DarkClown

It seems like all the files I worked on and closed without saving generate a "recovery file" what AP desperately wants to open on restart ... this drives me nuts since I tend to save my work but experiment with documents further on ... so I'll close them without saving the last steps and AP keeps bothering me on restart with wantig to open "recovery files" from theses documents ... Am I doing something wrong? How do I turn this of? A recovery file ist nice when the program has crashed ... but not each time I close a document without saving it!

Is "Bigger Thumbnails" a setting you can adjust somewhere? (I'm struggling with the thumbnail size for quite a while)

Hmm, works fine for me ... must have been your specific installation ...

The attached video shows the completely unacceptable delay in screen redraw. You see a larger TIFF file in the background and a small jpg (1200x800px) on top of it. No other file open no other program running. The only thing I do is resizing (at the beginning) and than moving the smaller top picture. You may realize that while I'm just moving the pic a resize of the picture is performed by AP without me even releasing the mouse during moving - so I have to resize afterwards to get the picture back to screen size. All the artifacts and delays when resizing and moving are original performance on my system. Of course it will be easy to blame it on my system but no other program (e.g. Lightroom, PS, CaptureOne) shows performance like that on my system. Maybe other people don't experience these kind of substantial problems or they don't care - but for me this makes AP unusable for daily work. Delay.avi

I checked with the beta and the same pictures. It's still not "impressive" but there is a significant improvement in the behavior - so it seems something has been done in the beta to overcome the problem but I do see quite some space for improvement!

Well, the problem is not that I used a brush or anything else ... I did use the "Move" tool and just moved the top picture (or later resized it) ... but while "Moving" it as well did a resize (I did not release the mousebutton) .... And of course the overall performance is a complete no-go. Here are my Performance settings (and turning of "Use precise clippings" does not change anything in terms of performance!):

Latest Beta 243: When dragging and dropping an external jpg from the explorer into an open document in AP the program crashes reproducable without any error message (no recovery file as well). Timo

Well, it might be related to some kind of JPG setting Samsung uses ... and when you open it with a different App and save it again obviously the according other jpg interpretation is written what causes less problems. Interestingly AP doesn't have that problem in the stable version.

Thx for confirming!

I cross-checked again ... and indeed it does not crash with every picture. The problem seems to be related to the picture I drag onto the already open picture ... does not seem to have problems with other programs - but gets AP to crash ... I attached it here so you or a moderator may test it yourself 20190204_162641.zip

Sorry, my mistake. It was just a typo. I am testing the latest version .243!

This bug is found in both the current as well as the beta version of AD: When you draw a shape, change the pressure values of the stroke (just drag one point of the pressure curve to 0), go to (brush) properties in the same dialog and now the "size variance" initial value is always 0. (Should be 100 after you changed a point of the pressure curve to 0) In AP the brush brush property box inside the stroke parameter box is completely useless since no parameter can be edited except the "Texture" button "Set Texture" ... but setting a texture has no effect. Cheers, Timo

I can't reproduce that bug you show here but the gradient tool indeed has many inconsistencies in handling. If you have a gradient selected, go to the color edit box with one of the color points selected, switch from the "Gradient" tab to the "None" tab and back and all settings are lost without even clicking on anything. (Works fine with the "color" and "swatches" tab). As well starting to paint a gradient on an empty document the assistant still does not automatically add a pixellayer (something I still perceive as pretty illogical since I don't get what you want with a new document WITHOUT any pixel layer as a base - but that's a different story). This has been brought up years ago already ... Cheers, Timo

For a year I kept my mouth shut ... waiting for things to develop. Now checking the old list of suggestions I made to improve basic and essential workflow in AP and AD to get closer to PS 20 month ago - hardly anything has changed (oh, no, I don't expect every suggestion beeing taken over). But even basic simple improvement like centering the picture when undocking have simply been ignored ... instead new features were introduced also not working properly. So many basic things like saving settings, size of handles, windows handling (a neverending list of just workflow issues ... everything that one needs to USE the product and not only to play around with it) have been ignored ... for over a year. I'm still working with PS6 on a daily base due to these topics ... need a product I can work with .... not somethings that comes with more and more buggy features. And I ask myself: what's the f***ing problem to do a job right and not only 80%? To be clear: Affinity poducts offer great features. One of the only close competitors to Adobe products feature wise - but as long as workflow and basic handling as well as stability is in such a mediocre state and not at all improving - I can't call it a competition. And I read all the fanboys, cheering up ... claiming to be long time professionals ... wondering what they do with the product. Are they getting paid by serif? A seriously disappointed long term "want to be" user ... DC

