General Disarray

Well, if you start your post with "Apparently, on Mac, Affinity apps simply offer the OS which file types they are capable of opening." that's one thing. But the way you started it, it seemed to me that you knew this to be a fact. But if you don't know this and are just guessing, then what is the point? Because if you're just guessing, it's no different than me saying that the installer associates the file extensions. The real problem is that software companies keep doing this over and over in both macOS and Windows. So I've had to waste a lot of accumulated time (sure, one time is not a problem, it's the sum of all the times for 30 years that I've had to do the same crap over and over) setting that file extension association to what it was before. And I had no error, perhaps Publisher can open RW2 just fine, I simply force quit it because I wasn't too happy that a raw file was opening with a program that is not even the right one for camera raw files. No, you got it backwards. Loukash said that it wasn't the installer that forced these associations, but it was macOS that was changing them because the installer was simply letting macOS know what file types it could open. Well, that's an easy fix. Take out of that plist all the extension that are photo related, like what are .jpg, .psd, .tiff etc, etc doing in that list??? Again, if you're working on a magazine for example in Publisher, and you want to bring in images, whether pixel or vector, you import them, use Place, drag and drop, whatever you want. But why is a camera raw format in that list? And that's all the time I have for this.

Do you know this as an absolute fact? I'm not saying you're wrong, but the internet is full of people guessing things and posting them, that's why I'm asking. And if this is 100% accurate, then Serif has to change the installers so that in any case, if it tells the system what file types they're able to open, to not include file types that are obviously compressed, uncompressed or raw image formats in the Publisher installer. I'm familiar with a lot of the extensions in that list, but not all of them. But of the ones I'm familiar with, several of them are not for the Serif equivalent of Adobe InDesign. At the most, .ai, which should be associated with Designer unless you also have Illustrator (I don't), but the rest are for Photo. So Serif should take a lot of formats off that list in the Designer and Publisher installers, and maybe include them in the Photo one, but I wouldn't include most formats for even Photo, at least not the ones that open with Preview in a snap. Then if the user still wants to associate them with Photo, it's very easy. One of the main advantages of macOS as opposed to Windows is the ability to use Finder as a photo browsing app, which is fast even on older Macs and you can press the space bar for a quick preview, then if you want to learn more about the file, like DPI, dimensions, metadata, etc, you can click the Open in Preview button. Or you can just double click and open in Preview. So files that open in Preview should not be associated with any of the Affinity apps unless the user wants to, or like I said, offer a choice, a simple step in the installer listing all the file associations and a checkmark for those you want to associate with the app being installed.

I love the Affinity Suite. Had it for about two years and recommend it to everyone. Affinity Photo is way better than Photoshop. Designer is way better than Illustrator. And I haven't used InDesign for decades but Publisher, for as little as I have used it, seems great. But Serif has this nasty, narcissistic habit that all software makers have: they override the OS's associations with their software. I don't get it. 30 years using computers, both Mac and PC, and still don't get it. Why does every software maker thinks their software is better than everybody else's? And why do they assume that if so far I was opening image files instantly in macOS Preview, now I want to wait several seconds looking at their icon bouncing up and down while their software opens??? Especially, if it's the wrong software for it. I found an old SD card, put it in my Mac, and it had a file with the RW2 extension. Those are photos from my Lumix G7 camera that I haven't used in ages. So I double click on it and preview doesn't open. Then I see that the icon for Affinity Publisher is bouncing up and down, up and down, up and down and I realize that the installer decided to associate itself with .RW2 files. That's extremely rude. So I force quit Publisher, because even on a Mac Studio Ultra M1 with an internal drive that tops at 7 GBps, the Affinity suite is slow to open, at least after a boot or reboot. Second time it's just a couple of seconds. But I force quit it, opened the file info, and setup RW2 files to associate with Preview as they should. Then if I want to edit that photo, all I have to do is right click and choose Affinity Photo from the menu. Which many times, I do. So please tell me why you think that I want to wait several seconds to open this photo, not even in the correct program in the suite, because a photo is supposed to open with the... with the... Photo app!!! Correct! Yes, you can open it in Publisher, and Designer too, doesn't mean that it's the right program to do so. Unless you're working on some document in those two apps and you need to import a photo. At least you could put a step during installation that asks the user for their choices on associations. Some installers have been doing that for at least 25 years. I remember installing Winamp in the late 90's and having a step that was about setting associations. Then why do you think that your software is the only one in the world and all files should open with it? And why do you not even associate them with the correct program? Even more, you have your own file type. It wouldn't occur to me to associate .afphoto files with Preview or Pixelmator Pro, which probably can't even open them anyway. There's a right program for every file type, and sometimes there are several, but it's up to the user to make that choice, not the software maker, except when it's their own file type, like .afphoto. Please stop being so narcissistic. Please stop changing file associations. Thank you.

