Herbert123

What you are referring to is Adobe's version of "Tiff files". Adobe is saving a PSD file embedded in a Tiff - which is only fully compatible with Photoshop. And no other application (bar one exception) is capable of dealing with smart objects with external smart live effects anyway. Affinity Photo is not able (yet?) to do this either. Simple answer: No, it is not. Blame Adobe for mucking with standards and confusing everyone.

In other applications it is possible to assign multiple fills and strokes to the same object. I searched for such an option in Designer, but I can't seem to find it. Is this possible (yet)? If not, is it on the road map?

Multi-layered EXR files as well, I presume?

I understand that. I am providing an alternative viewpoint that not all designers are in love with Illustrator's isolation mode. I am not the only one - visit Adobe forums, and a quick search will result in questions from users how they can turn off isolation mode. And I am not inherently opposed to an isolation mode - merely the way it is implemented in Illustrator. I do like opening a symbol or smart object in its own window when working on complex art and layouts. Having the rest of your design faded out - no, thank you. Various reasons. Under pressure from a deadline, and complex artwork tends to become laggy to work with. A secondary click may be interpreted as a double-click under circumstances. Besides, double-clicking is 1) frustrating when the user works with a Wacom, and 2) to be avoided in relation to repetitive strain injury. Third, if alternative methods exist, we ought to explore those as well, and see if we may improve on the Illustrator working methods. Ah, my mistake. It was late when I wrote that line. I meant that in that other application I can either hold down a modifier key or switch selection mode, and a single-click selects any object in a group or sub-group. No need for double-clicking at all to work with groups and sub-groups. Also, in that other application I can easily select objects 10 levels deep with one click. Then select another object in another group anywhere in the canvas with one click. Selecting is dependent on a mode switch - which means I can drag a selection marquee around objects within the active group that I am working in without accidentally selecting other objects or groups. ... The reason for my counter posting is really only to start up a discussion to explore alternative workflows to solve these workflow issues in Affinity Designer. I and others do NOT like the isolation mode as it is currently implemented in Illustrator. Double-clicking as a common GUI action has its drawbacks as well. So, let's explore various options, I say. Let's not be bound by what is standard in Illustrator, and perhaps we can discover a method of selecting, and working with, objects in groups that is an improvement over what Illustrator offers - because I feel Illustrator's workflow is a pain in the neck.

I feel a dose of reality is warranted here. Freehand never had an isolation mode like the one in Illustrator. It was possible to convert groups of objects to symbols, and edit a symbol in a new window. Not comparable to Illustrator's isolation mode - similar to Flash and Photoshop's smart objects, though. But quite useless for editing within context. Freehand's layer palette is terrible. Other organization tools in Freehand are antiquated. The way many tools work in Freehand - frustrating. The GUI slow and cumbersome to work with in comparison with modern software. Let's avoid the "olden times were the best" syndrome. Freehand is a relic - granted, some nicely implemented base tools, but for the rest - blah. Frankly, I dislike Illustrator's isolation mode. Inadvertently double-clicking any group, and BAM! the rest of the design is faded out. This happened to me when working under the pressure of a deadlines all the time. Personally, I turned it off in the preferences. But then again, I really did not like working in Illustrator in the first place, and prefer other tools now. As mentioned, the layer panel is a mess. The workflow laggy and slow - unless expanded with plugins. IF the Affinity Designer developers ever decide to add an isolation mode like the one in Illustrator, PLEASE make sure it can be turned off. Not all of us are enamoured by Illustrator's implementation of this mode. I very much dislike the rest of my design faded out. In one of the vector/bitmap applications I use, working with groups is quite elegantly solved: two selection modes are available, and one of these allows for entering groups with two clicks. Selections occur within the group itself - dragging a selection marquee will only select the objects in the active group. And no need to fade out the rest of the design. Exiting a group in that application merely consists of a single click outside the group. It will then select the next parent level. No need for pointless double-clicks. Nor do I see any reason to fade out the rest of the design when editing a symbol. I'd like to see the actual effect and overall colour changes when editing symbols. If the need exists to focus on the contents of a symbol without being distracted by the design it is used in, opening the symbol in its own window works better anyway. And for complex designs it will provide a definite speed boost as well. Simple commands to enter and exit a group work just as well in my opinion. The same application I mentioned above allows for a smart object type workflow as well. Aside from symbols, I think smart objects would be far more useful to organize complex work with compared to an isolation mode. I do completely agree that Affinity Designer's current selection tools must be expanded, and allow us to work within groups only. I do not think Illustrator's isolation mode is the best approach. I believe Illustrator's isolation mode was conceived to deal with live paint mode in the first place? Let's not make the same mistakes Illustrator made. Isolation mode is a patch to deal with Illustator's less-then-ideal workflow and layers. The existing selection tools can be expanded easily with a group work mode. And add shortcut keys to enter and exit groups quickly with the keyboard.

