LilleG

Time will tell if they will replace the Adobe apps. They both have very innovative solutions for our workflows and it's too soon to throw out the baby with the bathwater because of an inaccuracy.
 
I think that we can all agree that these developers are more interested in satisfying our requests than most are so there are times that we must agree to disagree and move on.

Just to add one more voice 'pleading' for a lighter/brighter interface.
 
Despite now having to use 'computer glasses' :( I still find the present funereal interface very hard/difficult to see and to use.
 
Thank God Serif haven't chosen to use the same colour as the background for this forum :rolleyes: .

I do really like Photo and Designer and expect to keep them as my go-to apps but unless there is an option for a lighter UI in version 2, I don't expect to upgrade either one.  Instead I'll just muddle along with the final version of V1.  I'm hoping that's not a choice I have to make but I'm really, really tired of struggling with this dark, low-contrast interface.

Simply view it as an indication of how important the light UI is to those of us struggling visually with the dark UI.

I use an older version of the Huion H610 Pro and I'm very happy with it.  I'm not a professional user so my needs may be different from yours.  There have been other threads on this subject.  You might want to do a search for those other opinions.

I would hate if there was all kind of windowzy buttons all over the interface wasting real estate as kbd shortcut are so much faster to use. I suppose there would be no harm though if you could hide them. Some tablet computer users like them also.

All of AD's effects include live previews that update in real time as you change their settings. Is that not enough of an example for you?

But what should that default be? Likewise, when there is a radius slider zero also means no effect, so what should be the default for that? Should either or both be the same regardless of the pixel dimensions of the canvas, artboard, layer, or group?
 
Defaults make sense when there is a logically or intuitively consistent starting point, but for something like this I don't think that is true. For me at least, anything other than zero as a starting point would just be confusing because it won't be the same for different things.

Hi maximium, voom,
We started implementing sticky settings in version 1.5 but as there's several places where they are applicable it may take some time until everything is covered. 
I believe they will cover this.
 
@maximium
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Cool, Alfred!  I like that.  You and smadell have both been extremely helpful. It's people like you guys...and others, of course...that make this forum such a great place.

You can use FX with my method, too, of course. The attached screenshot shows the standard 'Rainbow' style applied to the coloured rectangle, and a 12.5px 'Bevel / Emboss' layer effect applied to the text. (I've added a black background to make it show up better here.)

Thank you.
 
It would be nice to have an ePub of the help like this available on the Affinity website as the program is updated.

I just purchased Affinity Photo and I am excited to get started.  That said, there are enough differences between it and Photoshop that I quite quickly get stymied.  That isn't really a problem in and of itself as any new software carries a learning curve with it.
 
That said, it would be very helpful if someone could put together an "Affinity Photo for Photoshop Users" video or document.  It would have to be very very quick - i.e. I don't need to learn what an adjustment layer is, or how photo editing works.  What I need to know is where my color swatch palette is located, and how I go about selecting a color when painting (holding option in the brush tool doesn't seem to work).  Just a quick mapping between "In Photoshop you do this common thing this way, in Affinity Photo you do it this slightly different way."  I tried to watch the tutorial videos but they are very very long when all I am trying to do is get an overview of the UI (I already know about the fundamentals underlying photo editing).  The key here is quick.  Just two or three sentences for each mapping.
 
Of course I will figure this out eventually on my own, but when I am on a deadline (which is almost all the time) taking time to learn really really basic UI things makes me jump right back to Photoshop to finish my work.  Having this rosetta-stone-like document could ease that transition.
 
So... is there something like that out there?  Is that something that the Affinity team could whip up?

Hi cc7,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
You have to apply the texture to the shape using the Fill Tool. Select the shape, change to the Fill Tool, change the Type dropdown on the context toolbar to Bitmap, select the image you want to use as texture from the dialog and adjust it. When you save a style from that object the texture will be included in the style.

A very simple method is to put a coloured rectangle under the signature layer, and then drag it up in the Layers panel until it's clipped to the signature (indicated by a thick blue line extending to the right of the signature layer's thumbnail). If the blend mode of the rectangle is set to 'Screen', then it won't matter whether the signature layer's background is white or transparent.
 
You can change the colour of the signature at any time by changing the fill of the rectangle.

Here's a good method.
 
1) Sign your name and scan it. Or, sign on a tablet. In any case, create a document with a black signature on a transparent background. Save this as an Affinity Photo (afphoto) document.
 

 
2) In the Photo you want to sign, place the Signature document (as an embedded document) into the photo. Using Place... allows you to resize the signature as big or as small as you'd like.
 
