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This has been requested before, but can be a bit more complicated than it sounds. For example, if hyphenation is being used, there is a possibility for the split to occur in the middle of a word, in which case you suddenly have a half-word at the end of one frame and another at the start of the next frame, which can lead to spelling errors while at the same time removing the hyphen (since it is no longer one connected word from the perspective of the text engine). Similarly if your text is displayed justified and the split occurs in the middle of a paragraph, then the last line of one may no longer stretch across the width of the frame since it is now the last line of the surviving portion of the paragraph and the first line of the other may not longer stretch across the width since it is now the first line of its surviving portion. Other text flow rules may similarly be impacted by splitting the text in the middle, and there may not always be good solutions to match these things up. Serif would either need to accept that splitting the frames will impact formatting in this manner, or would need to arrange for "phantom" paragraph content on either side to help maintain the exiting status of the flow (and then work out what to do when the user edits the content from there). None of it is 100% insurmountable, but I suspect they have bigger fish to fry at the moment.

Photo doesn't really "open" image files either. When you "open" an image file with Photo it actually creates a new Photo document and imports the image into a layer of that document. If you open a PhotoShop file you can optionally have it configured to automatically export back to the PSD when you "save" it, which can work well for some workflows, but there is a loss of editability for some types of layers when doing this as they are not readily represented in a PSD.

... unless you are using Photo, where that option is not available.

The joins may not be clean with that approach... of course, if the change is done at a segment level, there are limits to how effectively that can happen regardless. Most apps set line thickness at the level of specific nodes added for the purpose, or possibly just at the nodes joining the segments. The Affinity apps set it... arbitrarily along its length, totally ignoring the nodes and segments...

The Merge feature only works on raster data, so layers that are vector (such as text and shapes) would need to be rasterized in the process of being merged. On the desktop app, Merge Down is disabled when the layers are not pixel layers, while Merge Visible will automatically rasterize the data in the process of merging the layers. The problem with the iPad version appears to be that Merge Down is not disabled in the same cases where it is on the desktop - for the options where the command cannot possibly work. As a result the user can select the command and it looks like the command was accepted, but it doesn't actually do anything. Merge Visible does seem to work however, just as it does on the desktop. The fact that the option is not disabled is likely a bug, and if not it is a serious design flaw, so either way I believe this should have been filed as a bug report instead of a feature request, if it has not already been added to the bug report section of the forums.

This camera (as well as the S6) will probably take some time to support as the company introduced a new compression scheme for these cameras which will need to be reverse-engineered unless Panasonic provides documentation for the format (which camera companies rarely seem to do without some kind of NDA being signed or similar) and that can be a hit-or-miss operation which can slow down any attempts to provide support for it: https://discuss.pixls.us/t/lumix-s5ii-raw-support/35976 It is, however, supported by Apple's RAW engine so if you are on a current version of macOS you can switch to that within Affinity Photo and it should work: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213267 If S5M2 is the same as S5 II then it looks like Capture One supports it though (but curiously not the S6?): https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002718118#h_ceed14ae-dd9b-4837-8ad0-d322dabf8739 Same with DxO PhotoLab: https://www.dxo.com/supported-cameras/

It seemed to work under Windows 11 on my Mac Studio, which is ARM-based. I haven't done much with it because I was basically just checking how the installer behaved after reading a few other threads early on after the v2 release - I just use the native Mac version - but I didn't run into any issues getting it started at least. I agree with Walt's suggestion to try the trial version and see how it works on yours.

You can join the beta program: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/affinity-beta-program/ Note that occasionally something will show up in a beta then be pulled out before the release if Serif feels it was not actually ready, but if something is going to show up in a release, it will almost always show up first in the beta.

In the meantime, you can insert one of arbitrary size, then enter the dimensions you want in the transform panel. If there is a size you use frequently, you can also create a blank one then store it as an asset in the Assets panel, so you can drag it out from there into a new document, wherever you need it. List view is helpful in this case as you otherwise are working blind to locate the one you want.

This is not generically possible. For example, consider a line with a gradient applied to it, to which you apply a curves adjustment with a complex curve. The colors along the line may be affected in such a way that they would not be possible to achieve on the vector shape without potentially altering its geometry with the addition of nodes to represent points where the color changes, something you would not want happening unexpectedly, and even then this may require some very complex computations to achieve, beyond the boundaries of what would be reasonable to expect from any ordinary graphics manipulation software.

Non-destructive is already possible by not applying the filters at all - just leave them as layers. Applying a filter means you want to bake it in, which modifies the pixel data and is thus destructive by definition.

Assuming it is the vector brush tool, you can delete the stroke by right-clicking on it in the Layers panel and choosing Delete, regardless of the selected tool. The delete key should also work, but agree that in the vector brush tool it does not. I could understand it not working in the *raster* brush tool because a raster brush does not create a layer but draws on an existing pixel layer that can have other unrelated content making that operation questionable when that tool is in use, but the truly strange thing is that it actually *does* work in the raster brush tool and not in the vector one! I suspect it is probably a bug that the delete key does not work with the vector brush tool as the key definitely works in other vector-oriented tools such as the shape tools and the pen tool, and even in places (such as with the raster brush tool) where I am not sure that it should?