Looks interesting, I'll take a look tomorrow.

Thanks for the detailed post. I'll be checking on your suggestions very soon.

Yeah, that's the main problem for me. Apple used to have a very nice photo catalog program called Aperture, I don't know why the hell they stopped working in it. They kept working on Logic Pro X, Final Cut Pro X, Motion, Compressor, Pages, etc. Why kill Aperture? It's absurd. It could be another one of those apps you buy for $200 and then never pay for an update again.

Well, I bought ON1 and I'll probably ask for the refund. I took some photos with my old DSLR, a Canon EOS 60D, so probably a lot less megapixels than new cameras, and just a few photos, less than 50 for a project my wife is working on. And it's slow as hell. So as soon as I get a chance I'm going to ask for a refund and then look for something better, whether it's free or more expensive, but something I can buy and not lose one day if I lose my job (which can happen to anyone at anytime) and can't afford the subscription anymore.

I bought the Affinity suite back in December, and I love it. I use Photo all the time, and the other two every once in a while. I think this suite is far better than the Adobe products it competes against, especially Photoshop, which is a dinosaur that they keep slapping things on top of. I haven't paid for the Adobe Cloud subscription in years, although I use it often in my work laptop. And I definitely don't want to go back to pay for it. But while the Affinity suite does an excellent job replacing Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, the thing I'm having trouble finding a good replacement for is Lightroom Classic. Slow as it is, it's great for managing large amounts of photos, and to easily change settings for large batches. I hope Serif comes up with a good replacement in the near future, which I'm sure will be better than Lightroom, but in the meantime I wanted to get a feeling for what the rest of the Affinity community is using. I bought On1 Photo a couple of days ago. It's not bad, but it's kind of slow at times (on a Mac Studio Ultra, so nothing should be slow), and some menus look like all the commands are piled up with little space between them. On the other hand, it's only $100, while others are more expensive. The good thing is that you can return it within 30 days if you don't like it. So what are most people here using as far as a Lightroom alternative for large amounts of photos?

So I had not included that in my post because it was already a bit long, but I had done the soft proofing. What I see on the screen when I apply that layer has nothing to do with the printed photo. Either Affinity Photo is sending the wrong gamma, or the printer driver is.

Thanks Lee, but it says there those are profiles to be used with their PrintFab product, which costs $49. Definitely not going to pay more than these overpriced cartridges. This machine should give me a near perfect print without external software. I'll watch the video later, thanks!

Few things in this world are more aggravating and frustrating than photo printing. If you don't do it all the time, you typically buy a new printer every few years, print a few useless prints until you find the right settings, and move on. Then years later that printer stops working, you buy another one, and here comes another set of wasted paper and ink, except that this time, it's the very expensive ink from Epson, so I want to put my hands around Joe Epson, shake him and tell him: "Stop ripping people off with this overpriced ink, damnit!!!" So my good old Canon Pixma MX922, which I bought for $80 in 2016 gave me many years of good photo and Blu-ray prints on cheap ink, but eventually gave me the B200 and decided to die. Since I still need disc printing, and that seems to be, along with discs, a thing of the past, I had to spend over $200 on one of the few remaining consumer printers with that ability, an Epson XP-7100, for which generic ink is sold but voids the warranty, so for the first year I'm forced to use their insanely expensive ink. And I wouldn't really mind a lot if at least the prints were excellent and very similar to what I see on the screen, obviously with the difference between photo paper and a self lit medium like a screen. But no, the printed photos have the gamma all messed up, or something else, but they look way darker. And I'm sure it's something that I did wrong, but the Canon always gave me decent prints if I did things this way. So I would like to show whoever's nice enough to help me and knows about this stuff, all the steps. This is a RAW CR2 from a Canon EOS 60D DSLR, as I see it when opened in Affinity Photo 2 (updated to the latest version): This is after having developed it in AFP, which as you know, opens in the Develop module when loading a RAW photo. I didn't do much to it, but this is what I ended with, and more or less what I would like to see in the printout. As you can see in the info pane at the bottom right, I converted it to the Epson XP-7100 Photo Glossy color profile to see on screen something as close as possible to the final print. This is how I setup the print options that matter to quality: When I print that, I get a photo that is much darker than the source. And not because I'm comparing a print to a screen, I've seen photo prints before with many printers and I know what the difference is supposed to be. So just to give you an idea, I scanned the printed photo, and then adjusted it to look as close as possible on screen to what I see in the printed photo: As you can see, it's much darker, but I guess I left the Epson scanning app to some auto thing, but Epson software is aggravating, and I was lucky to get anything at all because it would freeze and do nothing at all. If you see the curve I applied to get it to match the photo, I believe I brought down the gamma quite a lot. Another thing worth mentioning is that because I thought the Canon printer was going to last much longer, at one point I bought a lot of 6x4 Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy II. I doubt this has anything to do, it's not the first time I print to photo paper from another company, and usually it's about the same. So I'm sure those of you who know about these things found about ten different things I screwed up, so if you know a lot about this (not wild guesses please because this ink is insanely expensive), then please tell me what did I do wrong, and how to make it so I can get the best prints I can with this machine. I really don't want to start printing photo after photo trying out different things because I will be down $100 before I know it. Thank you!

