R C-R

Hi HenrikP! Even in the 1.5.5 version of Affinity Designer there are several ways to create hour/minute ticks for a circular clock dial. A variation on what has already been mentioned in this topic you might find useful uses (the AD only feature) symbols. Try this: 1. Turn on snapping, with all the 'snap to object' options checked. 2. Draw a reference circle of convenient size to represent the dial & lock its layer. 3. Draw a filled rectangle at the 12 o'clock position on the circle. Use snapping to center it so half the rectangle is on either side of the 12 o'clock centerline & its top edge aligns with the top edge of the circle. 4. With the Pen tool in Line mode, draw a line from the bottom center of the rectangle to the center of the circle. Snapping should make this easy to do. 5. Select the rectangle & the line & in the Symbols panel, click the Create button. 6. Select the symbol in the Layers panel & duplicate it with CMD-J. 7. In the Transform panel, click on the bottom center anchor point & in the R (rotation) field enter 30°. This should result in a second symbol at the 11 o'clock position. 8. Power duplicate with CMD-J to create the remaining hour ticks. 9. Now the interesting part: expand any symbol in the Layers panel so you can see its two parts (the line with the (Curve) label & the rectangle). Click the visible checkbox on the line to hide it. The line on all 12 symbols should now be hidden. 10. Because the rectangle is part of the symbol, you can edit any one instance of it & all the others will get the same edit automatically. So for example you could change the fill color, add a stroke, convert to curves & change the shape, & so on. Use a similar procedure for the minute ticks, changing the rotation angle in step 7 appropriately. You can either delete the minute ticks that occur on hour ticks or group all the hour ticks & move them above the minute ticks, etc. Attached is an AD file showing the hour ticks as symbols using this technique. Clock ticks.afdesign

There are multiple ways to do this. Attached is an example of two of them, using a screen grab of your photo (so it is small) & a copied, pasted, & resized "Path6076" layer from your svg file (so it fits the dimensions of the stamp frame outline in your photo). For the mask layer method, first fill the Path layer with black & then drag & drop it on the thumbnail (important!) of the photo layer. Move & resize as necessary. For the clipping layer method, drag the Photo layer just below & a little to the right (important!) of the Path layer until you get a horizontal blue bar that is indented slightly & drop it there. You can set the stroke width and/or color of the path layer as you wish if you want the stamp border to show up. Both methods are non-destructive -- the photo layer is still full sized. stamp.afdesign

For me at least, it is partially trial & error & partially application of what I know about the mathematical geometry of the color spaces & their transformations, tempered by my incomplete understanding of how the latter relates to human visual perception. IOW, I have some idea of how to get sort of close to what I want, but I know I am going to have to experiment to get closer to that & I may not ever get the exact results I want.

Am I the only one that finds this tool non-intuitive & difficult to use to get the results I want, particularly for things like this?

The Wikipedia article for HSL and HSV, particularly the section about lightness, may help you understand why this is confusing ... but it probably won't do much to reduce the confusion. :( The article is not the easiest to read, but in a nutshell, lightness/brightness/intensity/luminosity are related but do not necessarily represent the same thing. Also of some relevance, note this comment at the end of the Use in end-user software section:

The whitish part of the Color Chooser window is not a gradient. It just shows the color values you get if you click in that area. So for example, anywhere along the top edge will set the Lightness to 100%, producing white, the same as R, G, & B values of 255 for an 8 bit color space.

When you try signing out & back in, make sure you go to the Purchased section & look for Affinity Designer there. If you still don't see it, click on the Store menu > View My Account item, make sure the Apple ID is the correct one, & enter your password to get to your Account Information page. Look for the "Hidden Items" section & click on "Manage" in it. If Affinity Designer appears there, click on the unhide button next to it.

I watched a science fiction movie yesterday. Its key plot element was that the symbolism of language fundamentally shapes how we think. I got curious about how much real science there was to that & discovered this article. It implies that not just the names assigned to graphics tools but all of the language used for such things profoundly affects our cognitive abilities. There is nothing trivial about that!

If you think about it objectively, "Magic Wand" is about the silliest & least descriptive name possible for a graphics tool. "Lasso" describes the icon but not how the tool works because a lasso is a rope with one free end & a noose at the other. The Pan tool hand icon could refer to anything done with a hand & "pan" has a different meaning in the video world. "Raster" & "rasterize" are terms borrowed from the video industry when CRT images were created using parallel scan lines called rasters. Digitally rasterizing an image actually converts it to a bitmap (a map of pixel values) but "bitmap" can also refer to a one bit deep monochrome image. We sometimes refer to the pixels in a bitmap/raster image file as if they had a direct, one-to-one correlation to something in the physical world but they don't. We often use ppi & dpi interchangeably but they refer to two very different things. "Color" (or if you prefer "colour") is a property of light but we also think of it as a property of things that do not emit light. We think of both light emitters & non emitters as having a single specific color but that is never really true -- our brains just evaluate the relative strengths of different parts of the spectrum of emitted light we are sensitive to & pick the most dominate part of the spectrum as its color. That varies by individual & even by the physical & psychological state of a given individual. We make an artificial distinction between color & grayscale because our eyes have different kinds of receptors for colors & for intensity. They have different sensitivities & are not evenly distributed on the retina so 'color vision' is most acute at the center of our field of view & much less so elsewhere, but we don't notice that because we move our eyes, head, & body to compensate for that & build a mental image of what we are seeing that changes over time. So basically, most of the terminology we use is in some way inaccurate, contrived, ambiguous, or silly.

