Stun Damage

My bad, shooting with primes has made me assume things. Then again, a few millimeters in length hardly make for a noticeable difference in distortion. It'd probably be sufficient to work in increments of 10 and profile 30, 40, etc. Still fiddly, but better than waiting for support. And vignetting will still be a fixed value regardless of focal length. If anything, it's affected by the aperture being wide open and can require a bit stronger exposure compensation then, but even that mostly happens with cheap lenses, not sure whether that's the case here.

While you wait for support, take the time to manually correct the distortion in one of your photos. Don't use mesh warp, just tweak the sliders in the optics panel of develop persona. Be meticulous about it, then write the numbers down. They will be the same for all your shots with this lens. From here on out, you just type them. You can do the same for vignetting. Create an overlay, paint the corners of your picture and bring the exposure up until they match the rest. This number is also consistent, once you've got it right you can just mask the corners and type it in the exposure slider.

Ethics and philosophy aside, most major game studios are currently updating their contracts to prohibit the use of generative AI. The film industry is sure to follow, if it hasn't already. I know this eludes techbros' hype bubble, but generated imagery is in copyright limbo. The law always lags a few years behind disruptive technology, and it is not at all clear yet where it's going to land (and there are already legal precedents of individuals being denied copyright of AI images). All these images may end up in public domain, or even as property of the algorithm's creator, which would be even funnier. No sane company would risk its IP for a workflow speed-up that it doesn't really need in the first place (and believe me, they don't). Generative fill seems like a more innocuous kind of AI, but it still constitutes whole portions of your image not being yours. You'd need to prove that your use of it is "transformative", as defined by law. That definition is vague, though, and too dated to cover AI use cases, so the extent of changes needed is unclear. Are a few adjustment layers on top considered "transformative"? A liquify? Good luck with that. The point is, concentrating on AI would move Affinity away from pro concerns and more towards hobbyist territory.

Please don't. What you seem to be requesting here is the kind of toyish one-click solution nonsense that almost killed Paintshop Pro a few years ago. You'd probably be surprised to learn that most working professionals and dedicated hobbyists are against this. Serious work involves control and precision; pixel-peeping, really. It's not about relying on some mythical algorithm to swap some faces or skies so your aunt can pat you on the head and exclaim that you sure know them computers. There are already quick and powerful ways to do selections in Affinity Photo and I'm sure that you're more than capable to learn them. And even if you just can't be bothered, there will always be apps like Luminar Neo or whatever. No need to request that higher-end software become something it was never meant to be. Now, about so-called "AI"... Machine learning is not really AI, at least not in a meaningful sense. This is pure marketing speak, please don't fall for it. And look, machine learning has proven itself useful in some areas, most of them having something to do with reconstruction - denoising, upscale, temporal reconstruction in 3d rendering (DLSS, FSR 2). However, these are all things humans have never excelled at, stuff we've always been doing with algorithms. Computers are just better at pattern recognition, no question about that. What they can't replace, though, is the actual creative work people are doing with Photoshop or Affinity Photo. Now, should Serif develop some sophisticated machine-learned denoise algorithm? Well, they could, but why would they? There are already at least three great to amazing perpetual license options for that (DxO DeepPrime, Topaz Denoise, On1 NoNoise) and people in need of denoising already have one of these (hell, I have both DeepPrime and NoNoise. And Topaz is far from unaffordable, if I want to go for the overkill). And you see, none of these options are direct competitors to Serif. They can't replace a bitmap editor and two of them are actually available as plug-ins that people run directly from Affinity Photo. So, why enter late into a useless competition with DxO and Topaz and waste resources that you can put into developing your core product instead?