It would be useful to know what the final image is going to be used for. The output intent is decided by that - for example, is it meant for the web? Or for a print (colour inkjet)? Or for press work? Reducing that image to 18.000 pixels still means it results in a giant bitmap that will eat resources needlessly in most practical circumstances. Based on your responses, I think your understanding of output intent and resolution is missing a couple of pieces. It would be helpful if you could tell us a little bit more about what you are trying to achieve. Then, and only then, can be provide you with suggestions for sensible output settings.

The trouble are all those fancy and attractive layer effects that are nowadays so easily applied: a printer and image setter must convert those to bitmaps, and cuts everything in either bitmap areas or vector areas. This results in two problems: 1) a visible resolution change on paper when text and vector object are cut into adjacent areas of bitmap and vector that touch, and 2) colour shifts - especially when the images are RGB. In the 'old days' we did not have access to layer effects, and I applied vector blend effects to attain soft shadows and other effects. A blend function is missing in Affinity Designer, which is a crying shame - this means we cannot use this method to avoid the 'YDB' syndrome (Yucky Discoloured Box). (Or at least, we would have to create this type of shadow effect manually - not recommended!) Manually rasterizing the entire document to CMYK is one solution: rasterize the blurry shadows to ~150ppi, and lines and text to the printer's/image setter's resolution 600ppi/1200ppi. But I have not found an option in Designer to control rasterizing ppi on a per layer basis. Try this: in the PDF export settings: - rasterize: everything - turn off down-sample images - use DPI 800 (unfortunately Designer limits the resolution to 1024 - which seems odd to me, since 1200ppi may be used to rasterize black and white vector work for high quality print. 1024 sounds like a developer-based limit). - set pdf/X-4 - colour space CMYK - if you allow JPG compression, set it to a fairly high quality (or turn it off) for quality press work. Otherwise, 80-85 should be fine. You are now rasterizing EVERYTHING at 800PPI - which should be more than sufficient for newspapers and lower~medium quality paper/print. When printed no YDBs will show up. Ideally for higher quality paper and press work you want a higher PPI resolution. Designer, as mentioned before, allows for up to 1024PPI only. I think that ought to be increased. Do inform your printer how you generated that pdf, though.

Uhmmm... You are exporting a (more than) 36000px by 37000px file as PNG or JPG. PNG output in Designer is limited to 32768px in both height and width, and will automatically scale the image down, btw. With a large bitmap image such as yours things will naturally slow down to a crawl. PNG and JPG compression algorithms are slow to compress, and with a large file like this one it is going to take some time. How much RAM does your machine have? At least 32GB would be required to work with bitmaps like that in my experience, I would say. If you have less RAM, your machine will start relying on virtual memory (harddrive) which will really cause a slow down. EDIT Tried this is an alternative application, and I have 48GB RAM installed. i7 920@3.6ghz. Saving a 33200x25000 bitmap takes ~4 minutes and 10 seconds for me. But that is PURE bitmap - not a vector graphic that must be converted to bitmap, which will eat way more time. Are you certain that you need that high resolution? How is the image going to be used? For print?

