h_d

In response to a post I made last May, MJSfoto1956 suggested the use of Blend Options as an alternative to more traditional luminosity masks. It turns out that the use of the Blend Options panel, combined with a little math, makes luminosity based selections quite effective. The trouble is that the method is cumbersome if you do them from scratch each time.

What I have created is a series of Macros that automates the process. The attached afmacros file contains macros for creating Luminosity Selections in their usual and anticipated forms: Lights 1 through Lights 4, Darks 1 through Darks 4, and Midtones 1 through Midtones 4.

Notes:

1) Each action will select a luminosity-based portion of the selected layer.
2) NO additional channels are created, so files don’t become bloated.
3) Once the selection is made, it can be used for an adjustment layer, a mask, a live filter, etc. It can be deselected (like any selection). It can be replaced by using a different selection (e.g., click on Lights 2 to replace the selection made by Lights 1).

Caveats:

4) You must have a Pixel layer or an Image layer selected for the macros to work properly. If you have any other type of layer selected, or if you have NO layer selected, the results you get will be wrong.
5) The macros will undo any Blend Options you may have set on the selected layer.
6) I am one person with one computer. Obviously, I have not tested these macros in every possible situation. Use them if you like them. No guarantees are made.
7) However, if you like them, they are yours. They are my way of saying “thank you” to the Forum for helping me learn a wonderful piece of software!
Luminosity Selections.afmacros.zip

Bumped it for you.

Neither issue fixed fixed in 1.8.3.175
Cheers,
H

Hi @Sean255 and welcome to the forums!
 The latest customer beta of Affinity Photo (version 1.8.0.164, for macOS) adds PSD smart object import support. I don't think this feature has been rolled out to the PC beta yet.
I'm not in a position to test it myself, and I would guess it's a work in progress, but it might be worth a try... You can run the beta in parallel with your installed version, it doesn't replace it.
Cheers,
H

But you can use spreads in Publisher and export as single-page PDFs.  See @walt.farrell's post 
If you really want to work in single pages it will be more complex. You would need to set up left and right masters. The bleed setup will be the same as in my original screen shots (as bleed is document-based) but you'll need to go through your document making sure the right master is applied to odd-numbered pages and the left master is applied to even-numbered pages.
I would honestly work with spreads and export as single pages.
 
 

Hi everyone,
We have been testing the 2.5 DxO plugins this morning and have found a number of visual issues that we have already started taking screen recordings of. So far, we have found:
A red box that appears when initially choosing a number of plugins (Catalina) A smaller red box covering the loading dialog when loading a number of plugins (Catalian) Artifacts when loading the HDR and sharpening plugins (on the initial low-render pass) and it seems to affect macOS and Windows I will keep updating this list as new things are found. I haven't been able to reproduce the crash yet but I'm spending the day running more tests. 
If any of you running Mojave or older and see the red boxes, please let me know  Thanks so much! 

I'm certainly seeing some oddities with the 30-day free trial of NIK 2.5 running on Catalina/Photo 1.8.1, similar setup to @ipb
Running HDR Efex Pro 2 has just crashed Photo a couple of times, and before that I was getting some horrible visual glitches:

Followed by misaligned chunks of the image when committing the NIK edit (I can't replicate this at the moment, so no screen shots).
I'm also seeing display issues with the Viveza interface - unlabelled sliders, together with a washed-out image display not reflecting the plugin settings, the view in the Loupe or the results when committed. Viveza hasn't crashed on me (yet...) 
Hard to know if it's a problem with Photo or the NIK plugins, or both, or neither...
I think I'll scrub my 30-day trial and go back to the Google versions. I don't see any need to re-install.
 

The document contains a Pixel Selection region of 32 x 3 pixels entirely outside of the canvas, so new filters will have no effect anywhere inside the canvas area.
Open the document then press ctrl+d (Windows) or cmd+d (Mac) to deselect the Pixel Selection, and then you should get expected results when applying filters.
 

I wonder if the 2.5 trial is somehow using the Google version's plugin *.config files (should be in the same folder as the plugins themselves in the free Google version) & that is causing problems.

Just for fun, here's a version that does it with just a single text frame.

Screen Recording 2020-02-20 at 09.55.38.mov The frame has a blue background, the text has a white background, and there are four decorations: two for the red bars, two for the white areas that extend beyond them. I haven't got the spacing perfect by a long way...
 
Extended header.afpub

I think the undoubtedly premature release of the 1.8 retail versions was a surprise for a lot of people, & that probably included at least some of the support staff. As little as two weeks ago, we were still being told that it could be months before the retail versions were released. I don't think this was about 'under-promising & over-delivering' so there must be more to it than that.
Whatever the reasons, what is done is done, so the most important thing now is how quickly they can fix the major bugs & release patched retail versions suitable for production work.

I too am a """PROFESSIONAL""" designer (I really hate that) I rather see myself as a graphic designer Illustrator who attempts to make a living from a pastime I love, and for me, within the first few minutes of using Designer back in 2014 I felt it had amazing potential and warranted spending time to learn how it works, that said, I was turning out usable artwork within the hour - ok there have been bugs here and there and much needed features which have yet to emerge - but for me I love it, studio link is utterly brilliant - the fact that we can have decent communication using this forum is a great thing and I have complete faith that the latest batch of bugs (namely the weird boolean, compound and expand stroke) will be sorted by next week. 

