Ian

Having waited eagerly for Publisher to arrive, I didn't hesitate to download the first beta and test it out. Rather than just 'tinkering around the fringes', I decided to give it a proper test by designing and laying out one of my portfolio photobooks, which would normally be done in InDesign, and then have it digitally printed by a commercial printer. In effect, I treated it like I would all other jobs I do for my clients.
My experience of Publisher, from a professional perspective, was actually surprisingly good (as far as beta software goes). As a highly experienced PageMaker, QuarkXpress and InDesign user (from the v1.0 days) the learning curve was very minimal. The end result was that this initial beta release managed to produce a professional product that I would have no qualms releasing to a paying client. However the journey involved to reach that point was, obviously, not straight forward – but by no means remotely anywhere near as painful as some of the discussions on here would indicate. Without trying to 'blow my own trumpet', I will readily admit that it does require the kind of mindset that is capable of coming up with multiple workarounds and and when required.
Aside from some of the initial issues that many had reported (ie. master pages, lack of visible bleed guides, sliders staying visible etc), the main obstacle that I had was at the output stage because I was unable to output a final press-ready PDF with reliable bleed settings on every page/spread. Some pages would output WITHOUT any bleed, some only output with about 1mm of bleed and some would output with the full 3mm that was set throughout the document. In the end, my workaround was to create a template document with my own trims and bleed on it. 
The second most frequent problem I came across was the instability of the application – there were A LOT of randomly occurring crashes which, if it wasn't for recovery files, could have been a massive problem. Whilst I fully expected beta software to crash, I didn't anticipate so many (more than 12) during this process.
Less of a 'user experience' and more of a future file management issue is that the file sizes are HORRENDOUSLY MAHOOSIVE. Despite having all images linked instead of embedded, this 32pp layout resulted in a whopping 1.5GB .afpub file. As a comparison, a previous 96pp photobook with the same spec created in InDesign resulted in a 50MB .indd file.
There is so much more that needs to be fixed and implementd but, overall, if the first beta of Publisher is already capable of this standard then I am going to chomping at the bit for the full commercial release.

Besides Adobe Photoshop as a photo editing program it is also used as a tool to color separate images for screen printing.  I can easily pull colors from an rgb, cmyk and grayscale image to make up my final color separation in a rgb file.  After pulling colors from the grayscale and cmyk image I just drag and drop the channels to my rgb file.  With the color range tool I can pull my yellows and reds from an rgb file.  I can pull my light blues, dark blues and greens from a cmyk file.  And I can create my white base for dark colored garments from a grayscale file.  The final print on the garment comes out pretty close to what I see on screen without changing any color profile in Photoshop.  I can assign a color for each channel from the Pantone swatch or I can visually match the actual ink color with a rgb match.  To simulate how it will come out on garments I adjust the solidity per channel to give me a good visual of how it will look on a garment.
 
Screen printers who don’t know how to separate colors end up spending hundreds of dollars in separation software.  Quikseps, Ultraseps, Screen Print Separator and many others.  Affinity Photo on the other hand is very affordable.
 
Right now I can’t seem to find those kinds of features in Affinity Photo, desktop or iPad.  And if It is there with color selection tool it’s not very convenient.  Maybe you guys can add functions to automatically pull basic colors like yellow, red, light blue, dark blue, green, black etc.  Or maybe a screen printing version of Affinity Photo.  Or maybe a screen printing mode within Affinity Photo.  Just an idea.  Even better add a RIP so screen printers can print the separations to their inkjet printers with specialized inkjet film directly from Affinity Photo.  Printers spend hundreds of dollars again on RIP’s alone.  If you guys can put these simple functions into Affinity Photo I think this will be a good alternative to Adobe Photoshop.

Actually, "Balance Ragged Lines" is not supposed to be used on body text. Balancing and hyphenation are taken care of by the paragraph composer – by default that's Adobe's excellent "Multi-Line Composer", which already takes the effect of hyphenation and composition decisions over the entire paragraph into account, not just the current line. So you don't need to activate any other options to get nice and balanced body text.
 
"Balance Ragged Lines" is intended to be used with small centered blocks of text like pull quotes, multi-line headlines and so on. For instance, you can apply it to your subhead paragraph style so that those two lines of text are always evenly divided between the two lines and you don't have to manually add forced returns for everything to look balanced.
 
If you apply "Balance Ragged Lines" to regular body text however, it will actually usually make the result significantly worse, and it is sure to drive anybody mad who has to do copy fitting with your body copy style.
 
If you look at your example, the only thing that has really improved on the right is that InDesign has balanced all lines so that the last line of the paragraph is filled completely, making tradeoffs in all other lines in order to meet that goal. Also keep in mind that placeholder copy won't always give you the best impression of these things since the hyphenation is not representative when using pseudo-latin.
 