Very small icons with few colours optimized in GIF result in smaller file sizes than PNG.

Easy work-around: duplicate the layer, and apply the effect to the duplicate. Then change the Fill Opacity to 0%. Duplicate that object and apply other effects. This allows for a layered layer FX approach. Now, if only there'd be an option to instance the original layer: the changes would cascade to the instances.

The devs could take this much, much further, in my opinion. Photoshop's clouds filter, while useful, is a complete joke in regards to control. Affinity Photo's Perlin Noise is a good start, but the competition out there is fairly stiff nowadays. Compare the following implementation: Live filter, contrast and intensity, and other parameters such as detail, and X and Y repetition to fine-tune the cloud/noise effect. Multiple live noise layers can be combined freely, and even cloned/instanced. Integrate multiple noise generators, and allow for custom colours. Allow for custom presets and gradients. And why not take it all the way, and integrate a non-destructive multi-layered texture generator with built-in embossing and lighting? And allow these textures to be used as fills? Affinity devs: dig deeper! Go way beyond Photoshop! Others have done this already.

Bumping this again. Can't we just quickly turn off anti-aliasing globally for a document and/or specifically for a bunch of layers?

It would be nice if we could simply right-mouse click either the ruler, or an input field, and change the unit on the fly.

Just for the competition with Wacom I thank Microsoft for the Surface Studio. It is about time Wacom gets some serious competition - let's see if they can keep up those inflated prices. This is only the first Studio generation - I'll be looking forward to its evolution. As for Mac hardware: as much as it pains me to say this, I feel Apple stopped catering for creative professionals years ago. It was the creative community that kept Apple afloat during the hard times all those years ago, and it is exactly that community Apple is no longer interested in developing hardware for anymore. A shame.

I agree - restricting the number of colours for greyscale images potentially saves considerable file size. As for black&white or grayscale scans at higher resolutions: my testing always proved that PNG wins over GIF in these cases. The same 600ppi b&w scan is 152kb PNG, and 176kb GIF. However, I must amend my answer with WebP: the same document saved as a non-lossy WebP file results in a 103kb file! WebP is awesome. It combines the best of JPG, PNG, and GIF in one file format for the web. Even animation is supported. A crying shame only Chrome and Opera support this format at this point in time. Although Firefox and IE are experimenting with support. I'll be happy when we can finally get rid of crappy antiquated JPG. It is terrible compared to what is possible with WebP - both in quality AND file size. If you are developing for Android, no question about it: save your images as WebP (which is still not possible in Affinity, but it is supported in alternatives).

The only two reasons to use GIF nowadays is either for animation support or if your graphic is extremely tiny (=< hundreds of bytes, with only a few colours), in which case GIF produces smaller file sizes. (Of course, as Mr. Lucky pointed out, another reason might be that an older existing popular GIF file must be replaced online). In other cases, PNG yields smaller file sizes in 99% of cases, and is the best choice. It does also depend on the optimization tool that is used. For PNG ColorQuantizer is currently the best tool.

No chance: as it stands, AD does not include a scripting interface/API for external developers (yet). As long as that remains the case, extending Affinity Designer and Photo is impossible (except for the Affinity developers themselves). Aside from this, Illustrator is the industry standard - unless that changes, I cannot see Esko developing for other products. When the Affinity developers open up their applications with a scripting/development API, it will make it possible for third parties to greatly expand Affinity's functionality - including packaging plugins. *edit* just found out the devs are working on a javascript scripting interface. Good stuff!

