Gaz

The Affinity suite is easily as good as CS6, the last version of the Adobe suite I’ve had dealing with, in a lot of ways it’s better. But the main reason for buying and dedicating my time to build a career around this suite, and convincing friends and colleagues to switch, is because it has a perpetual license. If it didn’t, then for me it would be no different to Adobe. I welcome the pledges, how quickly they were published and that Affinity don’t shut down freedom of speech on this forum, however negative it’s been, just face the comments head on. I have a lot of admiration for that. Certainly something Adobe wouldn’t have done. The pledges have certainly put my mind, more at rest. I will continue supporting Affinity (and Canva) going forward. Purchasing major upgrades as they happen, as I realise you guys also need funding for continued development. Good luck with the new collaboration.

I’m sorry to hear Serif has been acquired by Canva. I guess there must have been financial reasons for it. Another British company sold off. 😏 It’s hard not to be pessimistic, as I’ve seen it so many times. Hopefully there will be a few more years of V2 before the ‘exciting’ news that V3 will offer subscription as an option. “Don’t worry it’s just an option ! perpetual licences will still be available etc…”. Fast forward a few years “We are excited to announce V4 will be subscription only and the super exciting news that Canva has now joined the Adobe Family, which we feel will be a perfect fit for our customers”. Hope I’m wrong, but this feels like playbook stuff. The end of another era ?

That feature would be very helpful. I use Motion and the Affinity Suite, and the ability to design and use graphics from Designer in Motion would make life so much easier.

When the zoom tool is selected, the magnifying cursor shows a "+", and when the canvas is clicked it zooms-in. When you hold down the Option Key, the magnifying glass shows a "-" and clicking the mouse should zoom-out. However, when holding down the option key, it also reads the surface of the magic mouse to control the zooming in and out by dragging your finger forward and back. So sometimes, when the mouse button is pressed, there is a conflict between zooming out and the mouse surface detecting a slight forward motion of your finger which causes it to zoom-in. Hence a conflict. Also did the canvas always rotate, in zoom mode, when the command key is held down and moving your finger across the surface of the mouse / Scroll wheel ? I guess it's possibly a useful feature, but I think that should probably happen when using a different tool. I rotated the canvas by accident last week, and it took me ages to figure out I needed to select View > Reset Rotation. I'd suggest, with the magnifying tool selected, using the command key to zoom in and out using mouse surface / scroll wheel and the option key to zoom-in and out using mouse clicks and put the canvas rotation in a totally separate tool (perhaps as a part of the drag tool ?). 🙂

TinyPNG is pretty good for my requirements it regularly saves 93% off my file sizes, especially when working on image sequence batches. I use the web version of TinyPNG but also have the Mac version of the Photoshop plugin, unfortunately Affinity Photo doesn't recognise the plugin. I have contacted TinyPNG about this (support@tinify.com) and they said: Sadly, the Photoshop plugin is not compatible with Affinity Photo. It only works with Photoshop CC. Currently, there are no plans on our roadmap for creating a plugin for Affinity Photo. However, I've added this feature request to our list of possible improvements. If anything changes, we'll be sure to let you know. After I replied saying I'd contact Affinity to see if there's anything they could do from their side to make the plug-in compatible. They said:- Thanks for contacting Affinity about the plugin support. If they reply back with anything of importance, feel free to let us know. It would be brilliant if either it could be made compatible with AP or if TinyPNG, in conjunction with Affinity, made a specific Affinity Photo version. Perhaps a similar feature could be added to Affinity's batch processing feature, independently ?

It looks like this bug / anomaly comes and goes with different versions. Perhaps affinity need to have a series of test images that are opened during the quality control process, to make sure the bug doesn’t creep back in to a new release. I’ve also recently had problems with 16 bit Tif grayscale images having severe banding issues. I hope Affinity can concentrate more effort on quality control, because as a pro app that needs to be consistent with all releases.

Hi All, I appreciate you guys looking into this. Most of it, I'll admit, is over my head. I've never really understood colour profiles or know which ones I should be choosing. Is the poor banding issue, colour casting and apparent low bit depth display of 16 bit images, something I should report as a bug ? Or do you think Affinity already know about it, and have it on their top do list ? 🙂

OK, I discovered something. If I select Document > Convert Format / ICC Profile And switch RGB/16 to RGB/32 Everything smoothes out. If I then switch back to RGB/16 everything remains smooth, although there is still a bit of banding when I use a brush, but not as bad. Perhaps it's better to work in RGB/32 and possibly switch it back to RGB/16 when finished editing.

Thanks for checking that Lagarto, I respect Anon2's answer, he's probably right about the 10 bit stuff, but something else doesn't seem right to me. Affinity is supposed to be a pro photo editing product, I think it must be a bug or something. I can imagine Photoshop possibly doing a better job at showing gradients, but not Microsoft Paint Pot, on a very cheap PC, using a very poor 8 year old monitor.

Thanks Anon2, It seems to look ok in Photoshop CS6 and even in Pixelmator, surely this can't be as good as it gets in Affinity Photo ? It makes editing greyscale images very hit and miss. I even tried it in Microsoft Paint on a PC and it worked a lot better, even on a really cheap monitor. Is there a way to improve things or am I stuck with it if I use Affinity Photo ?

I'm outputting separate layers from Cinema 4D to composite within Affinity Photo. The images are RGB/16 and look perfectly fine when opened in Apple Preview. However when I open them in Affinity Photo I get very bad banding, especially if I then use the brush tool. Is there something I can do to stop this happening. I've attached an example file here. Affinity Banding Test_specular.tif The screenshots show what I'm seeing with Apple Preview, and Affinity Photo. On Affinity it's most noticeable at the edges. If you use a white brush with the flow / hardness / opacity settings turned down you can see the banding in real time, as if it's an 8 bit image or something. I think the image is 16 bit as it show that in the Info Panel (Studio). Have I got something set incorrectly ? What would I need to do to stop the image banding like this. Many Thanks Gary

Serif: FEATURE REQUEST Please consider this my request to have an option in the settings to bring back the Title Bar, and locate the tools below it. Thanks 😊

Fde101, Ah, thanks, that makes sense. I guess if laptop users did need more space they could switch to full screen mode. I’ll make a request to have the option added.

Fde101, Ah, so it’s something Apple did in their OS 😏. Although a lot of the apps I use within Mojave still retain a clear area at the top of the window to allow it to be moved. As GUI design experts that pioneered a window based interface, I’m surprised Apple don’t understand the purpose / importance of that bar, they seem to be one of the worse culprits for filling it with tools etc (Safari).

Markw, The default location of an open documents ’Title’ is now displayed in the centre of the Toolbar as you have found. i’m not so much worried about the title word itself. It’s more to do with the 1cm (ish) strip that should be present at the top of each window, I think it’s traditionally been called a title bar. It seems that you have the opposite problem, moving a window around when you are trying to use tools. I think I have a solution: Please Affinity separate the toolbar and title bar and don’t try to merge them together, or at least have an option in the preferences so those who prefer keeping a separate title bar, can re-introduce it. 🙂