coming from photoshop I got very used to just being able choose a color, click and drag to accomplish this. It seems to be a bit more complicated than that in affinity, and when playing around with the gradient settings, I couldn't seem to get the opacity to change from 100%. I've read the help file, but it's a bit - excuse the pun - opaque!