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BatteriesInc

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Everything posted by BatteriesInc

  1. No, that would be dangerous as they may make changes to the structure. It's good to have a separate directory, but some kind of an import/export option for brushes/styles/tools/whatever would be good because it also helps with a re-install - you just run one export and it's all backed up, and one import and it's all back. Maybe I should propose that as a feature, possibly tied to the serial number to prevent people mass copying brushes etc.
  2. I'm not having that much time to tinker right now, but is there a way I clone all the presently installed resources of the production version (brushes, styles, whatever) and install it in the beta as if it was an upgrade, or do I have to manually install it all? Cheers!
  3. There's also the non-trivial fact that design is more than just colour ;) I have a father whose colourblindness borders on the spectacular, but in one of nature's weird games I am the opposite: I can detect colour differences of 2..3 MacAdam (more close to 3 now as I no longer work in a profession where I use this on a daily basis). And, as you may have seen from my questions, I am *definitely* not a professional designer :P
  4. Affinity Designer is a drawing program: you create images and designs with it, mainly in vector format so you can scale it to any dimension without loss of quality. Affinity Photo is a program focused explicitly on photos and their manipulation, ranging a wide range of images from your average PNG or JPG format to RAW, HDR and panorama shots. The best way to work out what you need is simply download the trial versions and play with them. Personally, I didn't make a choice - I got both :P
  5. The MagSafe ports help to avoid that because the connections are intentionally *weak* - they break free and can simply be plugged back in after that. With USB-C, we are back to the danger zone. I must admit that MagSafe does little for me because I have lots of other stuff plugged in which pretty much undoes its benefit. USB-C has one MAJOR advantage: on a regular Macbook, you'll have 6 of them. You only need one with an adaptor box (unless you push 4K video through it in which case you better leave some ports exclusively for that), which means you have backup if a port gives up - no need to have it fixed immediately. Try that with all the Thunderbolt/Displayport/USB/RJ45/HDMI cabling - for mobile use it's now 1 jack or maybe 2 and you're fully docked. The other advantage is that it normalises the whole power supply malarkey - you don't explicitly need Apple's power supply to get work done. There are also already a number of PCs with USB-C which opens the peripherals market, and I noticed USB-3 sticks are not as expensive as I feared - you can get dual ones which are USB-C on one side and USB-3 on the other. In short, if you have existing kit it's annoying to switch. If you're busy cycling hardware anyway it's not a bad idea.
  6. I've come across something called ResourceSpace which I'm going to try and install in my ISP space. ResourceSpace also offer trial accounts, but 1GB isn't going to cut it for me so I hope I'll get a personal setup running (not a big fan of cloudy things). The main challenge is making time for it. It's not just the install, it's also transfer and tagging. I'll have to set up a workflow so I can do this in batches. I've tried to do this with ACDsee but having it online makes it less dependent on my laptop and makes it easier to give someone else controlled access to some parts. Update 19 Jun 2017: I couldn't get ResourceSpace to work (uploads simply vanished), which may not be the software but my ISP as they use FreeBSD, not all Open Source ports that easily. I ended up installing Piwigo which is actually a tad too simplistic but which will do for now. The killer feature for me is Piwigo's ability to be a front end to a storage area on the server so I can push a directory (and subdirectories) up to the server with FileZilla and then run a sync, after which those directories show up as galleries. I still have to title/tag them and set rights, but it's good enough for my personal needs. It's too lightweight for commercial use, though.
  7. Leading on from another feature request (path persistence), here is a feature requests feature request :). Is it maybe an idea to create ONE sticky thread in which we start collecting the things that could do with persistence in use, between tabs or even between sessions? I have seen quite a few feature requests that ask for data to be preserved between operations, tabs and sessions so I figured it would make sense to maybe gather them under one topic and maybe make it sticky. That parks it all in one place so it's easier to gather and act on it where that makes sense in the scheme of things. The hope is that increased efficiency could help other projects such as DAM and DTP progress (cheeky nudge :rolleyes: ).. Cheers!
  8. I guess it's worse for people who don't even have function keys anymore. Not a "juge" fan of the strip thing myself as you have to look at it to operate..
  9. A small proposal/amendment to this - there are quite a few items that could do with persistence. How about starting a separate thread, i.e. one to cover all so you end up with a list? This could also include menu selections, such as sticking with "Selected items without background" on export. The other thing to address is, of course, the scope of this persistence, as it could be per image, per session (multiple tabs share settings) or permanently, with a facility to reset it. I suspect this will have its own entry in the Preferences and will take some head scratching because at the moment there is, for instance, somewhat of a raging conflict between brush settings like size and changing those for the effect that the USER wants rather than the brush creator. I get that the brush creator supplies a certain effect, but this takes away design decisions from the user. Sorry, drifted off topic: collection thread for items that users want persistent - opinions?
  10. That's a general observation: it would be good to have both a method to achieve a persistence of settings as well as a way to reset them, possibly selective, even if that is per session rather than completely.
  11. Funny that, when I saw "not an expert", "many wedding pictures" and what was asked I thought of Portrait Professional too - the OP will save himself masses of time. One caveat, though, be very, very gentle with corrections - it is easy to stray into artificiality. It pays to reign in the program's enthusiasm to beautify people using the algorithm that actually started the PortraitProfessional business..
