jimh12345

I think we can conclude that this problem is never going to be addressed.

I've made several attempts to understand the gradient tool. All have failed. I just wasted another 10 minutes trying to create a color gradient in this hellish UI. Setting the colors is either impossible, or too complicated for my simple human brain.

Plain brush, no texture, no wet edges, Normal mode. I probably won't need to revisit my 2.6 work anytime soon, so I'm just sticking with 2.5 for now.

I uninstalled 2.6, installed 2.5 and the problem is gone. But, yes, all the work I did in 2.6 is now unavailable to me. And it seems I can't have both versions installed. My fault for violating the Prime Directive: never install an update unless it has something in it you really need.

Wait - 2.6 is a "beta"? Why did I get a notice of an upgrade? I didn't really want to be a beta site.

Sigh. In all the years since "hardware acceleration" was introduced, I can honestly say the only thing I've actually been able to do with it is to turn it off to avoid problems. I'll try to go back to 2.5. I hope that's as easy as uninstall 1.6 / reinstall 2.5.

I'll try to attach one here. Expand the Group, select the mask and try to edit it with the Paint Brush, with Hardness set to 0. When I do that there are all sorts of sparkly lines and junk around the periphery of the mask. (If hardness is 100% you won't see much). My GPU is an RTX 4070. mask bug.afphoto

It seems if I create a Group with 2 adjustments with a common mask, things get weird- as I try edit that mask, there are rendering problems and the area of the masking isn't always stable. If I avoid groups and just use single adjustments it's ok. So I've lost the ability to use a Group to share a mask with multiple adjustments.

2.6 seems to have introduced a bug that's causing me real problems. Is there a way I can reinstall 2.5 and have both versions available?

Apparently you're correct, AP doesn't install a shell preview handler and so Windows just invokes the thumbnail handler. And we get these pathetic, non-resizable "previews". I just installed V1 on a clean machine, and it didn't do resizable previews either. But my confusion is now total, because I think I remember other posters here saying they got nice resizable previews. And I have a distant memory that this used to work in V1. So if that's true, it stopped working long ago.

I can only imagine one possible connection between NAS sync and AP previews: the synchronization software could be using the file systems attributes to track which files need synching. I don't know why date/time wouldn't be enough information, but it could be a performance thing. Maybe the synch software sets and clears the archive or indexing attributes for its own internal purposes. Now, there's no obvious reason why this would affect AP previews, but I can't think of another way the NAS could leave something behind that would confuse AP. Here's a list of attributes: https://www.2brightsparks.com/resources/articles/understanding-file-attributes.html?srsltid=AfmBOopu52Br8EdxD-lD7XS0XX3i9LPHwcX45ENF3C1Tg1xw8P1Yv2GR Still hoping someone here will post what's in their C:\Program Files\Affinity\Common\ folder...

I installed and activated V1 but nothing changed - I still have the tiny previews. Even tried changing the file association in Windows ("open with") to V1. No difference. I can see in the Registry that the "preview handler" that's installed for the .aphoto file extension is this file: C:\Program Files\Affinity\Common\thumbnail.dll On my system that file has a date of 12/4/2024, even after installing V1, so installing V1 didn't overwrite it. Could someone who's getting correct, full size previews please check this file on their system, post its date and size, and note whether any other files are in that folder?

I uninstalled the MSIX, installed and activated the MSI/EXE, and now I have previews - sort of. As before (in the old thread I linked above) the previews are small, obviously just a bigger version of the thumbnail because they include the AP icon at lower right. And that's no surprise, because if I dig into the Registry I see the registered "preview handler" is "C:\Program Files\Affinity\Common\Thumbnail.dll". It seems AP doesn't really have a preview handler. I recall from the old thread that some people said having V1 installed alongside V2 fixed the problem - maybe because V1 installs a proper preview handler. Can I just install V1 to find out, without messing up V2?

On further inspection it looks like - although I definitely intended to install the MSI version - I somehow installed that confounded MSIX nonsense by mistake. It's been a long time since I last dealt with this tapeworm - how do I completely remove it and get back to the MSI? Is it sufficient to just ask Windows to uninstall the app or will that leave some sort of residue behind?

This was a brand new system and had never seen any version of AP before. I installed and activated the MSI/EXE version.