fde101

Status: Beta
Purpose: Features, Improvements, Fixes
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Photo
Mac App Store: Not submitted
Download ZIP (Universal): Download
Auto-update: Unavailable (the switch to universal binary has disrupted auto-update - it will return soon)
 
Hello,
We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the fourth build of Affinity Photo 1.9.0 for macOS.
If this is your first time using a customer beta of an Affinity app, it’s worth noting that the beta will install as a separate app - alongside your store version. They will not interfere with each other at all and you can continue to use the store version for critical work without worry.
This beta is significantly different from the 1.8 version available for purchase - we strongly recommend that you do not use this beta for real work as data could be lost and the files you save are not guaranteed to open in previous / future versions of Affinity Photo.
Furthermore, massive behind the scenes work has been done to enable GPU acceleration for the Windows version of Affinity Photo in 1.9. In theory this should have no consequences for macOS / iOS users - but it’s likely that a couple of things will have become broken along the way. We are giving ourselves a longer beta period with 1.9 in order to find and fix those things.
This also means that the full complement of new features is not available yet in this 1.9 beta - more will be added over the coming weeks.
Thanks again for your continued support!
 
Affinity Photo Team  
 
Changes Since 1.9.0.199
 
- Added a new “Astrophotography Stack” persona which allows you to combine dark frames, light frames, bias frames, flat frames and dark flat frames then stack them. FITS images are also supported. Lots of photographers have been experimenting with astro during lockdown - hopefully these new tools will help users to get better results. I'm sure James Ritson will be providing some tutorial guidance in short order
- Added “Pattern Layers” - a fixed size bitmap layer which repeats across the entire document. You can paint on pattern layers and use all filters to manipulate them and see the resulting pattern in real time. They can be transformed non-destructively. After a pattern is added and a tool selected, a faint grey box indicates the "real" area of the pattern which can be edited.
- Added “Export Timelapse” - the ability to export a document which has undo steps as a video. Numerous options exist to control how the video is generated (and more will come later!).
- Added “Live Liquify” layers - as the name suggests, they allow you to have non-destructive liquify layers in your stack which can be edited and masked just like all other live filter layers. At the moment, a hard limit of 512 pixels offset in either X or Y is enforced - we hope to eventually lift this restriction.
- Reworked “Studio Presets” from the earlier 1.9 betas. They now work in a more predictable way and store tool / toolbar configuration. A manager dialog is also now provided.
- Added a new “Combined” result to the benchmark - to test performance contexts where vector and raster content is used together. The benchmark version is still 1900 - so existing vector and raster scores from previous builds are still valid and comparable.
- Added a registration page to the app - this allows users to login and auto-install brushes (so far).
- Added the “Resource Manager” functionality from Publisher for managing image placement.
- Added ability to open package files from Designer and Publisher.
- Photo is now a universal binary, supporting both Intel and Apple silicon processors.
- Path text improvements.
- Assorted small bug fixes.
- Help improvements.
- Localisation improvements.
 
Cumulative Changes Since 1.8

- Added “Duplicate spare channel” to right click menu.
- Added missing “Convert to Path Text” menu item.
- Small improvements to the benchmark UI.
- Update app icon for Big Sur.
- Fixed numerous bugs with brushes, introduced in the 1.9.0 betas.
- Fixed issues when opening multiple RAW files at once.
- Fixed significant memory leak introduced in 1.9.0 betas.
- Fixed UI issues with Big Sur.
- Fixed assorted other GPU acceleration issues introduced in the 1.9.0 betas.
 
- Text on a path is now available in Photo.
- More filters now work on masks / adjustments / spare channels (Add Noise, Perlin Noise, etc.).
- Improved Metal rendering performance (over 195).
- Improved experience when editing a spare channel (view artefacts, histogram and navigator).
- Setting a blend mode on a sub-brush will now work properly - paving the way for import of PSD dual-brushes in a future build.
- Attempted to fix startup crash on machines with no compatible Metal GPU.
- Fixed localisation issues affecting non-UK users.
- Fixed issues when attempting to add layers to a spare channel (!).

