StrixCZ

Hi, can you please add an option to show a currently open document as the window title instead of just program name? I always have Windows taskbar titles on as I'm using them as a kind of reminder what am I working on at the moment - so I find it very inconvenient to only see "Affinity Publisher 2" as a title when I actually have a document open. I need the title to be "DocumentXY - Affinity Publisher 2" and I was really surprised to not find such a basic option (IMHO) in the Settings (or did I actually miss it?). Thank you in advance!

Sadly, the question is not whether they "should be able to". The question is how to deal with the fact the they "already can" (and I don't think any sort of regulation can stop it now). To put it in perspective with your "breaking into someone's house" metaphor, we're talking about the equivalent of trying to ban production/sales of crowbars or making it mandatory for anyone buying one to sign some sort of "ethical use" contract (and expecting them to never break it, LOL).

Obviously, you're misunderstanding what AI is or what it can do, as automatic tracing is exactly one of the tasks AI can be incredibly useful to help with. Creating images based on text prompts is only one of many possible uses of AI - it's definitely not the only (or even the main) one. And since Affinity is trying to compete with Adobe, they actually need to adopt AI tools if they don't want to be left in the dust. Have you seen what you can do with Photoshop's "neural filters" (based on AI models)? Considering they're only in beta stages yet, they're pretty impressive already. And if Affinity doesn't come up with something similar, it will eventually render their suite obsolete. I mean, not many people will choose to spend hours on tasks AI can take care of in a matter of seconds (and we're not far from this being the case)...

Well, maybe not embrace it but we surely need to accept the way things are and learn to adapt since this can of worms can't really be closed now that it's open. Trying to fight it is as futile as trying to play tug of war with a speeding train...

Fair enough, I just tried that one and I have to admit that it produced far better result than I thought it would (not perfect so that the original would still be clearly distinguishable under close inspection but pretty good anyway). Frankly, trying to steal someone's work was never my main focus 😃 so I had no need to look for such tools (and removing it manually really would be a chore for most images)...

Expert PS user / professional graphic designer with 15+ years of experience here and I can tell you this is simply not true. At best, you can remove watermarks from some images (simple illustrations with white background are the easiest to deal with) but even that won't usually take 2 minutes. Removing a watermark from a complex photo/illustration - well, good luck with that 😅 Not to mention that the watermarked images are generally low-res (meant as a preview / to be used for mock-ups) so typically you wouldn't get a decent print from them even without the watermark. Anyway, the watermarks are actually quite effective in terms of protecting images from being used without permission - otherwise, nobody would use them anymore. The problem is that while this solution is suitable for stock images, it's not nearly as suitable for artists trying to display their work as big ugly watermarks basically prevent everyone from fully appreciating the artwork...

Thanks, exactly my point. At best, we can hope that the AI models will ignore images containing certain "copyright protected" / "AI generated" symbols or patterns. However, if their creators decide to ignore/circumvent these measures, it will be rather easy for them to do so, and it's safe to assume that at least some AI models will do exactly that, especially if lot of people starts to "protect" their artwork. It's unfortunate, but the question the artists today need to be asking really is "how can I make profit from my art despite the AI being able to immitate my style". The only real option to make sure* AI won't use your images for training is never publishing any of your artwork online which is next to impossible for most people trying to make money from their art. * And even that won't be 100 % bulletproof solution as the AI can still hypothetically use a photo of your artwork someone else publishes, even though it would be as close to keeping your art protected as possible.

AFAIK there is no way to do this that wouldn't ruin the image for everyone (like the heavy watermark you mention). Any image publicly visible on the internet can be stolen used for training by AI models - expecting some EXIF tag or opt-out in the TOS of a public gallery to prevent it is just naive and unrealistic. Sorry to break this to you (I'm not very happy about it either) but that's just the way things are...

No because I need to be able to quickly switch between applying some parameters to all the photos, then selecting say 30 of them and tweak something, do some minor tweaking on just one photo, select/tweak couple dozen of them again, being able to quickly switch between files to check that their colour tone matches etc. - all with thumbnails and without opening/saving anything (until the final confirmation when it only generates XMP files with settings for every file) - Camera RAW allows me to do this. Affinity does not. Once you get used to this kind of workflow, anything else becomes unaccaptably slow/clumsy...

I see. I guess I'm old school but I just prefer to organize my files with a well thought-out folder structure and 3rd party utilities to enable thumbnails for basically any format directly in Explorer (I know I'm missing stuff like tags that way but it works for me)... It's also for this very reason (my distaste towards DAMs in general) why I mention Camera RAW instead of Lightroom throughout this topic (even though they use the same engine for development) - LR to me has always been Camera RAW + extra bloat which I couldn't care less about 😂

100 % this! Also, Open Shell FTW (and screw you, W11 🤮).

Nope. I might a give it a try - thanks for the tip 😉 I'm a bit puzzled (even after some googling) what exactly would be an example of a widely-used DAM - are you talking about something like Bridge? If that's the case, it's actually something I've personally never used or liked (it just annoyed me to no end when I accidentaly opened it via PS/AI/ID while still being on the complete CC plan so I ended up removing both the "Open in Bridge" menu item and the keyboard shortcut) 😂 Then again, to each their own I guess 🤷‍♂️

Also, I certainly didn't mean useless as in general - however, it is mostly useless for my (photography) use case in its current state since I do 99 % of photo tweaking directly in Camera RAW and I only do occasional extra tweaks in PS - which is a process I'm simply unable to replicate with Affinity. And the rather misleading claim on Affinity website doesn't help either - developing photos one by one is pretty far from "full RAW development" (feature set) IMHO. Not to mention the very limited options/capabilities of the Develop Persona compared to Camera RAW even when developing a single image...

I don't really care whether it's technically the same app or not - it's an essential part of Photoshop for me (so it's equally essential for me to have similar option in any app that I'd use as a PS replacement). Thanks for the tips but I've tried the free ones and they lack a lot of options which are crucial for me. As for the paid ones, I've checked the pricing and since even the cheapest one you mention is just a little cheaper than the basic Adobe photo plan mentioned above (which gives me a RAW processor that suits all my needs AND the best bitmap editor on the market) it doesn't make any sense to me to pay that much just for a RAW processor itself...

I figured out that much (hence this post ending with the hopes for V3 implementing this crucial option). I appreciate the effort. But like you said, I'll have to stick with PS for now (luckily the Photography 20 GB plan is pretty affordable even for a hobbyist at $9.99 a month, with the only "limitation" being the cloud storage space which I never used anyway nor do I intend to). Still, I hope to be able to ditch Adobe altogether (even for freelance work) with future Affinity updates - we're just not quite there yet...

Well, this is a (really clumsy) workaround at best, not a solution. Unlike the film strip, it doesn't allow one to do further tweaking on individual files after applying the batch parameter change, you get no preview, it takes much longer... Sorry, that's a no from me.

Me neither, but it worked just fine for me (Win 10 Pro 64bit) with the only downside of the apps being listed among Windows Apps rather than Installed Programs which is a bit confusing but doesn't affect functionality in any way...

The title says it all. I've bought the Universal License and I don't regret it (the price was worth it even for Publisher / InDesign replacement which I mainly wanted and I'm also glad to just support some much needed Adobe competition) but I'm unable to cancel my Photo Plan with Adobe until Affinity comes up with an alternative to Camera RAW (and most importantly, its film strip). Being able to only develop / change parameters for one RAW file at a time really is a deal-breaker for anyone shooting into RAW format. My usual workflow is dropping a whole album (often hundreds of RAW files) into Photoshop (Camera RAW windows pops-up), applying some global adjustments to all the photos and then going through them one by one for more tweaking, yet often using the same settings on multiple files in a row (which you can select in the Camera RAW film strip). When I'm done with tweaking the parameters of the whole album I'll just use Image Processor to batch convert the files it into JPEGs. Sadly, I can't do any of this in Affinity Photo as of now which unfortunatelly renders it literally useless for my main photography needs. Fingers crossed for this being addressed in V3 - until then, it's more of Affinity Single Bitmap Image Editor rather than an actual tool for photographers to me.

Well, it also makes some people (like me) buy the whole bundle instead of just one app (I originally wanted only Publisher) . I'm also an exclusive Windows user but the bundle price with the launch discount was just too good to miss (and I didn't care a bit about "paying for Mac versions that I wouldn't use" - I saw it more as Serif just releasing one bundle for everyone - I actually think that a vast majority of their users are either on Mac or Windows - not both). Bottom line, I spent more money in the Serif store than I originally planned to - without feeling cheated at all (on the contrary). And I'm quite sure I'm not alone here. So this pricing model actually does make a lot of sense (even though it's obviously less convenient for people who really want just one app).

Illustrator has always been the least used Adobe (graphic design) app for me and I've never bought vector stock (unlike stock photos). I usually only use simple vector graphics which I either create myself or download from free stock sources (I just downloaded and tried to open 3 random ones in Affinity Designer and it opened them all). I've mainly used Illustrator to clean-up / check logos before placing them into InDesign and I'm quite sure Affinity Designer will manage this task just fine. As a hobbyist photographer I prefer to build my designs more around photos rather than vectors. So this is not really a concern for me. As for your other point, see my reply to fde101...

This. It's mostly (bigger) companies that usually require you to provide source data on certain jobs. Since I mainly work for individuals and small businesses, I don't really expect to run into any problems, especially since I'm going to be open upfront about not using InDesign on jobs where the client asking for source data could be a possibility. Still, the lack of any export option bothers me (even if I can live with it for now), hence my original post.

Actually, I'm doing just that. I mean, not entirely yet (I'm keeping PS + Lightroom until Affinity Photo comes with an option to process multiple RAW images which is absolutely crucial for me as a photographer) but I've already replaced Illustrator and InDesign with Affinity and so far it looks like they will suit my needs (with some limitations and annoyances which will hopefully be solved/removed in future versions). I do have a daily (DTP / graphic design) job now but I plan to use Affinity for my freelance work.

Point taken about IDML not being an open format, even though I am not sure whether that means that Adobe actually bans other software developers from exporting into it or they just refuse to guarantee that it would import back into InDesign correctly? Also, the format is actually highly unlikely to change as it is basically a legacy format mainly used as a fallback option, providing a backwards compatibility between Adobe CC and CS which wouldn't work anymore if they changed it. I do understand that it wouldn't be a perfect solution for transfering documents between InDesign and Publisher but it would be still so much better to have at least some solution than not having any option (to get AFPUB document into InDesign) at all. Importing into Publisher does seem to work pretty well - I tried opening IDML of a 40 page catalogue (including objects with transparency, effects etc.) and even though I haven't inspected it thoroughly yet it did open just fine (at a glance anyway) - so I believe that if it wouldn't be a legal problem for Affinity to include the export option, it would be actually mostly reliable (and definitely a priceless addition to the suite).

Ok, I'm sorry - this IS actually the solution I was looking for - thank you so much! 🙂

LOL, I know how to add pages to a document - that's not what I'm asking about...