Well, at least you get toast. Mac users don't get that! More seriously, on (at least my) Mac version, the Missing Fonts item in the Character panel popup list is unusable because the same popup lists Font Book collections, but it is off by one, actually displaying the fonts in the collection one item above the selected one. I have reported this several times but I don't think I ever got a reply from a staff member indicating if it was just me or a real bug.

+1 for this.

As Alfred said, The Mac version is sold only through the Mac App Store. Also, using the Mac App Store is the only way to get Mac OS upgrades, so unless you want to be stuck forever on whatever Mac OS version you have now, (which eventually will become a very bad idea for security reasons) you will need to use it at some point, even if not for buying Affinity or other apps sold only through the store.

ronnyb, did you read the Adobe Font Embedding Permissions article I linked to in my earlier post, or the Additional License Rights one that it links to?

The Mac versions do not use licensing keys (they use Apple ID's) so no, as Alfred says if you want to install the app on both Windows & Macs, you need to buy two versions, one from the Serif store for Windows & one from the Mac App Store for Macs.

According to the "View Clipboard" Finder Edit menu item, the text is being copied as Rich Text from Apple's Preview app, but the two instances of uppercase L are not italicized in any app I paste the text into, not just Affinity. Maybe it is an OS level thing?

It would really help if you would explain exactly what is wrong with the version pasted into Affinity Designer. The only thing I can see that is materially different is the two upper case "L" letters are not italicized, & that appears to be happening at the system clipboard level, not during pasting into the AD document.

What specifically is awful about it? I don't have the CMB10 "Computer Modern" font installed on my Mac so I don't know what that font should look like but otherwise it seems perfectly acceptable. By the way, If you don't want the text to appear as a frame text object, select the Art Text tool & click on the document somewhere before pasting. You will get an Art Text layer that you can move, resize, etc. with the Move tool.

voyager1, just in case you don't know, this is Adobe's general refund policy. You must make the request for a refund within 14 days of receipt of an app; you may have 30 days total to return the item for a refund, depending on who you bought it from & what country you and/or the seller are in. Some resellers will not permit refunds on software products at all, regardless of the manufacturer's refund policy. You really do need to check the refund terms, not just for software but for any product you buy.

I think this is one of those times when the distinction between a "Layer" (a particular type of container layer) & a "layer" (a generic layer of any type) is important. Try placing some or all of your layers into different Layer containers & toggle on & off Edit All Layers. With the all option off you should not be able to select things from different layers; with it on you should be able to select layers in different Layers. Confusing, is it not?

If you mean a "marching ants" pixel selection you can make with the Freehand Selection, Selection Brush, or the Marquee selection tools, that already exists. Look for the "Mode" item on the Context toolbar with one of those tools selected. You should see several choices that vary depending on the tool but each of them has an "Add" mode. This only works for pixel layers but if you are trying to make a pixel selection it is much easier to use these tools than using the Pen tool & converting to a selection. If you mean object selections (like for vector curves you draw with the Pen Tool) then you can click on one to select it with the Move Tool & Shift-click to add others to the selection. Note that vector objects live on their own kinds of layers, so you are really selecting layers.

Because the creature & part of the background are on the same pixel layer, the simplest way I know to do this is to duplicate that pixel layer, erase everything that is not a part of it in the dup & everything that is in the original. You can then select the duplicate pixel layer with the Move tool & resize it as desired. Attached is a very crude example of this, including grouping the creature layer & the blue layer I assume you might want resized along with it so they both resize proportionally. creature sketch.afphoto

For practice & experimentation I sometimes use a collection of images I saved over the years that came with various apps I bought, like Photoshop Elements version 2 "Stock Art," some ancient version of Adobe Pagemill, & such. Since they are copyrighted & have licensing restrictions, I avoid using them for anything I post or otherwise share with others, & I don't even save the results after working on them in Affinity Photo, but for this purpose that isn't an issue.

It seems consistent with what this "Ultimate Guide" suggests, except for the type of blur applied. I tried to duplicate that guide's 'Apply Image' method's steps in Affinity Photo but got stuck at step 3 -- I have no idea if there are equivalent settings in AP's "Apply image" filter for the ones shown for PS for scale & offset. Nothing I tried resulted in the high & low frequency layers I created using the guide's approach combining to look like the original image, as suggested in its step 4.

Mike asked for a pdf, not an afdesign file.