Sure, your reasons for choosing Linux are sensible and I'm not disputing any of them (and defending Windows is the last hill I'd die on ). I even respect that you put your money where your mouth is (well, Linux is free, but you still have to accept a slight-to-moderate amount of inconvenience in order to stick to your principles). That's the only way for Linux, really - its userbase needs to grow despite the lack of software support and only then the commercial apps will come. It's more people like you that would make that happen. However, port begging for-profit companies is not the solution. It's a misguided, if well-meaning, attempt to alter the market perception. You saying that you want something doesn't show demand at a useful scale. You can't possibly know how much demand there is, nor do you understand how much demand Serif actually needs. Yet you project an absolute conviction that a Linux port is a good idea and can't possibly harm them. Do keep in mind, this is not a feature request - you are asking for a lot here. And fact is, you are one person. You are not providing useful/actionable information about demand. What you are doing is trying to skew perception. I think a lot of this comes down to you being in VFX. That industry is an outlier, as there is a huge overlap between Linux "nerds" and VFX artists (I guess it comes with computer literacy?). Companies like Foundry are not targeting broad and general markets, they know the type of studios they sell to, so having a Linux version is a no-brainer. That's if the software wasn't actually developed on Linux in the first place, which is often the case with VFX apps. But it's not the case in most other markets. How much effort and money a Linux port requires varies vastly between apps. We are all well aware that there are platform-agnostic options that make porting trivial. This does not matter for software that isn't already built upon such a foundation. Affinity (and DxO for that matter) run native interfaces, which is to say they have basically built the entire UI two times over. A linux port would mean a new version (and also diverging support for that version in the future, indefinitely). Do you have any idea how much dev time this takes? I know it sounds kinda silly that the UI should be one of the main hurdles in porting, but it absolutely is. Consequently, this: is wrong. It is already too late for Affinity to become effortlessly cross-platform. The amount of work on a Linux port would probably be comparable to the Windows one. And for how much of the market? The point is, you don't seem to understand how much you're asking for here and are consequently bugging the wrong company. Concentrate on cases where a Linux version is actually viable. This means one of two things: 1) Platform agnostic foundation - a Linux port would be trivial 2) A large corporate behemoth that can spare the resources on a non-trivial port without significant repercussions. Affinity is neither of those things. (Adobe was just an example of the latter. Otherwise, we agree that their rental model is a non-starter and the software itself is only getting increasingly slower and less stable over time, so wouldn't be very desirable even at a reasonable one time fee. That doesn't make Affinity on Linux any more viable than it is, however. You should pick a better target for your bugging).

Excuse me for starting on a semi-offtopic note, but in the DxO Photolab forums there was recently this thread. You'd deem it innocuous had it not come up just a few days after the last post in this monstrosity. Now, unlike Affinity Photo, DxO Photolab is not a 50$ general imaging software, but rather a 220$ specialized RAW developer. You could call it a photo workflow app, but its database/DAM capabilities are rather limited and its pixel editing tools non-existent, i.e. it usually needs both a front-end app for culling photos and a back-end layer based one in order to form a smooth workflow. Something like On1 pretty much provides all three of these steps at just a 100$, as well as even more features in the actual development stage. So, why choose DxO then? Superior RAW rendering, optics module and noise reduction. An obsession with pure image quality is literally the only reason one would pick Photolab over anything else in the field. So, we can all imagine that a Linux version of this app is going to become a hit and sell like hotcakes, right? After all, that's what Linux users tell us. If only DxO take 4-5 months out of their yearly development cycle just so they can port it... So, @MattyWSyou wonder why people are hostile to your request? We wouldn't mind if you pestered Adobe or some other corporate monolith about Linux. But what you are trying to achieve here is to actively deceive a small independent company that Linux is a financially viable market. Sure, Serif are in all probability smart enough to ignore this, but that doesn't excuse the desire to push them into a venture that would both harm them financially and severely slow down the development of what they already have. In this sense, your request is objectively malignant. Not intentionally so, I'm sure, but still ignorant at best and morally objectionable. But most of all, it's self-centered. Consider this: There are a lot of request threads for an Affinity DAM (the number is comparable to the Linux threads, actually). You don't see any resistance there, do you? Now, I positively don't need nor care about an Affinity DAM, but I still support it. Why? Because it'd be beneficial to Serif; it's the missing link in their suite that would allow most photographers to switch over from Adobe. On the other hand, I personally could certainly use an Affinity After Effects alternative much more than the DAM, but I wouldn't request it. I realize it's a bad business idea. And indeed, there is skepticism in such threads. You see, the world doesn't revolve around me/you. One has to think about the future of his chosen software. I do care about the future of Affinity because I have invested in the apps (time much more so than money). In the last 5-8 years, we've had a lot of small creative software studios that punch well above their weight and provide rather valuable alternatives to the industry giants. Please, do not take this for granted - they are already utilizing all of their resources. Stop trying to push them into doomed ventures just because it suits you. A few - even a few hundred - users on a forum do not demonstrate actual demand. By the sheer virtue of being here, you are already an edge case and not representative. Just for a moment, step out of your VFX industry bubble and look at the world. A for-profit business doesn't have any moral obligation to think about The Future of Computing (TM) and try to push an outlier OS at their expense. This is not a chicken and egg situation - we all know what comes first. It's not the commercial software.