It sounds as though it's been written by someone who is very set in their ways, who has invested huge amounts of time in the other two programs, and who didn't expect to be on a learning curve. Without knowing which Affinity program she was using, it's hard to offer much more in the way of comment. 
"Should be"? Who says? Leading applies to an entire paragraph, it makes perfect sense to have it in the paragraph settings.
I can see it.
It's really simple.
There's none so blind as them as won't see...
 

It sounds as though it's been written by someone who is very set in their ways, who has invested huge amounts of time in the other two programs, and who didn't expect to be on a learning curve. Without knowing which Affinity program she was using, it's hard to offer much more in the way of comment. 
"Should be"? Who says? Leading applies to an entire paragraph, it makes perfect sense to have it in the paragraph settings.
I can see it.
It's really simple.
There's none so blind as them as won't see...
 

I am not trying to defend Affinity but you really need to list some of those bugs to back up your argument.

It sounds as though it's been written by someone who is very set in their ways, who has invested huge amounts of time in the other two programs, and who didn't expect to be on a learning curve. Without knowing which Affinity program she was using, it's hard to offer much more in the way of comment. 
"Should be"? Who says? Leading applies to an entire paragraph, it makes perfect sense to have it in the paragraph settings.
I can see it.
It's really simple.
There's none so blind as them as won't see...
 

It sounds as though it's been written by someone who is very set in their ways, who has invested huge amounts of time in the other two programs, and who didn't expect to be on a learning curve. Without knowing which Affinity program she was using, it's hard to offer much more in the way of comment. 
"Should be"? Who says? Leading applies to an entire paragraph, it makes perfect sense to have it in the paragraph settings.
I can see it.
It's really simple.
There's none so blind as them as won't see...
 

It sounds as though it's been written by someone who is very set in their ways, who has invested huge amounts of time in the other two programs, and who didn't expect to be on a learning curve. Without knowing which Affinity program she was using, it's hard to offer much more in the way of comment. 
"Should be"? Who says? Leading applies to an entire paragraph, it makes perfect sense to have it in the paragraph settings.
I can see it.
It's really simple.
There's none so blind as them as won't see...
 

It sounds as though it's been written by someone who is very set in their ways, who has invested huge amounts of time in the other two programs, and who didn't expect to be on a learning curve. Without knowing which Affinity program she was using, it's hard to offer much more in the way of comment. 
"Should be"? Who says? Leading applies to an entire paragraph, it makes perfect sense to have it in the paragraph settings.
I can see it.
It's really simple.
There's none so blind as them as won't see...
 

It sounds as though it's been written by someone who is very set in their ways, who has invested huge amounts of time in the other two programs, and who didn't expect to be on a learning curve. Without knowing which Affinity program she was using, it's hard to offer much more in the way of comment. 
"Should be"? Who says? Leading applies to an entire paragraph, it makes perfect sense to have it in the paragraph settings.
I can see it.
It's really simple.
There's none so blind as them as won't see...
 

They haven’t given many details so it’s difficult to tell what the ‘problems’ they were having were exactly but, from what I’ve read, it looks like they simply haven’t taken enough time to get used to using a different piece of software than what they’re used to.
Most of the issues seem to just be things that can be very quickly learned if someone puts a little time into it.
We get a lot of people saying things along the lines of “It’s not working like it should.” which translates to me as “I can’t be bothered to learn a slightly different way of doing this and I’d rather spend £20+/month than find out how to use it properly.” If they would rather do that then that’s entirely up to them.
If only they had posted a few questions in the forum they would have been able to quickly get up-to-speed and probably not have had much of a problem at all.
It’s a shame that some people seem to prefer to complain that things aren’t how they want them rather than put any effort into learning new/better ways of doing things.

It sounds as though it's been written by someone who is very set in their ways, who has invested huge amounts of time in the other two programs, and who didn't expect to be on a learning curve. Without knowing which Affinity program she was using, it's hard to offer much more in the way of comment. 
"Should be"? Who says? Leading applies to an entire paragraph, it makes perfect sense to have it in the paragraph settings.
I can see it.
It's really simple.
There's none so blind as them as won't see...
 

It sounds as though it's been written by someone who is very set in their ways, who has invested huge amounts of time in the other two programs, and who didn't expect to be on a learning curve. Without knowing which Affinity program she was using, it's hard to offer much more in the way of comment. 
"Should be"? Who says? Leading applies to an entire paragraph, it makes perfect sense to have it in the paragraph settings.
I can see it.
It's really simple.
There's none so blind as them as won't see...
 

Hi h_d,
Check these links for earlier versions (Affinity Store users only - they require a product key for activation)
- Affinity Photo
- Affinity Designer
- Affinity Publisher
For Mac App Store users there's no way to revert to a previous version unless you have made a backup before.

Okay, that makes sense. I just opened a file that I use as a template and saved it as a template and then added the folder that it is contained within to the template dialogue and there it is.
Thanks very much, I think this all makes sense now.