I know, like I said in my post, I did this, but as soon the update for Designer finished doing its thing, it forced the OS to set the association back to Designer. The Designer installer shouldn't be programmed to associate Designer with photo formats, especially ones that are raw formats meant to be developed. Even more, after the user forced the association of all DNG files or whatever the format, to open with Photo, Designers updaters shouldn't revert that.

I don't know if this is a bug exactly, but I had to open a DNG file today, which is a raw photo format, and obviously should open in Aff. Photo, but it's set to open in Designer, and it opens, but it's not the right program. Even further, after this I closed the file in Designer, I changed the association to Photo and made sure it was done for all files, but Designer had an update. So when the update installed, it reverted my manual change of association back to Designer for DNG files. I can't remember what formats, but this is not the first time it happens for formats that are mostly photo based. Might be a good idea to check the installers and see what they tell the OS to associate with.

Fair enough. Thanks, fellas, and a happy new year!

Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but why do none of Affinity's apps have a line tool like most design apps in both vector and bitmap formats? I know I can use the rectangle tool, but it seems a bit odd to create just a simple line. Unless I missed it somehow, but searching for line in the menus and then the shapes tool, usually where that sits at, there's no line. Sure, a line is not a shape, but it's normal convention to put it there.

I'm going to answer my own question for some other newbie. For this to work the right way, you have to toggle off the toolbar icon with the description "Allow selection to consider items inside a group". I show which one in the screenshot.

I made a project that I started in Photo 2.0.0, continued in Designer 2.0.0, and a few days ago updated all apps to 2.0.3. Nothing fancy, just some stickers for my MIDI keyboard to learn the notes better. Since I started working on it, I made a rectangle, and inside it a text box with the note, or notes for the black keys. I grouped both and then started duplicating that group and duplicating several of them at the same time to reach the number of keys I needed. One thing I used several times was the distribute tool to align both vertically and horizontally. With the Move tool selected, I would click and drag a rectangle to include all the groups I wanted, then click the distribute tool in the toolbar, and choose either vertically or horizontally as needed. This used to work perfectly fine. It treated each group as a single object, so it would distribute them perfectly. But today that stopped. And I think this is a problem that 2.0.3 introduced, because while I've used Designer since the update, I haven't used it until today for this specific project. Since today, it treats each object inside each group as a separate item, so when I do a distribute it doesn't go the way it should, as it did before. In the screenshot I attached you will see how it messes up everything because it doesn't see the groups. Now, I searched for this everywhere and couldn't find anything. Is this a bug that 2.0.3 introduced, or did I accidentally toggled some setting? I've been looking for a setting that has anything to do with this and couldn't find it.

Right, but maybe I didn't explain this in perfect detail, but a week ago, in 2.0.0, I was able to select one Rectangle, then do a select same name, and all the layers called "Rectangle" would be selected (as long as I had expanded all the groups first). Then two days ago, still in 2.0.0, I opened the same document, and this behavior was different. Now it was selecting all groups when following the same process. When I posted this that day (it shows as yesterday but it was late on 12/18), I was still working in 2.0.0. Then yesterday the new versions came out, I installed them, and now instead of selecting all groups, it deselects everything. So the mystery to me is why did it work differently between two sessions of the same version. And I would say if they introduced "Select Same Name should only select objects with user supplied names" as a new change, it's not a good one. It's a good thing that the app assigns a name based on the shape, like in this case, a rectangle. Why wouldn't it select all the layers called Rectangle whether I entered the name manually or not?