EDIT: There is an article on InDesign Secrets that goes into detail.

Yes that's the plan

Yes that's the plan

"Hundreds" is an understatement. There are around 3100 (!!!) png image files in /Applications/Affinity Designer Beta.app/Contents/Resources alone. Even ignoring the large ones for splash screens, example art, help resources, & so on, there are about 2000 or so that can appear somewhere in the UI. According to a Finder search, 882 of them have "lightui" in their filenames, suggesting each of them has been designed specifically for the new Light UI.
 
A few more statistics for those interested in such things: There are also currently 32 png files used just for the monochrome UI; & about 70 for displaying Personas (for enabled & disabled states, light & dark UI, & 1X & 2X screen resolutions) but as yet none specifically for the monochrome UI.
 
So yeah, there is nothing simple about any of this.

Hi MBd, sorry you see it that way - but as Steve has tried to suggest, it's more about the fact that we have hundreds of assets and custom controls in our application, and each one has been recreated to work properly on a light background - so it's not as simple as just exposing a colour choice... you must surely know from us by now that if something matters to our users and we can enable it quickly, we'll pop it in there - this has actually been a long process to get to where we are now, for both Steve and for our Creative team...
 
Edited to add: I think I've actually mentioned this a number of times before, but it's worth stating again... Sometimes, the things that you'd think are easy as an observer, are in fact very involved and slow to implement and sometimes the things that you might think are nightmarishly complicated are actually a few hours worth of work. Development is an unpredictable thing...

The docs and creative teams are working on the Affinity Photo Workbook as we speak  B) (((release date tbc)))

The docs and creative teams are working on the Affinity Photo Workbook as we speak  B) (((release date tbc)))

Just got my copy today, Ordered on a Sunday - received on a Tuesday. Not too bad. 
 
It's lovely. My wife looked at it and agrees. In fact the first words out of her mouth about the book is "It's gorgeous." She thumbed through it and pointed at a number of graphics she liked. When a computer-centric book can grab the attention of a someone who's extent of computer use is limited to web, email, and word processing, you're doing something very very right!
 
IMHO, this is one of the best app-focused dead-tree books I've seen. And over the upcoming long weekend, I hope to read a bit of it.

I just got your wonderful book the other day. I love it. The Affinity Design app and the book are early Christmas gifts to myself. I have been using Photoshop for almost 20 years for pretty much all of my graphic arts needs –– pretty much every single day. I never did use Illustrator, so this is all new to me. The book is great. With it by my side, I am currently methodically teaching myself how to use the Affinity Designer app. I do hope to get a full grasp of it soon.

Recently I've needed to quickly export identical images in various formats, including .pdf, .png, .svg, .jpg, and so on—and also with varying file sizes.  Since the image doesn't need to be any different in any way other than file format and resolution, it is unnecessarily time-consuming to always have to readjust the settings every time I edit the file and have to re-export the many versions of the image or to try and manually make a load of identical slices.
 
It would be much easier if I could duplicate a slice and then adjust the duplicate slice's export options.  That would mean I could quickly create five-or-so slices of the same dimensions and position—just with differing export options, and then make edits to the image and just export simultaneously in different formats, but with the same area of the image being exported.

Affinity has now become officially cross-platform with the launch of Affinity Designer for Windows. It was our trail-blazing first app, and since being launched on Mac the response we have had to it has been unbelievable. It’s consistently been the top paid-for design app on Mac since launch, we’ve won a coveted Apple Design Award and there have been thousands of 5-star customer reviews on the Mac App Store.
 
For many designers, Affinity Designer has become their go-to app for everything from creating concept art, print projects, logos and icons to UI design, web graphics and mock-ups. And because Affinity Designer on Windows matches the Mac version feature-for-feature, PC users can now experience the same thrilling speed, incredible tools and supreme accuracy which has given Affinity Designer that formidable reputation.
 
For more information about the launch go here. Product information and how to buy click here.
 
Many thanks
Team Affinity.
 

Sometimes, when it is grey and windy outside, all you want to do is curl up with a good book.
 

I really want to improve the way I work and my skills too, so thank you for your feedback MBd.
 
Each Workbook project is clearly different, in terms of skills and levels of knowledge.
As you noticed not all the descriptions are for absolute beginners, but I think that the entirety came out with a nice compromise didactically speaking.
The target (in my case) was to find the right balance between accessible and technical.
 
By chance I'm rather reachable... ;)  So if you need some specific informations just ask, and I'll be pleased to go as deep as you want.  
Maybe open a new discussion in order to avoid off topics here.

Wow, just arrived, super fast. Amazing is not a word!
 
 

 

 

Hello Seif, and Affinity folks….  

