jorismak

in my experience the (purple) fringe-removal from DxO is unmatched. Everytime I'm fiddling in ACR to set the correct width and color ranges or in AP to get the right parameters I always end up with the fringe gone but huge parts of the image affected which shouldn't, require me to go masking and fixing again. Save the image as tif, go into DxO, chromatic + fringe removal. Two sliders to set at the 2/3rd mark and blam, fringe gone and none of the image affected which shouldn't. And this is with a scanned-in tif file, no lens data what so ever in that :). I haven't tried yet, but if DxO's DNG-output files open correctly in APhoto I would stick with that. The lens profiles + noise removal + chromatic-issue removal is (by far) the top one out there. Use it for what it's good at, use AP or ACR for the rest :P. (I've always had a DxO -> DNG -> ACR workflow)

While we're talking about stuff like that, add export for JXR? It imports it already (So the libs are there :P) and while the compression might be a little bit behind jpeg2000, it's sooo much faster to compress and uncompress. Not enough good lossy + lossless 16bit capable file formats out there (with support at least) :).

ah, those things. Was thinking about filters or adjustments. Shows something about me, forgot there was that other stuff about drop-shadow and stuff :)

Open the layer (there's a little array for it to expand it / open it, right?). That way you see all the adjustment layers and live-fx layers. Each layer is a mask in itself

Just tried.. Select something -> duplicate layer. Creates a new layer with only the selection (in it's original place, so all unselected parts are transparent) Indeed 'new pixel layer / add pixel layer' doesn't work, but in the part in braces I talked about duplicate layer. Confused myself there, but it _is_ duplicate layer that does as you want. #2 :)

Isn't this just a case of different compression schemes being used for the tiff files ? If one defaults to uncompressed and the other compresses it there could be your difference. Tiff LZW compression might actually increase file size if the image is noisy / grainy or incompressible in some other way . Might also be Photo saving a huge chunk of metadata to the file like previews / snapshots :).

You can paint black or white (or in between :)) on a FX layer to mask it. Does this do what you want ?

Isn't it so that if you make a selection and do 'new pixel layer' that the selection is automatically in the new layer ? Solving #2? I had it a few times by accident at least :). (Had a selection , quickly wanted to duplicate layer to try an effect on and instead got only the selection duplicated.)

That's the whole discussion. And yes, why I keep saying you _need_ a perfect 1:1 unscaled image view (you're statement 'the pixels are blurred' is exactly a good reason for that). But it's not technically a bug, it's by design. A design that has a problem in my (and your) opinion, but by design none the less. So that requires changes some things that might not be easily fixed that way.

Since (somewhat understandable) it's not an issue in their book but it's doing what they want it do, don't expect much 'movement' :). I guess you'll have to except to use a different scaling for 1:1 pixels or set your Windows scaling to 100%

Is there a place on the forum or something where (small) official updates are announced? My two editing machines are not connected to the internet so the autoupdate won't work.

Are you sure it's not a visible bug? The difference you see is still there when you save the files? So, having Krita open affects the calculations done to the buffer by Affinity Photo and not just how your videocard manages to draw it? That seems very weird, and a bit of a stretch. Then again, I've seen other weird stuff happening in Photo so who knows :P

Affinity supports 16bit (and 32bit) to plugins. A lot of plugins won't work OK, but the nik suite is one of the good ones. In the preferences -> plugins , make sure you've checked the 'allow unknown ' or something at the bottom and restart Photo. Make sure you have a pixel layer selected when you want to run a plugin ! You can't run a plugin on a adjustment layer or something. I did notice that if I try a plugin that doesn't work , after that NONE of the plugins work until I restart Photo. I use Nik color efex all the time now.

It isn't _that_ much of a deal now, but you saw how easy it was with the Photo-windows-beta for people to put stuff in the wrong topics (because they don't care, are confused or just don't know that there are other products :P). If Serif adds more products to the Affinity line down the road it will only be chaos. Better to split it now (feature requests and bug reports per product instead of per OS, sticky on top to ask people to specify OS or something (because bugs can be valid for both OS-builds) than wait before the chaos erupts and you need to clean it :).

