thomasp

Long time - but my Mac became unavailable soon after I posted that. I seem to have resolved the issue by installing the latest Wacom driver available for the OS.

Thank you for putting the context help bar into windows in separated mode in this release! Not sure if it was by my request or an item long on your list but such a pleasure to no longer be flying blind. 🥰🥰🥰

Yeah I just compared with another installation of Affinity (different OS version) and there I do not have mouse cursor at all on the canvas with paint tools active. Nice tip with the Wacom drivers, I have 6.3.30-something installed, 2018 era stuff. Will try out over the weekend, just have to do a backup first.

First of all I'm not sure if it's a bug or a wrong preference setting: What happens is that the circle showing brush size only appears during a paint stroke (pen down on Wacom tablet) and with pen up (pen hovering above the drawing area) it show the standard OSX mouse cursor. During normal operations that leads to a situation where the mouse pointer and the brush size preview or any gizmo to interact with layer contents constantly alternate (flicker). I've only recently upgraded my OS from High Sierra to Mojave and also updated AP and AD. I'm absolutely sure that I changed nothing in my preferences and that the behaviour wasn't there in 1.7.3 on High Sierra. It affects both AP and AD 1.8.1 Also it seems to only happen when switching from another application to AP/AD via clicking into its interface (running in separated mode here).

I just installed 181 for both AP and AD and was wondering what ever happened to this feature request? What would be the reason to not wanting to show the user context help in separated mode? I always feel gimped trying to do more involved masks/selections but the default tabbed interface is just too limiting (I always have multiple documents open and want to view them side by side).

Just bumping this to voice my request for scripting features. In particular I dearly miss the ability to load/save/import/export files via shortcut, something the macro recorder does not allow. Also taking the opportunity to ask that if scripting is going to be added then please choose a language that is not locked down to one specific OS and ideally is a standard you can already find lots of resources to learn for. *cough* Python *cough*

One feature I am missing from the Adobe camp is the ability to have the program save documents as a background task, allowing you to work on another document in the meantime. When you have to juggle large documents this is a very welcome ability. With AP in its current state however you have to just sit there and wait for any file save task to finish. I'm rather surprised at a quick glance the forum search did not unearth any earlier made request for this. Am I not using the correct terms? In the same vein I think it would be great to also have the program load in images in the background. Example use case is that you drag a series of large photos onto the program and start working on the first one that finishes loading. Then any subsequently loaded images pop in and steal your focus away. Comments related to 1.7.3's behaviour on the Mac.

Hi Lee, yes indeed I'm running 10.13.6. I'm just curious at this point if this error is indicative of anything serious happening behind the scenes? So far I've not experienced any crashes related to AP.

I noticed that the console on Mac is reporting a lot of these errors (marked red) for me when running Affinity Photo in the foreground: void IOAccelFenceMachine::fence_timeout(IOTimerEventSource *): AMDRadeonAccelerator prodding blockFenceInterrupt Only AP seems to trigger them - Designer for example doesn't. Other graphics intensive software using Metal acceleration also seems unaffected. I've seen this error attributed to GPU freezes, hence the curiosity. What's the meaning of it? Happening on D500 GPU's on a 2013 Mac Pro.

Hi MEB, Thanks for your efforts thus far. I've looked into this a bit more and it may be dependant on my setup - I have AP installed on my (NVMe->adaptor->Mac Pro 2013) system drive and I'm batch-outputting images to an external (modern, fast, FAT-formatted) USB3 spinning disk. After error checking filesystems and updating OS 10.13.6 to the latest security update I can not currently reproduce the zero-byte file creation issue. Still testing to see if now all files are being written whenever I run a batch with parallel processing turned off and after that will check if parallel processing behaves. Perhaps it's an issue with AP not waiting around for a comparably slower output device during batch export? Testing it over a slow network might get some results, too. What I can rule out is that it only affects files of a certain format or image dimension/file size threshhold.

I wonder if you found the time to investigate? The behaviour is still there in release 1.7.2 - random missing files and/or creation of zero byte files when running with the batch settings described above.

As said - play with the spacing parameter: if set too high it creates a patchy brush streak that partially exposes whatever is under the current layer. It'll need to be really low to create a smooth, continuous look.

Not sure what I'm looking at but playing around with the 'Spacing' value in the brush parameters can help if the Smudge tool is not behaving well. I've set mine very low for smudge brushes.

Quick sidenote: is LR 4 considered incompatible or gimped in newer OSes? Asking because I have LR 3 on High Sierra - not encountered any problems but not a heavy user either. Sorry for the offtopic. Giddy for that official 1.7.2 release! Special thanks for putting in the TGA export!

That setting does change the pen button's behaviour quite noticeably - great if that works for you though.

Excuse me but - are 2080Ti's even supported anywhere in macOS? I'm sure you can somehow install it in a cheesegrater but it must be so way out of sync with what Apple offers and supports that you may as well sell it to me for a really good price - and get yourself a Vega something something.

It's been reported as an issue a while back, yes. QA was aware of it when I ran into this.

I've never even looked at Publisher. As said I lost it in the Photo update but still have it running on the same machine in Designer 1.7.0 - separated mode, status bar visible in every open document. Proof (running on 10.13.6): So it appears this feature was already in but somehow got removed in the 1.7.1 update (which I have not done to Designer so far)? Well, now that I see that - if you reintroduce the status bar for separate mode then you might as well consider having the help text only display for the active window and dim or hide it for the background ones.

I'm well aware that the bar is there in the unified window mode - but I had it in the interface in 1.7.0 in separated (floating) mode which is what my first screenshot is showing - and really like that. It's gone after the update to 1.7.1 is what I'm saying.

Riiight. Was already there in 1.7.0 though. My initial 'bug report' was about the behaviour of said bar and that it came up empty when I switched focus back from something else to AP/AD. Would be worthwhile to include that when you bring the 'bar' back as a feature.

Thanks Gabe, But is losing this bar due to the software update a bug by any chance? Attached below is what it looks like now. How do I make it reappear?

Just to add that after upgrading to AP 1.7.1 I have now lost this bar. I'm not aware that I have changed any settings to make it vanish - is this toggle-able somewhere? Not even sure what it is called in the software.

Works for me: Alt+LMB on Intuos Pro M 6.30.30-2 on High Sierra

Not sure if this is a feature or a bug but currently AP lets me draw on hidden layers - that seems like very unusual software behaviour to me. IMO a hidden layer should stay off limits for any canvas manipulation until unhidden by the user, else it's too easy to accidentially ruin one's work without noticing (until too late).

One more voice for Targa export (with alpha channel).