T R E N T R E K E R

hey folks, thank you for checking this out. first, i'm a noob trying to break free of adobe after 35 years. managed to do so with a.designer & a.publisher but a.photo is another thing. i go off on that below. i'm always the guy that finds out what's wrong with something. if i worked in QA, i'd be king of the world but... yeech. i'm enough of an angry old man already, thank you. anyway, thanks again for your validation. i'm not looking for answers as much as hoping my troubles translate into something good for many others. peace out! ________ AFFINITY PHOTO: first thing i do is move the tools and tool windows from the big monitor to the macbook. but once pulled out from their position docked at the right, they're impossibly long. trying to shorten them was a very time consuming and problematic act. one that should take a second or two takes minutes as i struggled to hook into the fraction-of-a-pixel-magic-spot where the up & down arrow exists to shorten the tool window. the entire time i have a hand-shaped cursor which wants to move the file around and NEVER lets me change the size of the damned tool window. i later figured out one must try a CORNER and then it's far easier to grab, but why not the first and logical choice from the bottom? why is one way easy and the other rather impossible? can we make the ability to customize tool box sizes more intuitive and far less of a pain in the ass? thank you. ________ is there a way to tap into one's v2 settings (studio, brushes, etc.) instead of having to re-install and set up for an hour? is this what users will experience when v2.1 is ready to download? if so, it's not cool. forgive me if i should know this from v1 updates but i never used v1 to know. i'm a noob using all the affinity v2 progs for only two months. thank you. ________ why can't i simply right-click to "unchain" and move brush categories into customized groups? it's easy to create & name a new group but getting actual brushes into it is far from intuitive. i have yet to figure out how to actually move entire brush categories into it. i can only move one brush at a time. i have a couple thousand. this is so lame it's wearing a cape. it's an issue i have with a lot of affinity workflow; click hold click click scroll click click click repeat 1000 times and then click/scroll just one more time. jesus. when i was a UI designer, clicks were bad. we were to make the fewest clicks possible to get a user where they wanted to go. what happened to that? how does one unlock the folders? there is no menu option on the burger in the brush window. is there a way to move entire brush folders into other folders that i'm unable to find? and again, why is this so lacking in intuitiveness? why must a noob struggle to do simple operations like categorizing brushes? thank you. ________ you know what would be more cool than a naked supermodel at your door sporting a bleached mullet? the ability to import .pat and .atn files to gain patterns and to use as action/macros in affinity progs. the supermodel says "HELL YEAH DUDE!" that would surely require a far more robust "macros" capability than i've seen so far. one would think with v2 something like this, which many have commented on over the years, would've been addressed. if affinity could boost this aspect of their programs, it would be the most important thing which keeps many from coming over. it's why i never did until $99 for all three. adobe creative cloud is obviously still making it and probably always will, but i've moved away from indesign and illustrator to fully use publisher & designer. photo is another thing, though. if i could do with affinity photo what i do in photoshop, all i'd need is $5/mo incopy subscription to be able to use their fonts. but i find so many things lacking, #1 being the "actions," that i cannot fully commit to photo. and that's a darned shame because it does a lot of nifty stuff. so i open in photo, do a few tricks, save as a psd and finish in p-shop. now the supermodel is crying. good job. ________ once a tool window attaches to the side or top or bottom of another, how does one free it? ________ i cannot state more emphatically my frustration at the lack of intuitiveness with photo. the other two a progs were a cinch to get a hang of. at this moment i create a circular path. i click on the bottom inside to add text. i paste my text and it changes the paragraph to "justified all" when i had "center align" chosen. so i re-choose center align and. . . . nothing. meanwhile, a short sentence is wildly spaced on both sides of the circle and nothing will make it change. back to photoshop i go for the night. i struggled to do ANYTHING in a.photo and spent two hours importing brushes and swatches, organizing my studio (all which should've been auto created off my v2) and writing these notes. i hope this changes things for the better because i can't spend so much time to get nothing done again. thank you.

your reply is far kinder than mine to walt, NMF. thank you for your thoughtfulness.

really, walt? i've been a photoshop user since BEFORE adobe bought it. the point of (CENSORED) layers is TO PLACE THEM WHERE YOU NEED TO DO WHAT YOU NEED THEM TO DO. if i want/need one on top, but don't want to mod it to the point it affects EVERYTHING below, well, for 30 years i've been doing that. basic f'n shit dude.