If you don't see the red outline it probably means you have a layer in front of what you're inpainting on, or the mask is hiding the area you're trying to inpaint. Or the opacity is changed or stuff like that. Make sure you select the proper layer you're trying to inpaint on and that it is indeed the visible layer (with nothing on top) and that the area you're painting on is not masked out. Never had problems otherwise. (I did once use a mask on a layer I was inpainting on, and indeed the moment I reach an area that is masked out the red outline disappears while painting)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying at all the current viewing-with-scaling is bad. It's the new hi-res / retina world and DPI and OS-scaling-factors are getting more important. In the Windows world 'DPI" has been blatantly ignored since before Windows 7, and is only really being used by the OS itself since Windows 8 (and I think even 8.1). So yeah, it's one of those things were not everything has to be like the old ways. "What we're used to before" doesn't mean it's the correct way. That's why I stress on the 1:1-device-pixel 'unscaled viewing' part, because that's what I (at least) find important in this. How the rest of the viewing percentages go I don't care, as long as there is a quick to reach 1:1-true-device-pixel viewing size :). What the easiest (or best) way is to accomplish this (and if it's something you're actually going to do) is completely up to you guys/girls over at Serif of course.

Windows NT means everything from 4.0 to 5.0 (Windows 2000), 5.1 (Windows XP), 5.2 (Windows server 2003 / Windows XP 64), 6.0 (Vista), 6.1 (7) . They're actively target XP 'levels of compatibility'. That's their goal. Doesn't mean they reached their goal unfortunately.

There _is_ an Auto Levels.. and an Auto Contrast, Auto Color, Auto Whitebalance (which is really funky :P). I'm specially asking for the thresholds. Doing it manually is of course what I'm doing now, but the levels dialog is so f*cking small you cant' really see what you're doing in the regions where you have less than a few percent of signal. A log-view or something else to make the difference more extreme can also help.

Hi there, PS has the options in the levels dialog to do an 'auto levels', but more importantly to set the thresholds for it. You can enter an amount of percentage of signal at which you want the set the level-markers so to speak. And then it has options to do that for every channel separately, or to keep the overal link between channels and a few other options. Is there something like that somewhere in Photo? The per-channel thing I can do by separating the channels into a R, G and B layer and doing 'auto levels' on those layers... but I want to set the thresholds somewhere :).

Hi, I have some color profiles installed under Windows that are linear variants of srgb and adobergb. I even used the File -> Import ICC profile to try to add them to Affinity Photo. Yet, they don't show up when editing 16bit images! Only when I switch the color format to 32bit do they suddenly show up, but since Affinity automatically tries to convert to linear-space the profiles are messed up. Is there _any_ way to tell Affinity Photo that the data in the file is _already_ in linear space. So to _interpret_ the data as gamma 1.0 instead of converting it? It doesn't help that the gamma slider in the Levels-adjustment doesn't go higher than 2.0 as well :)