Yes, I am aware of that method, and used that in the end. Still, it is rather strange behaviour, in my opinion. Why would we ever want to crop the rasterized version to the canvas in the first place? Let's assume the designer worked on a complex vector object with many layer effects, and in the design it is placed partly off-canvas. The designer decides to rasterize the object. Result: it is cropped to the canvas - and the designer can no longer re-position that object. Thus, to prevent this from occurring, the designer is forced to first move the object inside the canvas (and if it does not fit, resize the canvas as you proposed), rasterize, and move the object back into place. So inefficient and quirky! This behaviour makes no sense to me at all. I do hope the developers fix this as soon as they can.

I am trying to create a work-around for the 3d custom curve emboss stepping issue by increasing the size of the vector object many times, and then rasterizing it in order to be able to scale down the final embossed version to reduce this stepping effect. The issue is that rasterizing a vector object, even with "Clip to Canvas" turned off, CROPS the rasterized version to the canvas area. It would be great when rasterizing vector objects would not be cropped to the canvas area when "Clip to Canvas" is turned off. When this option is turned on, one would expect the cropping, though. It allows the user to choose between the two cropping behaviours.

I've tested this in the latest beta, and the problem still persists - any indication when (or if) the emboss effect stepping will be resolved? Performance is also an issue: duplicating a circle a couple of times that has a 3d custom curve emboss effect applied to it causes Designer to slow down, and dragging these objects causes a ~0.5seconds lag before dragging, and while dragging the screen update is quite slow. Document resolution does not seem to affect performance in these cases - whether I work in a web document, or a print document: very laggy performance is the result. Grouping neither works: the screen update becomes a cacophony of parts, and it is difficult to see what is happening on the screen. I believe the laggy performance is caused by the continuous screen updates of these effects - perhaps rendering them to a static bitmap instead would be improve performance? In other applications one work-around is to place complex (groups of) objects that affect performance in a placeholder or smart object. These are then no longer updated in real-time, and performance becomes very snappy. But aside from this, Designer just seems really slow with certain layer effects - much slower compared to other applications. There is definitely room for (code) performance improvements here.

Inkscape does a very good job. If you are looking for an excellent sketch/black and white bitmap-->vector converter, I would say OpenTOonz does a brilliant job. It is meant for a paper-based 2d animation workflow for industry-strength animation film production, and proved itself with Studio Ghibli marvelous animation films. Import your scans or bitmaps in OpenTOonz, and convert to vectors. Then save the frame as SVG with the help of the file browser. The beauty of OT is that it can either convert to a single line vector (for later precise stroke width control) or as filled lines. It will also convert colour work, but is quite finicky in that no anti-aliased scans are allowed. OpenTOonz is open source and free. https://opentoonz.github.io/e/

A request to add an option for cubic interpolation to AD's gradients.

@Ben Sounds good. A couple of questions about the current implementation of guides in AD: Currently guides can only be dragged from the rulers when the move tool is active. It is a hassle to switch tools if a quick guide is needed while working in a different tool mode. Will this be reconsidered? Guides seem to live in their own invisible layer. Often it is handy (almost required) to have multiple guide systems with different colours in the same document. When the guide grid creator option is added, will it be possible to have multiple layered grid systems as well?

THE best PNG exporter/optimizer is Color Quantizer. Period. Export your PNG as full 24bit and transparency, and load it in CQ. The options available are by far superior to other visual tools, and it offers something unique: a quality mask brush, which allows for precise control to retain even small spots of colour. Better even than the command line tools that are available. It also offers a wide range of down-sample algorithms, dithering options, and other controls. An automatic trim option is available too. Batch processing as well. Get it here (freeware): http://x128.ho.ua/color-quantizer.html The 7.0.4 version is the latest one. Unfortunately only available for Windows, but it is worth installing WINE for on a Mac.

Looking forward to this - without it is very inefficient to create column grids for designs and web layouts. Will formulas be supported so that a grid can be applied that automatically updates when the page dimensions are changed? And will guide presets be available to the user? A bit like this: