Herbert123

Indeed! Pretty excellent replacement for Dreamweaver. I use Pinegrow as a super-charged visual inspector, as well as for quick web setups. It supports the main front-end html/css frameworks as well (Foundation, Bootstrap, Google Material).

It's difficult to answer: I process each image individually for web use. After processing I scale down with either Mitchell-Netravali or Catmull-Rom resampling algorithms. Catmull-Rom in particular keeps small details clear and sharp. I NEVER EVER use Bicubic, Lanczos 3 or 8 for downscaling images: Lanczos works well for upscaling, not so much for the other way around - especially when dealing with sharp-edged illustrative artwork. Read up on it here: https://pixinsight.com/doc/docs/InterpolationAlgorithms/InterpolationAlgorithms.html Scroll down for visual comparisons. Catmull-Rom and Mitchell-Netravali just result in better down-sampled images. I also found that scaling down sharp-edged artwork with Lanczos may introduce artefacting or halos between dark edges and light fills. In any case, Lanczos results in too soft a result - as if blurred a bit. Unfortunately Affinity Photo or Designer do not offer either Catmull-Rom or Mitchell-Netravali as a resample algorithm (yet?). That is a real shame, because it does make quite a difference. Anyway, you can always download ColorQuantizer, which is free, and does support these algorithms (and many more!). Then save the result as a lossless PNG, and open it in Photo for further processing. http://x128.ho.ua/color-quantizer.html If your content is illustrative sharp-edged artwork, PNG works best. For best final compression and quality control again ColorQuantizer bests every single other tool out there. I never rely on anything else at this point. Regarding final web output formats: for photos I never us PNG - instead I would suggest JPG at a higher quality (up until the time that we can finally say farewell to JPG and use WebP instead). If you prefer to keep using PNG as a final web output format for photos, I would advise you to do the final compression and optimization again in ColorQuantizer.

Dreamweaver is a train wreck. It becomes worse with each new release, and the latest one (2017) is a real mess with that half-hearted Brackets integration. I left Dreamweaver years and years ago. Most coders did the same: DW does not even show up in any of the user statistics anymore (for example: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016 Adobe should just bury it - leave it to Adobe to destroy good products (Freehand, Fireworks, Director, Dreamweaver). I work predominantly in Netbeans myself, with Notepad++ and Atom on the side for certain tasks. And PineGrow for a more visual environment that is still very code friendly. To replace Dreamweaver, have a look at the PineGrow <-> Atom combo: bidirectional real-time updates while you work. A much better workflow compared to DW. It's pretty awesome. https://pinegrow.com/

That is too bad. I am used to non-destructive bitmap mask gradients.

I mentioned this before when I tested Designer, and unfortunately the same problem persists in Photo: the 3d emboss layer effect with a custom profile yields unsatisfactory results - quite visible banding spoils the effect, and it becomes unusable. Here is a comparison between Photo and a competing product (bottom one is Affinity Photo): No tricks are used, similar settings. No scaling of assets. A smoothing of 1 is used in the competing product (which is negligible) - applying any kind of smoothing in Affinity Photo produces a too soft look, and still does not remove the banding. Both files were produced at 1024x1024px. The only difference: Affinity Photo's file is 16bpc, while the other file is 8bpc. If anything, I would expect better results because I created the file at a higher bit-depth in Affinity Photo. Here the 3d emboss is applied to a letter (different profile, because Photo crashes the instant I press "linear"): Last time I mentioned this the developers came to believe I had used tricks in the other application, and that is just not true. I hope this will be resolved in a future update.

? Twirl down the layer with the layer mask you would like to copy, select the thumbnail, and copy it. Then drag the copy on a different layer or adjustment/effect layer. It's very simple. Same with deleting layer masks.

Cloning objects and layers is awesome. Competing software has it, and it allows for mirroring, cloning layer masks for re-use throughout the project (and the layer masks can be based on a clone of the original image), vector clones can be transformed and adjusted with live adjustment layers and effects... The workflow is brilliant. And real-time updates of the clones when the original is edited is truly useful as well. Once you get used to this, it is hard to work in Photo - it really limits the workflow. At least Affinity does offer symbols - but it is not quite the same.

DaVinci Resolve is very hardware-hungry. If your hardware is well supported, then it flies, and runs stable. If not, well... That is indeed the disadvantage of Resolve - quite picky.

I noticed bitmap layer masks with a gradients are destructive: create a layer mask and add a gradient with the gradient tool, and switch to a different layer. Then select the layer mask with the gradient again. Even with the gradient tool selected, the gradient widget is not displayed. Is this a bug?