"it's not a must because not all competing programs have it"? some bug sprays cause cancer. why should we bother making one which doesn't? some children's toys poke out kid's eyes. now ours can, too! and some cars have crappy brakes. why should we make good brakes on our vehicles? etc... also, maybe serif shouldn't use second-rate software as the high bar. mediocrity is easy. excellence is hard.

thanks for the info walt, i figured that out a few hours after this post. but this can be problematic when you specifically want a top layer to be a top layer for whatever reason one needs. for the invert adjustment to affect ALL layers blow is super mega ultra lame. often with v2, (trying to free myself of adobe incompetence after 30 years) i'm finding click click click click click redo what was fine before i needed to make one simple mod click click click. click. click. seriously. the workflow is sometimes like driving a stiff hotrod (aka new macbook pro) over a washboarded road (aka affinity). you look cool, but you're suffering.

this is happening in all v2 programs but right now, i'm having difficulty in publisher. attached are screenshots of the problem. first shot is choosing the top grunge overlay layer to invert. second shot is ALL THE LAYERS getting inverted. can't figure out how to invert ONLY that which i've chosen. thank you.

i'll try that, fde. thank you.

well, i got drunk and purchased some kinda suite at adobe. but they had just made an enormous update which is the code word for more bugs than a rotten cow corpse. then one day i opened publisher. crashes ceased (thank buddha) so on the last day of the $100 sale, i purchased the suite. love publisher! that's some intuitive user interfacing, there. designer is cool. not perfect between the two i've no need for indesign or illustrator and that's a spectacular development. still getting the hang of photo. still having to use photoshop as a backup. like, 50% of the time. maybe some day i'll be able to fully ditch adobe (using apple's final cut pro so no premiere needed) but that day is not today. peace out!

g'day dudes. why so weird? why not click command (or ctrl) and cursor click over the spot to be used for repair? for 20 minutes i get a color i cannot unchoose and deciphering affinity's directions essentially translates into, "click here and drag and no try it again the other way no try the first way in case you got it wrong no no no. kill a chicken, spray it's blood on a monitor showing the open file i need to mod and dance the hokey pokey?" still waiting for the results on that. i dig you don't want to ape p-shop in all ways but sometimes different is for different's sake, not workflow or ease of operation. just my opinion. i t probably stinks. peace out. T

after 27 years with photoshop/illustrator, i finally had enough of their bugs & incompetent "customer service" and came to affinity. i loved it for a week but lately i realize... 1. can't scoot images between files or programs. 2. crash crash crash all the f'n time. 3. just got an error which said "save failed because ownership of the file could not be verified." WTF??!!?? that destroyed 20 minutes worth of work. it was done. now it's not. 4. can't select and either move, copy or delete the selection without click click click scroll click scroll click click. JFC. 5. did i say crash? crash crash crash. all day and night every hour. i've a 6-month old macbook pro with 16 gigs of memory and 10 cores. no reason for the crashing. as for everything else? i'm about to get drunk and go back to adobe. 'cause at least that's bullshit i know.

man, i don't understand this. after 27 years, i finally left adobe as my main tool, p-shop, has become increasingly bug-laden while "customer service" is automaton-filled robots unable to think outside the script. rant over. but now i just want to delete a selection and everything i see here is click click click scroll click scroll click click click. a slight exaggeration but only slightly. why can't i select, press delete, and ONLY THE SELECTED AREA IS DELETED and not the entire layer? all this "what's a vector what's a pixel" is some crazy secret code i cannot comprehend that only results in click click click scroll click scroll click click click. workflow? ease of use? that's no fun! click click click scroll click scroll click click click. yeah!

same thing here. there is no option to change from the default.

i'm with thomasmoulson. there should be compatibility. there is in photoshop. i'm a new affinity/mac user after 25 years with adobe/pc. the magic mouse has a ton of benefits i'm enjoying (after i added a couple of sticky grippy handles to the sides) and i found i could zoom using it with designer. tonight in photo, i cannot make it work. why does zoom with the magic mouse work in one affinity program and not another?