Right, I didn't give it a name, but then why did it work about a week ago and not now?

I thought I had already replied to this post. I started typing it, but then something probably caught my attention. That's life with ADHD. Anyway, I installed 2.0.3 as soon as it saw it popup when I open Photo and then Designer. So both updated, and opening its own version of the document, "select same name" still doesn't work in either. It behaves differently however; in 2.0.0 it would select all groups, but in 2.0.3 it deselects everything as soon as I right click on the layer Rectangle and choose Select same name. Any ideas? I'm going to post the two files here since they are very small. This is a simple set of stickers I created for my MIDI keyboard because I'm trying to learn music, and the system of letters and groups of numbers that don't match the order of the letters is confusing to me, so to make my life easier, I made these to print on vinyl adhesive paper. Feel free to use them as you please, share with whoever you want, as long as they're not sold. One change that the 2.0.3 versions brought and messed up these, was that under 2.0.0 in both Photo and Designer, I had made the ♭ symbol a different size and leading than the rest, so it was inside the rectangle. But as soon as the 2.0.3 versions came out, as you will see if you download these files, part of it is out of the frame. Not the end of the world, just time consuming to fix. Also, with the 2.0.0 versions, if I right clicked on the icons in the dock, I could see the list of recent files and open them. But after 2.0.3, they behave like the MS Office ones, where you don't have a recents list in there. And while the recent files section works fine in Designer, it never has anything in the Photo app, neither when it was 2.0.0, nor in 2.0.3. Weird. Piano labels glossy colors AD.afdesign Piano labels glossy colors AP.afphoto

No, I'm sure of that. Because the first thing I did after creating the rectangle and text box was to group those two, then duplicate the group several times, then duplicate groups of groups until I got to the quantity I needed. So it was like that when I expanded them all, selected one rectangle, right clicked, chose "Select same name" and it only selected the rectangles. No, that's one of the things I had already tried. Also selects groups.

I bought the full suite about a week or two ago and I love it. I worked mostly on the Photo app and today I saw the Designer one, but almost everything I needed to do so far was very intuitive and if I couldn't figure it out, it was a quick search online. So to between these apps, and Apple's FCPX, Motion and Logic Pro X, I'm really happy to have an Adobe free Mac, for such an affordable price. These apps feel fresh and new, Photoshop and Illustrator are ancient apps that keep being patched and some things added to them, but feel old and slow. Now, this is puzzling to me, and now I'm beginning to doubt that it was the way I thought. Last weekend I started a simple project that consists of a lot of rectangles with a text box inside. The rectangles are exactly the same in size, stroke color, opacity, etc. The text box is also the same size, the only thing that is different is the text itself. So the first thing I did was to create a rectangle of the size I needed, then the text box inside, and once I was happy with how it looked, I grouped them and started duplicating them until I had as many as I needed, and then I started editing the text in each of them. This would've been a project more for Designer, but I had hear about the Photo app, and I'm more familiar with Photoshop than Illustrator, so I got the trial for Photo, and I started this project in it. When I saw how good the software was, I bought the full suite and today I opened this in Designer, but the same problem happens in both. Last weekend, working in the Photo app, when I selected all the groups in the layers panel, then right clicked and selected Expand Selection, it showed me each group, containing the text layer and the rectangle layer, called Rectangle. So since there were a lot of rectangles and I needed to edit the size of several to the same dimensions, I eventually found the "select same name" command, which as far as I remember, selected all the layers called "Rectangle". So, today I loaded that project again after a week or so, and I want to change the size of the rectangles. But, today when I expand all the groups and click on the Rectangle layer in any group, then right click and choose "select same name", it selects the groups, not the rectangle layers. So if I change the size in the transform panel, it also changes the size of the text layer, basically making it fatter because I only need to change the width. I thought it was a glitch, so I closed Affinity Photo, reopened it, same thing. I saw a menu command to open the document in Designer, so I did that too, saved it as a Designer document, but the same behavior happens in it. In fact, Designer has that extra thing where you can do a Select Same and it has tons of options, super useful, but no matter what I choose there, like shape, stroke, color, etc, it always ends up selecting the group, and not the "Rectangle" layers. So, this is not a sarcastic question, because I really have memory issues. But, am I going crazy and remembering the "select same name" behavior wrong from just one week ago? Or is there a toggle somewhere that I accidentally enabled or disabled? I've been looking for over an hour, and I can select all the rectangles manually, but this is more to learn than anything.