Motion and FCPX are fine when you are on a Mac. If you need cross-platform compatibility, DaVinci and Fusion are excellent alternatives. And Motion can't compare with Fusion when it comes down to compositing work.

That isn't a new technique - I have been aware of it for years. I taught that in Photoshop classes myself (granted, with some variations). It is also quite handy to avoid sharpening those pesky JPG artifacts, and still improve the overall texture. The trouble in Photoshop is that layer masks cannot be cloned or used as a smart object, unless you resort to clunky clipping layers. And adjustment layers cannot be cloned or put in a smart object and still affect the main document. In Affinity Photo, as you state yourself, layers and masks cannot be cloned or instanced either, nor are smart objects available (yet?). Without the option in either application to virtually clone/instance layers and recycle those as layer masks, it is going to be impossible to create a non-destructive option - unless the developers implement a dedicated tool for this type of functionality - which is not the right path to be taking, in my opinion. Here's how you would do it in a competitor that does support cloned layers (fully non-destructive, and very controllable with the outline and gray mixer adjustment layers). Notice how the unsharp masking layer mask is an instance of the original photo layer. When the background is replaced with a different photo, the virtual copy that creates the mask updates automatically.

Affinity would have to compete with the likes of DaVinci Resolve and Fusion - a tough nut to crack indeed. DaVinci Resolve is a brilliant non-linear video editor, and the industry standard colour grading tool. Fusion is a nodal compositor for visual effects - superior to After Effects for that type of work. Not as good for motion graphics, though. Both are used in feature film production. Can't get any better than this, because the great thing is: both are free to work with up to ultra HD footage! Get them here: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/ca/products/davinciresolve https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/ca/products/fusion I would advice Serif to stay away from trying to compete in the professional video business. I would, however, very much welcome a Flash type competitor - but even in that segment the competition is quite tough: 2016 has been very interesting for animators: Moho, ClipStudio, and of course the open sourced OpenTOonz (which is getting better with every new release). Krita also includes animation now, and is finally Mac ready!

Well, when we are discussing system requirements - I remember the days Deluxe Paint IV ran in 2MB! I installed Photo on an older i5 system with 4GB ram, and it runs quite slow indeed. Adding a curve adjustment slows things down to a crawl, although that might be a beta issue. The competitors all run at an acceptable up to good pace in comparison on the same machine. Then again, Photo is still in beta, and it is still a young fledgling compared to the competitors. One more thing I noticed is Photo's (and Designer's) heavy installation footprint: around 600GB per application, and that is excludes the .NET framework required to run both. The installation files are a hefty ~250MB. I am aware storage space is inexpensive nowadays, but still. Adobe's competing products are much worse though: a ridiculous 3GB of space is required for each. Insane. I read somewhere that a major reason for the size increase over the years is the GUI: GUI frameworks require a lot of resources. Which is why I find it surprising that one other competitor's installation file weighs in at a paltry 22MB, and only requires 50mb for its installation - and can be run from a portable pen drive. It even runs on Windows XP(!) and MacOS 10.6. Yet is on par with functionality. I blame all those heavy (GUI and other) frameworks developers tend to rely on nowadays.

@svicalifornia: Thanks for the clear explanation: the table grouping example is a good one. I am not against an isolation mode - I just do not like the way it is implemented in Illustrator. If the shortcut key could be modified (with an option to use a modifier key + single click), and the screen darken effect could be turned off as well, I would certainly welcome such an isolation mode.

Refer to the image below. Compared to other Curves implementations, I like these things: the ability to work directly in HSV and HIS mode. Super handy. A simple saturation curve is quite powerful and simple to apply. the option to open any curve in a scale-able window that can be resized to any size - as big as the screen, if needed. I just do not understand why most image editors will not allow the user to do this. Photoshop's curve palette is tiny, even in expanded mode! Curves are so important, and this is one of my pet peeves. thumbnails of curve presets. the option to apply curve presets to specific channels. various curve types: spline, langrange, bezier, line, text input, etc. a preview option with a split view of which the split can be move to the left and right the option to quickly create a stepped curve. the option to invert a curve. the option to move the entire curve left, right, up, and down. My main issue with Affinity Photo's curves is that it seems quite heavy on processing. On an older i5 Windows tablet (EPE121) the curves choke that machine, and adjusting the curves is almost impossible. I do not experience that issue with other image editors and curves adjustments are snappy and responsive. Anyway, I feel it is a good idea to compare the various curves implementations, and learn from them. I do like the alpha channel option in Photo.