- Improved “Serif Labs” RAW engine.
- You can now single click a spare channel in the Channels panel to edit it like a layer.
- The Curves adjustment now has numeric field controls for precise positioning.
- Studio presets are now available.
- A benchmarking tool has been added in the help menu. It will only become available when no documents are open.
- Blend modes now work on “alpha only” layers (masks, adjustments, live filters, etc.).
- Added a new “Divide” blend mode.
- Added “Create from centre” for the elliptical marquee tool.
- Allowed snapping to the bounds of the pixel selection.
- Added ability to create brushes from the current pixel selection with one click.
 
To be notified about all future macOS beta updates, please follow this notification thread 
To be notified when this Photo update comes out of beta and is fully released to all Affinity Photo on macOS customers, please follow this thread

I never encountered a PDF with embedded video or music and just had to look it up that this is actually a thing with Acrobat Reader 9.
I like interactive PDF up to the point where you can fill out a form or click a link (either to jump to a bookmark or external URL) but inserting things you cannot print defeats the purpose of that format in my view.

Hello,
I wrapping a book, and a letter many times goes to end of line (this letter is "a" what is "the").
How can I set Publisher for one character drop to new line automatically?

Adding them to Publisher opens the opportunity for them to be integrated with data merge: consider the possibility of having a chart on a repeated page which collects its data from the merge source...

@Patrick Connor, the post you made on the release announcements for this new Publisher build on the mac is linked to the page for the Windows build.

Check the hints along the bottom of the window.  To rotate and scale around the opposite handle is control on the Mac.  As @haakoo indicated, on Windows some of the shortcuts are bit harder to get to due to lack of a fourth modifier key on that platform.
An alternative is to set the transform origin using the option on the context toolbar, or to use the point transform tool (hidden behind the node tool by default) in Designer.

How is a separate straight line tool an "enormous" time saver over the pen tool?
With the pen tool in Pen Mode, you click on each end of the line.  Press ESC to start a new line if needed - the ESC is one extra step per line after the first. With the pen tool in Line Mode, it works just like the traditional "straight line tool" - drag a line from one end to the other.  Start dragging again and you get a new line.  This is one extra click to change the mode, then you can create many lines.  Add one extra click if you must for switching the mode back.  
In Designer you can configure tab stops in the Paragraph studio panel.

Now you can in v. 2020.

If the school is allowing the students to choose their own software then this is an unreasonable thing for them to be asking of you, particularly if they are asking for mixed page sizes or a combination of differing spread sizes (some spreads with 2 pages and some with 3 pages within the same layout, for example).
QuarkXPress for example is the most significant "big player" competitor for InDesign right now, and while it can have more than two pages in a spread, including arbitrary configurations of 1-page, 2-page, 3-page, etc. spreads, all of the pages must be the same size (you can't mix page sizes within a layout in QuarkXPress).
Scribus offers single pages, facing pages, 3-fold and 4-fold spread configurations and does allow for differing page sizes within a spread, but you can't have for example a mixture of 2-page spreads and a 3-page spread in the same document, or stick single-page spreads between multi-page spreads or similar (except for the starting/ending pages being incomplete spreads - starting with a right-hand page for example).
Affinity Publisher allows individual spreads to have differing page sizes, but the pages in the spread must both be the same size, and you either have single-page spreads or double-page spreads, with the exception of the first and last page if you start the double-page spreads on the right.  You can't arbitrarily stick a single-page spread between two multi-page spreads as you can with Illustrator and QuarkXPress.

It would be faster and logic if one could activate the colour chooser directly from the gradient stops just by double clicking the gradient stops.

 

How is a separate straight line tool an "enormous" time saver over the pen tool?
With the pen tool in Pen Mode, you click on each end of the line.  Press ESC to start a new line if needed - the ESC is one extra step per line after the first. With the pen tool in Line Mode, it works just like the traditional "straight line tool" - drag a line from one end to the other.  Start dragging again and you get a new line.  This is one extra click to change the mode, then you can create many lines.  Add one extra click if you must for switching the mode back.  
In Designer you can configure tab stops in the Paragraph studio panel.