This is not correct. Shift constrains the aspect ratio (makes squares and circles instead of rectangles and ovals). This is labelled clearly on the status bar along the bottom of the window, as with any other tool. EDIT: as you indicated shift+alt for add, I should clarify that this is what shift does on the Mac; I don't know if this might be different on Windows...

There are iPad versions of the Affinity products which can open the files from the desktop version (and vice versa).

If you have a current version of macOS on your Mac (assuming you are using one) and of iPadOS on your iPad, you can mirror the Mac display to the iPad over WiFi or USB.

You mean like this (done in Designer without any need for a script)? Screen Recording 2023-06-05 at 09.03.29.mov

Short version: when it is supported by the underlying libraw engine (see https://www.libraw.org/node/2753), or if you or on a Mac, then alternatively Apple's RAW engine (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213267), as both engines are supported by the Affinity products on the Mac.

He is asking for a native ARM64 (technically aarch64) build of the Affinity apps to run on his 64-bit ARM Windows system. This would need to be built by Serif, so why would that be directed to Microsoft? The "official" response from Serif has generally been: However, this is no longer quite exactly true. WPF is available for aarch64 (ARM64) at this point, but only supported for newer versions of Windows than the minimum versions that Serif is supporting. They should be able to build a native aarch64 version now that would run on Windows 11, but not on Windows 10.

In the meantime you might try searching for it in Google and adding site:forum.affinity.serif.com to the search terms.

It won't bring me back. Adobe lost me 100% as a customer when they went subscription-only. Other companies have since suffered the same fate. For me this is a matter of principle and I won't compromise it. "Native" productivity software (anything which does not run "in the cloud" where the company has a *legitimate* ongoing need to pay for bandwidth, servers, etc. to permit usage of the software) equates to no subscriptions allowed. Period. For some users and use cases. Some of us would have zero benefit from this. I might have *rare* benefit from generative AI, certainly not enough of a benefit frequently enough to jump to a higher-priced application unless it has other things to offer as well. Definitely not enough that I would ever consider a subscription over it. I do recognize that it will make a bigger difference for other users. Selection assistance AI, I would probably make much more use of, but not at the cost of a subscription.

It's a tool, like any other. Use it or don't as appropriate for the work at hand. I think the biggest "bang for the buck" when it comes to current AI tech is going to be in selections rather than in generation of content - using AI techniques to identify things in the picture in order to more quickly zero in on what should be selected to help the user target things they want to manipulate.

Not quite. Photo has more than just the Photo persona: it also has tone mapping, RAW developing, the export persona, the liquify persona, none of which are available via StudioLink in Publisher. Even in the Photo persona, the actual Photo application supports the various stack/merge features and the batch processing feature, all of which are missing from Publisher. Designer also has the export persona and the pixel persona. The pixel persona is kind of pointless in Publisher if you also have Photo, but if you do not have Photo, then it would still add something of value. Publisher does not have anything like the export persona at this time. There have been several requests to unite these into one application with ALL of the features in one place, but these have consistently been shot down by Serif.

They do, but you need to remember that in the Affinity products you have both a vector selection (layers) and a raster selection (the "marching ants"); if you just use a bare Copy command it usually gives preference to the vector selection over the raster one (though there are some exceptions) so it will copy the selected layer rather than the selected raster area, and if no layer is selected, it has nothing to copy. Try Copy Merged instead for a more consistent behavior of copying the raster selection area across all visible layers. On the Mac this is command+shift+C. This is most likely a Windows limitation due to having only three modifier keys available, as the selection tools generally use all four on the Mac, and something had to be left out. When using the marquee tools on the Mac: Drag: create/move Shift+Drag: constrain aspect ratio Control+Drag: add to selection Option+Drag: subtract from selection Command+Drag: move layer with selection Check the hints on the status bar across the bottom of the Affinity Photo window to find equivalents if you are on a modifier-key-deficient platform. Image layers are not "non-standard" and are likely to be more common than pixel layers when working with Designer and (particularly) with Publisher. The Layers panel is a common interface component among the apps so giving special treatment to the pixel layer in terms of its appearance within the Layers panel doesn't really make much sense from the perspective of the suite as a whole. The layer types are instead distinguished using icons on the left side of the Layers panel. Also, I believe an embedded document layer is considered to be more like a smart object, rather than an image layer. Not quite the same thing. Agreed that it does not have a "+", which would make its function FAR more obvious, but its contrast looks about the same to me as the other icons surrounding it? In Preferences/Settings -> Tools, try turning on "Use shift modifier to cycle tools" (or whatever the Windows equivalent of that is).