... I stopped buying Adobe products when they came up with the blackmailing SW release model. So CS6 and LR6 was the last money Adobe got (and will get) from me ... Jumped into Affinity products and was convinced it's the only alternative featurwise to Adobe products .... One of the reasons I was so desperate to really support and giving extensive feedback! I really needed an PS alternative. While Affinity Designer evolved into a reasonable alternative to AI for me - maybe due to the fact that I was no heavy duty user of AI. AP did not make it my photo SW until today. l'm still using PS6 for my daily work - mainly for what I call the lacking workflow. I never went the way other people took, asking for LR alternatives (what would have been nice) just not to distract serif from focusing on getting AP right. Instead they came up with AP (undoubtful an application other people heavily requested) but again another building site that distracts the programmers from getting AP right (from my perspective) - and again an application that is incomplete and struggling in so many ways.

Open Topics and suggestions - only related to window handling and workflow (checked with Beta 1.7.0.209) 1) When you drag & drop a file from the windows explorer on the AP Icon or framework please: open it in an undocked new window (elsewise no second drag an drop is possible unless you float the first window)! if possible in 1:1 Zoom (not enlarged to windows size as it is done right now) please adapted windows size of undocked window to fit the original file 2) If you drang and drop a file from Explorer into an open AP document it gets added as a layer but since it does not get dropped centered and mostly outside the picture area of the first layer one can not find this newly added layer anywhere. It seems to be vanished somewhere outside the boundaries of the existing picture. 3) When you float one or all windows please make the floating window(s) fit the picture in the current zoom level (optimal windows size) - if it fits in the workspace. 4) If a window is larger than the original document (regardless if docked or floating) please automatically center the document within the new window (and disable the view tool in this window). If you resize a floating window smaller than the document: dock the document at the top left corner. Maybe it makes sense to implement a general setting "Always center documents when smaller than window". If a document is smaller than the window there is no need to be able to move the document within the window. One could avoid accidentally "loosing" the document in "outer space" if it would always be centered in the docked window (if smaller than the window) 5) When you work with docked and floating windows in combination you can't bring the docked window to the front. This is a general problem. It could be solved by only allowing docked or floating windows mode but no mixture. Floating windows can be brought to the front. 6) All Zoom tools (e.g. 100% / 200% / actual size etc.) should as well center the document in the window. 7) It would be nice to arrange all floating windows optimized on the workspace (e.g. horizontal, vertical, tiled) with one click (menu command) 8) Also nice to have: additional information of document size (height/width in current units somewhere at the windowsframe of a document) 9) If I undock many documents why do they cascade at the top right(?) corner of my screen? 10) Drag and Drop of layers between documents should be possible 11) Would be nice to individually be able to save the workspace (setting of panels, content of toolbars, position of all panels and toolbars, docked or floating windows) Bugs: - AP crashes sometimes when you drag and drop from explorer or undock a window - Resizing a window bby grabbing its frame causes a significant delay (the window frame follows some seconds later the movement of the mouse) - Seems like AP is so busy with permanently calculating the content of the window that the frame can't follow the mouse quick enough. The problem seems to be significantly less when you resize at the top left corner in comparison to the bottom right corner. Most of the above refers to Affinity Designer as well! Cheers, Timo

True ... that seems to be the case ... Please, do so. Would be really good. Indeed ... mainly (from my perspective important) suggestions based on workflow and handling optimizing ... The current windows handling on a daily base is extremely time consuming and a real *pita* ... It feels like AP has never been designed for handling more than one document at a time nor handling floating documents. I don't consider my points as "bugs" but extremly annoying and time consuming. I need to work on pictures (that's what I'm getting paid for) and don't want to deal with handling issues of the SW all the time - taking up a significant amount of my precious time ... A wasn't able to reproduce the first bug consistently myself ... it just happened more than 3 times while working with the SW (I know, this is a crappy bug description and does not make debugging easier) Hopefully the performance bug can be solved soon. Thanks again for your feedback! Cheer, Timo

Other Topics and suggestions -(checked with Beta 1.7.0.209) - most of them have been addressed already 1-2 years ago. 1) Exporting a document comes up with a dialog. When I choose a format(starting from top to bottom), set my desiered dimensions, choose sampling method and than select a different area my dimensions get resetted. A very annoying behaviour. Even when switching between "object with background" and "objects without background" (will result in the same dimensions) my dimensions are reset. 2) The assistant still does not add a new layer if you start with floodfill on a new document 3) As a general procedure Pressing ENTER or ESC should confirm or cancel a dialog. When I open a crop selection I can confirm the selection with "Enter" but I can't cancel with "ESC" 4) Adding, subtracting to from a selected color 5) Temporarily activation original proportions for unconditional cropping (by pressing the Alt-key) 6) Icon size in layer panel flexible (at least 3 different sizes) 7) Change assigned keyboard Shortcuts for all "brush"-"eraser"-"pen"-"whatevertool" sizes (increase & decrerase) at once - changing that separately for each tool takes ages and is complete over-engineering 8) Saving setting and content for parameter fields and pathes would save much time. Just some exaples: - Export preferences (They are continuously back to stupid *.png instead my predefinde personal settings ...) - Parameter for live filters (e.g. gaussian blur or unsharp mask) - Parameter for fx settings - Cropping Mode (setting keeps switching back to useless "unconditioned") - Resize method (e.g. bilinear/bicubic)? 9) BUG: Variable is not updated when resizing document (spreadwidth). Open a doc with dimension 5000x5000px resize it to 1000x1000 -> spreadwidth ist still 5000 (Checked in Transform panel) - likely other variables are affected as well. 10) Make the frequency layer separation parameters editable like in live filters 11) A "flatten image" and "flatten group" command for layers would be nice (combining layers in AP is not intuitive and effortless at all!) 12) Help file quite often does not open (e.g. wrong focus, dialog open, cursor in edit field) 13) Metadata Editor (This is a high priority for everyone supplying stock content) 14) Flood Fill with bitmap pattern 15) Exchanging foreground/background color in the tool palette also changes color in a selected vector object. Very confusing. 16) Include a small button next to the fg/bg color circle to reset it to black/white 17) Definition of standard output profile from the develop persona 18) Spiral Tool 19) Extended parameters for vectorial shapes in transform panel (e.g. "radius" for circle/ellipse) Macros: - Multi Layer Selection not possible - Filling of Objects can't be recorded (color assignment) - Export of document (including parameter) is not recorded - For macros it would be good if resizing of a document could be based on a maximum side length regardless if the document is landscape or portrait - Make conditional decisions available (e.g.: IF (DocHight > DocWidth) THAN ... ELSE ...) Alternatively include some kind of JavaScript language - Add customizable keyboard shortcuts to dedicated macros Cheers, Timo

Thanks for the feedback - very much appreciated! In case any of the above bullet points are unclear feel free to contact me any time. Cheers, Timo

Hi Mark, sorry for that last "unqualified" comment (I take that back! ... happens, when you are upset and don't really know who to blame) I will try to be more constructive again and assemble a list with verified open topics (based on the latest beta) and bring all the unfixed stuff up again. Cheers, Timo

I wonder if there is a way to scale a group (that includes textlayers) by entereing numerical values in the transform field and scaling the text as well instead of just scaling the surrounding box? Whatever I try the text size remains the same, only the framing box is resized ...

LOL .. if it wouldn't continuously crash (reproducible) when I try to do that :-)

Empty A4 page ... 1 textframe with 3 column text. Pasted 6 Word pages plain text and my system is slowed down to a degree I can't work any more (tablet does barely work any more ... cursor move stepwise 20 px per seconds). Mouse is still acceptable ... wanting to distribute the overflow text by shift-left clicking the eye at the bottom right column leads to this crash:

But ... not really ... let's wait for build 59 ... :-(