Something along those lines was just added to the most recent Publisher beta.  Indications are that it will probably only be for brushes in 1.9 (and only those purchased in the Affinity Store at that), but it is also strongly hinted that this will be expanded on in the future.

Hi @fde101,
Thanks. Issue logged. 

Maybe allow users to configure the context toolbar to be two rows to allow for such cases?

Maybe allow users to configure the context toolbar to be two rows to allow for such cases?

Maybe allow users to configure the context toolbar to be two rows to allow for such cases?

Undo? 

Suggest leaving it like it is except adding a preference (possibly under user interface?) to auto-close it upon generating.

I think you've misunderstood the page range functionality here, it is related to the pages in your document and has a min/max based on that.
If you have data merge nodes on pages 1,2,3 you can choose which ones get merged. The preview will show this (your other thread i think may be based of a similar confusion).
We should maybe be looking at making this a bit clearer?

Reset Formatting clears any changes you made that are not part of the style.  In effect, the style is the base formatting.
If you want to eliminate the formatting from the style, just pick a different style.
There are also "[No Style]" entries, but while this makes sense for character styles, I would argue that the "[No Style]" entry for paragraph styles is misleading at best, as it is technically a style itself.

Ideally I would personally like the ability to be able to lock the canvas rotation - its an option on the iPad! This kept happening to me a while back and become increasingly irritating every time I accidentally rotated.

No, this 12 is coincidence. The 12 was typed manually with "Pages Range" selected, then switching back to "All Pages" maintained the 12 and grayed it out.
Note: above the data merge node contains 4 of 10 records and is placed on 1 page. So its obvious that 3 (2.5) pages will needed for output.
It would even be worse if the app would round the total record number (10 > 12) to virtually fill a layout (for what purpose?) and use that calculation for a rounded total page number in your assumed way. – Maybe the new data merge feature is too complex to argue theoretically without experimenting

I don't think that is what is going on here.
The ability to export IDML is quite desirable whether you are interfacing with InDesign or not.
The main benefit is that IDML is an open format which can be imported into a number of other publishing apps - QuarkXPress for example, not just InDesign - so it provides a way to transport documents into another app at some point in the future if that need arises, giving a better starting point than simply using PDF or the like.
 
The main argument I've seen is that it is not reasonable to assume that IDML export will provide clients with a usable document straight into one app when the design was produced with another.  An IDML file produced by Publisher may not give you exactly the same layout when opened in InDesign or QuarkXPress - text might flow differently for example - so treating it as an interchange format for completed work being transferred across apps is inappropriate no matter how well Serif might implement the format itself.
 
So it would be good to complete the circle of moving projects between apps but it must then be treated as an intermediate transfer format, not a final project transfer format.  The documents will require some clean-up and adjustment when the app changes, and that is something the client should not be expected to do.

Thanks James. Never occurred to me trying with a mask but it still feels a bit unintuitive/hackish?

I don't think that is what is going on here.
The ability to export IDML is quite desirable whether you are interfacing with InDesign or not.
The main benefit is that IDML is an open format which can be imported into a number of other publishing apps - QuarkXPress for example, not just InDesign - so it provides a way to transport documents into another app at some point in the future if that need arises, giving a better starting point than simply using PDF or the like.
 
The main argument I've seen is that it is not reasonable to assume that IDML export will provide clients with a usable document straight into one app when the design was produced with another.  An IDML file produced by Publisher may not give you exactly the same layout when opened in InDesign or QuarkXPress - text might flow differently for example - so treating it as an interchange format for completed work being transferred across apps is inappropriate no matter how well Serif might implement the format itself.
 
So it would be good to complete the circle of moving projects between apps but it must then be treated as an intermediate transfer format, not a final project transfer format.  The documents will require some clean-up and adjustment when the app changes, and that is something the client should not be expected to do.