I just wanted to say I received my book earlier this week, and I am totally satisfied and impressed with the quality of production and the content itself.  I highly recommend this book, and can't wait for the next publication in the series.
 
Many thanks!!

* First off let me start by saying that I am in no way affiliated or paid by Serif or the creators of Affinity Designer. 
 
Your question is a pretty loaded question and that really is dependent upon your skill, knowledge, understanding and experience. I'm reading through the book now and I have not completed the entire book just yet, so take my response with a grain of salt. I think if you have gone through my Lynda course and you have also gone through all the free Affinity video tutorials and the entire help section of the application then you probably know most of what you need to know about the tool. I think the true beauty and benefit of this book is what you learn through the work of the 7 artist who contributed to the book. Being able to read how they approach a execute a a illustration or a design with the tools provided is what really makes this book worthy of the purchase. Being able to see someone else workflow and getting a bit insight into the different approaches is worth it alone. the book is well designed and arranged with solid content and a well balanced layout of information per page.You find plenty of great techniques that go beyond just knowing what the tools are and what they do. The book is titled as being a workbook and should be used in that manner. work along your favorite artist and come away with some better understanding of how to execute an illustration or a design in a particular style but also walk away with a better understanding of how to execute see and manage your own project or illustration. I know a lot about this application and even I am picking up a few tips and techniques from this book. If the book was rubbish I would say so, but I think all the positive stuff you hear thus far is well deserved and I don't think anyone can be unsatisfied with their purchase. if you can afford it then I think it worth having and that my professional and experienced opinion. I hope that answers your question.

Just enter the name of the chapter/project (only) after the affin.co/
In your example is just the first word of that file name (affin.co/wittler). You should get a zip with all project files inside.

Thanks Ian and MEB. All working fine now

Purpose: Features / Improvements / Fixes 
Status: Beta
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Photo
Mac App Store: Not Submitted
Download: Here
 
To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
 
 
Notable changes:
- New Panorama Persona - available from File -> New Panorama.
- 5 new Photos extensions - Miniaturise, Monochrome, Liquify, Develop and Dehaze - 400% rendering performance improvement in most common situations. - Global colours. - Full support for P3 panels found in the new 5k iMac and 4k iMac. If you have one of these you can try making a new RGB8 document with ProPhoto profile and choosing RGB(255,0,0) or RGB(0,255,0) as the colour of your objects - they should look richer and more vivid than you are used to seeing.
- View points added to the Navigator. The Navigator has an advanced mode that lets you choose to create and swap between specific view zoom/position saved points.
- Font fixes. Specifically, a number of font-related crashes have been addressed
- Export/Import improvements - particularly PDF.
- Fix for Text tool failing to accept certain characters (those that were mapped to other shortcuts!)
- Snapping improved for Rotation Centre. Rotation Centre is available from the Move Tool's context toolbar.
- Pantone/named colour/tint improvements. Selecting an object which has a Pantone colour will automatically choose the tint options in the colour panel.
- Canvas rotation. The canvas can be rotated by using the touchpad's rotate gesture or by using the View menu items 'Rotate Left', 'Rotate Right' or 'Reset Rotation'.
- Fix for colour conversion issues exhibited with HSL colours in RGB document formats.
- Character & Paragraph panel improvements.
- Typography panel show visually the effects of different OpenType features. Select some text and go to the Typography panel - this will show you the available options for your current font and text selection. Try changing fonts for more options.
- Printer’s marks and bleed available for output. The export options for PDF now include these additional options, as does the Print dialog.
- Smart Tap feature. Toggle between the current zoom and 100% by double-tapping with two fingers on the trackpad. This is useful for designing up close and being able to easily refer to a 100% view and then back again.
- Updated splash screens. These are necessary as we need to include Pantone licensing information.
- Added Split-toning adjustment. This is available from the Layers panel's adjustments menu and the main Layers->Adjustments menu.
- Improvements to deform filter - you can now select and manipulate multiple pins at once.

Suggestion: drag an appropriate layer over the 'Add layer' or 'Add Pixel Layer' icon to create a duplicate layer (as per photoshop)

Document default is white, but it would be nice to be able to pick different colours in a popup from this dialogue
 
Failing that, just radio button selection for White / Black / Grey / Transparent?

It'll be a tricky one to get right - but I'll see what I can do.
Bear in mind that the arrow geometry is dynamically created - there are a lot of parameters that play with/against each other when you combine the different head styles.  Whatever we do will have to work for all of the combinations.  Your examples show fairly uniform arrow styles, but there would be nothing stopping you choosing some extreme values - such as a very thin stem line, with a very thick head line on your first example.  The roundness would have to 'fit'.
Anyway - it's a challenge that I'll look into.

Yep, that's a good idea - we'll try to get that in.
 
For now though, just mash Cmd-J to duplicate.
 
Cheers,
 
Andy.