pixelstuff

I don't know why it needs to be in 3.0. They could add the feature in 2.7 and have it in our hands (or minds) as early as H2 2025.

It is doubtful that Canva will want to do away with the desktop apps. No doubt they want to connect the desktop app to their cloud services, but they almost certainly want the benefits gained from having actual desktop apps. Professional users (like those using Adobe's software) want local running apps. If Canva wants to break into the professional design space they need the same kind of thing. They wouldn't buy Affinity software and then do away with their primary feature. As far as subscription models, Canva has to realize they just bought a company that built probably its entire audience from people not wanting the Adobe subscription system. Keeping the perpetual model would be a good way to continue differentiating themselves from Adobe and convincing those customers to jump ship. Unless Canva one day becomes bigger than Adobe, I doubt they would ever become subscription only.

If you are going to donate money to hire programmers you might as well have them work on existing open source projects (or forks) like GIMP, Inkscape, and Scribus to get a leg up on the development. Otherwise you are probably looking at a 10 year project to get things anywhere close to feature parity with existing Adobe and Affinity apps.

I think they definitely intend to profit from it, but perhaps not by trying to be a carbon copy of Adobe. When I look at what Canva offers and what Affinity offers, my guess is their first focus will be to create a two-way road between the desktop apps and the cloud A.I. and storage services. I would have no problem if the cloud services are subscription based, as long as they maintained the perpetual license for the local apps. It could be pretty interesting to launch an Affinity app just like we do now, and then open a Canva persona that lets me fiddle with the Canva templates and import a design with full layers into the Affinity app for full customization. I also wouldn't mind if the cloud subscription service also included a tier with the apps for free, again, as long as they maintained the option of a perpetual license model for the local apps.

I think what you are wanting is the Perspective Tool in the left side tool bar.

That's too bad. Maybe this needs to become a feature request then.

I think a locked Affinity file would be better than a PDF in a couple ways: In an educational format, you can detail how the layers are setup, but the students can't use the source file to pass as their homework. Snapshots could allow someone to see multiple looks on a document, without having to export multiple versions and sending them all to the recipient. Another thing that might be interesting is a lock that still allows for export and printing, but injects a customizable watermark pattern across the entire image. I realize all of that might be a little bit niche since it only works when both people have the Affinity apps.

Yes. Wanting to create a locked Affinity file (with snapshots) that can only be viewed by recipients who also own the Affinity apps.

In the Affinity Photo Book tutorials the mam_tor.aphoto file won't let you complete the final step to export to JPG. If you try to export or print it pops up a dialog saying "This document doesn't allow exporting (printing)" How does one go about locking a new document like this so that it prevents export and printing? I searched the help file for locking a document and can't seem to find it. Just a lot of stuff about locking layers, which doesn't seem to affect exporting.

What do you mean active by default? I didn't turn off any preflight system that I know of. I opened and changed a word in an image that someone else created, didn't see any warnings, assumed it behaved similarly to Photoshop in that it would preserve the look of a document unless otherwise warned exported to JPEG ended up with a vastly different image than the original designer wanted. If preflight is a separate procedure, there was no good indication that I needed to run it. Obviously I know now that the Affinity apps only give a 5 second warning instead of a persistent warning for missing fonts. That is why this is a feature request. A persistent and unobtrusive warning would be better.

Not quite the same. In Photoshop for example upon trying to open a document you get a notification that you have to click [OK] before the document will finish opening. Then once you do open the file, the layers with missing fonts provide notifications at the point of edit. If you double click on one of those triangle notices you get this: The reason I think missing fonts need to be more in your face about things is just the other day, while multitasking, I opened a document the customer sent, apparently missed the brief warning in the upper right corner, made a couple changes and exported the image and uploaded it to a website. I had no idea some of the fonts changed compared to what was in their own system. The customer wondered why I had changed fonts. Another thing Photoshop does that Affinity doesn't seem to be doing is presenting a pixel layer image of the original font layer, even if the font isn't available on the system. So you can see what the original file is supposed to look like and if you do edit with a substitution font you see it change. In Affinity, I had no idea that layers I never touched had a cursive look and Affinity had automatically substituted Arial or something upon opening.

In the Adobe apps like Photoshop when you open a file with missing fonts it will put a small notification on each font layer that is using the missing font. I think it would also bring up a dialog showing the font name and warning about substitution before you could edit that layer. Furthermore Photoshop maintains the original appearance of font layers when opening a document even with fonts missing, until you attempt to edit them. I assume it uses embedded pixel layers or something. It would be really helpful to be able to open a document on any machine and see the original design. Can we get something similar in the Affinity apps?

I would tend to agree with this. Around the time of Photoshop 4, the university I was attending was primarily using Photoshop, Illustrator and PageMaker alongside Quark Xpress in their computer based design classes. Quark was probably still the more popular publishing app at the time, but I think Adobe's attempt at a unified interface really helped them take market share away from Quark Xpress and Corel Draw which were both still really popular at the time.

I'd like to see VueScan integrated with Affinity Photo as well. It saves on file clutter to go directly into the app. However, I think VueScan integrates with Photoshop using a proprietary plugin method (as opposed to TWAIN or WIA) so they would likely have to support Affinity Photo directly. Perhaps Affinity could get in contact with VueScan and pay them to add support. It would definitely open up a wide range of scanners.

In effect they have. It isn't the simple menu based crop like Photoshop has, but in Affinity Photo when selecting the crop tool, it now immediately snaps to the edges of any selection. So you can simply hit apply if you don't want to adjust it further.

That is a bit like saying if they don't add scanner support they will get behind others.

Which other tool SDKs have an AI implementation already running on it?

Doesn't Affinity Photo support regular Photoshop plugins?

One aspect to this is that probably 99% of the art generated on a daily basis today is more functional that it is artistic. Things that are used in advertising that gets used once and thrown away. A.I. will probably make that kind of utilitarian art much easier. Hopefully it doesn't make the web look significantly worse.

There's actually nothing strange about that.

Don't they already support Photoshop Plugins?

I would bet the majority of Affinity users are primarily here because they don't want to pay Adobe a monthly subscription. I doubt they will suddenly change their position just to get AI image generation built directly into the app. Most will likely have no problem waiting for the technology to mature and stabilize a bit before being integrated into the Affinity software. Affinity still isn't' up to feature parity on some of the more simple tools that Adobe has like perspective crop. Whatever audience they lose because of not being an early adopter of A.I. will be super tiny.

How do you get it into .docx from Publisher. There is no export for that either.

Or look at all the Android apps that do exist like Audio Evolution or LumaFusion and assume they obviously wasted their time by releasing an app on a platform such as Android.

Some of those are complicated though like Auto Trace for Designer. I'll continue to give them a pass on those.