3) Now, with the Signature selected, click the FX button at the bottom of the Layers panel. You can assign a Color and other effects as you'd like. In the picture below, I colored the signature yellow and applied an orange Outer Glow.
 

Are we beginning to nitpick here?  
 
And for what it's worth, I'm currently using a 2007 iMac, one OS back with El Capitan, that still handles everything I need to do...plus with Snow Leopard on a partition, it runs legacy programs that the current OS has left behind.  I will have to replace it eventually but not until Affinity stops supporting El Capitan.

Are we beginning to nitpick here?  
 
And for what it's worth, I'm currently using a 2007 iMac, one OS back with El Capitan, that still handles everything I need to do...plus with Snow Leopard on a partition, it runs legacy programs that the current OS has left behind.  I will have to replace it eventually but not until Affinity stops supporting El Capitan.

So, you are comparing Adobe, with more than 20 years of development, a corporation with about 15,000 employees, to Affinity.
I can't follow this logic.
About the DAM and other requests at some point I believe some moderator said that they realized that their expectations were exceeding the reality in terms of what is possible to achieve in a given time. That is why now they don't come out with a precise schedule in order to avoid any unrealistic prospect of what is to come.
 
About the giants. Despite both Microsoft and Apple are two arrogant giants as well, the main difference is that at least they can have some competition to some degree. Adobe doesn't have that threat. There is no other PS, AI, AE on the market to compete with them. So, again, this logic is not working for me.
 
As for the needs to work with something today vs waiting for a mature software: of course, it is totally up to you. The reason why your statement sounds kind of off is because we all to some degree need to work with these applications today. The exciting thing, though, is being part of  something from the very beginning that can potentially be a real alternative (and, in many aspects, already is). We are providing feedback and suggesting features. Obviously not all them will end up in the final product, but some will. I am already using Designer in production, but I understand we all have different tasks and needs and what might work for me today perhaps doesn't for you. But for 50 bucks or less, I personally can't find much to complain at the moment, all the opposite considered what I can already do with AP and AD.

You are entitled to your opinion... I walked away from Adobe due to the subscription model and will never look back. I still use Lightroom because I have not been forced out yet. It would be great if the Affinity alternative was out before that happened.
 
I've used and loved Photoshop for 20 years. At this point, I consider Affinity Photo a fundamentally better application. I don't even have PS installed anymore. I prefer Designer to Illustrator as well. 

Hey Andrew, on the Mac side I just tend to keep it simple and use Finder!
 
I keep a top level Photographs folder on an external drive, and within that folder I have many subfolders with a naming convention of Date - Description. So for example, I might have:
 
2012-08-22 Whitby
2013-02-12 Elizabeth Nature shoot
2014-05-05 London visit
2015-12-23 Winter visit
 
And so on. I just plug my SD card into a card reader (or the back of the iMac) and copy the images across into one of these newly created subfolders. Because Apple's Core Image support for raw images is really good and kept up to date, you can just preview all of the raw files within Finder and quickly hit the space bar for a larger preview if required. Once I find an image I want to take further I just drag-drop it into Affinity Photo.
 
Also, if you're trying to organise several photos, say for HDR bracketed shots or panoramas etc, you can just select multiple files, right click and choose Create new folder with selection - really simple and efficient.
 
I've never actually investigated, but I believe you can also tag/rate photos within Finder? So you could colour code good photos, rejected ones etc. I might be talking nonsense with that though!

Christ on a bike James.  That's a fair whack more tutorial vids there!  Looks like you've almost doubled the list!
 
I can only imagine the amount of work the team has had to do to roll this 1.5 out before Xmas!

Is there any information on when, or even if, we will ever get a Destructive Crop option?  Finally learned (thanks again to all who helped) how to create more than one border for an image but I still have to Save it as a Tiff, close the window, and reload the image if I have done any cropping or leveling.  

Uh, Lille definitely does want a Destructive Crop!  Lille is praying for a Destructive Crop.  An out-of-level photo drives me nuts so I am quite often rotating to straighten then cropping to remove the transparent areas.  Except that Affinity's crop doesn't remove anything; it just hides it.  Until you try to resize the canvas.  When you do...your original now-rotated image is back with some really odd looking transparent spaces around it!  
 
As for the rasterize option, in another discussion about the crop issue Rasterizing was suggested and someone pointed out that Rasterizing at that point would degrade the image.  Is that not correct?  If Rasterize does not affect quality then it would be an option.  But it's still an added step in what should be a simple operation.  I'd love to see a Preferences option for Destructive/Non-Destrutive because I will never, ever, want a non-destructive crop.  Other people do; let us choose what is best for us.

Stephan, you brought home the message … exactly, this is part of the future of the Affinity suite …  :)