the problem with the viewing system of Affinity is that it is (sometimes) not possible to get a true 1:1 pixel display of the image. In other words, it's not possible to view an image _without_ scaling. That means you're judging the image and quality as (image + affinity scaling). And that might be different to how other software views the image because they're scaling is different or they don't view it without any scaling. Multiple places around the net will explain how important it is to judge your images unscaled (not like it's the holy grail. Viewing at intended-viewing-size or expected-print-size is of course also important) for this reason: The scaling affects the image, _always_. So it should be possible to view unscaled. True device pixels 1:1. An option somewhere that sets the viewing-percentage _exactly_ so that there isn't any scaling is what's required / requested. It could be right next to the 'view 100%' option. I've set my Windows scaling to 100% just to get a true 1:1 in Affinity. It's true that if the Windows scaling is set to a round number as 150% you can get true 1:1-pixel scaling by viewing at 75% in Affinity. But Windows sets my Windows scaling by default to some fraction like 122.33% (because it's auto-calculated depending on the reported display size and display pixels). I can't set Affinity to a viewing percentage that's a true 1:1 pixel that way. And the explanation 'you want Affinity to show the image like other software will show it' is a nice explanation, but not really true. I'm delivering the output from Affinity, in a very dumbed down way, I'm delivering pixels. I want to view those pixels and stand by what I deliver. If the end user is displaying those pixels scaled in whatever way (up / down / sharp / soft) I'm not responsible for that. It's the end-user that chooses to scale it (intended or unintended by display settings :). A bit like I'm delivering a 150x150 pixel image intended to be embedded somewhere at the side of a website. If a user then tells me "Your image looks like crap fullscreen" I'm going to think well d'uh. You're not supposed to view it fullscreen :P. Adding a preset option in the zoom/view options that is called something like 'device 1:1' or 'true 1:1' or whatever, and behind the scenes does a thing like '1.0 / windows-scaling-percent * 10000.0' should get you pretty much there (or set a scaling factor like 1.0 / windows-scaling-factor). I'm just a bit afraid of rounding errors here and what that might do with the scaling still active :S. Kinda the same here. If I'm delivering a pixel image I want to view what the image looks like. Whatever scaling gets applied at whatever device somebody uses to view it is not on me. Another point is that when the display scaling is set in Windows, it's meant to scale text and UI elements. A good behaved graphics program like an image viewer (according to the MSDN this) will use the Windows scaling for text and UI, but will display graphics elements like the image at device pixels 'because that is what the end user expects'. Microsoft's theory here sounds good on paper to me: If I have a small screen with a huge amount of pixels (those 15.6" laptops with a UHD screen for instance) I want the elements scaled up because otherwise they would be invisible small. But I don't want any image like that scaled because then there would be no point in having UHD pixels (if every program would scale _Everything_ up to 200% for instance). I would just end up with 'finer drawn text' and no good benefit to pixel precision. If the scaling is somehow not preventable, at least give options to have control over the type of scaling (and please, B + C parameters to Bicubic or at least different bicubic-presets) so we have some idea of what it is we're actually looking at. I have the feeling you don't even know since it's "controlled by the graphics card driver", am I correct?

ReactOS is not a suitable stable work environment at all, and tries to target Windows XP. Since Affinity (Photo at least) requires at least Windows 7 or higher as far as I know, you can forget it :)

So after I uninstalled the beta and discovered plugin support is now completely broken in the final, is there a way for me to download and install a previous beta that did work?

1.5 final installs next to my 0.42 public beta (not overwriting it). Can be good, can be bad :). Have to redo most of my settings it seems edit: And none of the Photoshop plugins seem to do anything at all. They don't crash anymore, they don't work any more. Just 'nothing' happens when you click a filter from the menu. They are also all listed as 'unknown', I thought earlier beta's listed some as OK? I know for sure Google NIK Color Efex seemed to work OK at 16bits. Now just nothing happens.

Reading on Engadget that 'affinity photo for Windows is here' so maybe they released and removed previous versions? Kinda a bummer since I'm still on .42 and no offense but I'm not feeling a 'release candidate' is in sight on that version. Still lots of smaller bugs, a lot of plugins not working, weird 'highlight correct' behavior in Develop, lots of issues with resizing reporting, weird zoom-level display etc.. If they pulled the release candidate for the release no way that I can test if the issues that nagged me are fixed or not. Affinity Photo has such a good feeling and seems so close to a 'ps replacement' that I _want_ to use that it's really frustrating if there are still a few issues in there that make it 'unusable' :). If the release is around 50,- euro maybe just buy it anyway to support it and see where it goes.. but if it's anywhere near the quality of .42 it's not going to be a product that I use a lot :(