  12. For those asking about Designer, Frankentoon has some cracking tutorials on their site, see http://www.frankentoon.com/toonlab I especially like the (vampire) one that shows just how dramatic an image improves with a bit of raster grunge - beautiful, yet so simple. There's also good stuff from there about creating cartoons and some starting kits to get you up to speed if that's your scene.
  13. Hi, Would it be possible to accept both "," and "." as acceptable decimal separator, or give users a choice in the matter? You typically end up in this situation if your base operating language is English, but your keyboard is not - it then becomes a bit of a guess as to what will happen when you press the "." button on the numeric keypad (yes, some of us like larger keyboards :) ). Some software will follow system language, some will follow the keyboard language, and typically you have precious little influence in the matter (only LibreOffice and its NeoOffice derivative have a setting for it in their "Languages" preference). AD and AP both want a value of 4½ entered as "4.5" (system language), whereas "4,5" is what I end up with using the numerical keypad. Rather than enter this as a bug and fire off a debate, how about being a bit smarter and develop an input routine that will accept either for numerical values? I have yet to come across anyone who enters triad separators when keying in a number for data entry. In case that gets too complicated, could a choice be added to the setup? Cheers!
  14. Upvote for the double "Esc" key - double clicking on a bit of empty canvas presumes you are zoomed out far enough to have that available, which is not always the case..
  15. There is in general a need for command keys to be editable. Problem no 1 when working in multiple languages is that not all keys are easily accessible in each language layout, so what seems a perfectly usable keystroke in English may be hard to use in another. A simple example: the ubiquitous "#" key is pretty much buried on a Swiss German Mac layout (it takes two modifiers to access it, which is a bit of a swine if you're writing code or editing in a plain text application such as Ulysses :) ).
  16. Yup, been there. Can't recall what it is now (haven't had enough coffee) but I've had a few instances where I could select a tool but it simply didn't work, and the quickest route out was then to save, exit and reload rather than get frustrated. I must make a note one day so I can get help to figure out what is going on, so some more onscreen help would be good. That said, the current assistant popup has some annoying side effects, but I've already seen feature requests to improve that.
  17. I found that moving a guide is not always a guarantee that it has actually been removed, so that has my vote too :).
  18. I haven't had much need for the locking but I mostly do things that designers would probably consider stuff for beginners (and I still managed to break things :) ). However, the layers list is a very critical UI element, and even with my primitive efforts it has already become evident that some sort of scale or zoom function would be useful. At present I work my way around that by grouping elements, but that has its own problems - upvote for that..
  19. I'm no expert (although I have, for some weird reason, exceptional colour vision*) but wouldn't you normally calibrate the monitor and system overall instead of just "inside" an application? Just asking out of interest - I'm quite fascinated by the process of keeping colours stable throughout the design process. * discovered that by accident - even more ironic given that I have family members that are dramatically red/green blind :)
  20. Well, that's the major problem, isn't it? Hence the repeated prods at Affinity :D
  21. OK, "anything sensible" that is still actively maintained and improved ;) : even Lightroom isn't that good, and I intensely dislike cloudy apps. That said, I would welcome a platform that allows catalogues of external data to be incorporated, I have some data kept in a cloud platform (typically aged material) because there's only so much room on a local harddisk - it would be good if you can either add separate directories and drives (in which case I could just mount the external resource as a directory with tools such as "Mountain Duck") or web resources such as webdav or SFTP/SSH servers. You don't need that mounted if you only access the indexes and thumbnails or, alternatively, you could store the indexes of such drives on the same location so you could switch resources on and off (as it would be rather pointless to want access to an image if you're out of reach). Last but not least, I want to be able to switch OFF facial recognition. It's all very nice if it's a personal collection, but as soon as it concerns a professional photographer such data soon becomes a potential Data Protection violation risk that is worth avoiding. The incoming GDPR has teeth in the form of substantial fines..
  22. Well, I wouldn't want to affect a Royal "we", but when it comes to a DAM I must actually agree, there is definitely a "need", also known as a ready market. There isn't really anything sensible out there that allows you to tag images, manage copyrights (let's not forget that), sort on all sorts of parameters including whatever available EXIF data and even dimensions etc etc etc. The only other option I see here is some Open Source project which could incorporate things like Graphics/ImageMagick and exiftool for image handling, but I lack the bandwidth to get that organised and keep it from getting mired in pointless politics. Given past performance of the Affinity team which I enjoy daily with Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo* there is a high degree of confidence that whatever they dream up will be good and innovative too, and they have access to plenty of people here who would love to help with requirements gathering and alpha/beta testing (sticks up hand). That's probably their only problem: they set the bar pretty high for themselves with AD and AP :P - my confidence in them delivering something good is only exceeded by my impatience to see it appear :rolleyes: .. * They should really come up with some joint license - it's worth having both
  23. Hi, Could any of you great experts tell me how I could use Affinity Photo to make an image partially transparent? If I, for instance, have an image of a cup leaking lemonade I'd like to make the lemonade partially transparent so it picks up the background of whatever I drop it on. I'm hoping to use some images in a presentation and although I can probably get away without this, the perfectionist in me just won't shut up :). Before anyone mentions that Powerpoint has such facilities, (a) I don't use Powerpoint and (b) that's not the point, I'm trying to get comfortable with image editing in AP which I don't use much (I'm not a professional) and this was something I haven't managed to work out. Thanks in advance!
  24. Mea Culpa - now it works in Safari and FF. Weird. Maybe there was a network problem. In any case, it's now working - thanks for checking :)
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