John Rostron

Thanks, @DWright I am using: Chrome 84.0.4147.89 Android 7.1.1; SM-P550 Build/Nmf26X This glitch has not appeared since I posted the message - until just now when it happened with a single unread message in a forum. John

Thanks @walt.farrell. I had assumed that when Windows was updating my system (on restarting), that it would be loading the latest version. I will try again. John

I have not used my laptop for some time, so I allowed it to update my Windows 10 system to ver 10240. I then downloaded the latest versions of Affinity Photo and Designer. In each of these I got the message "Supported Windows Version not found. Checking with the system dialogue, It tells me I have a 64-bit operating system on a 64-bit processor. Both the old versions of Photo and Designer still work OK, but invite me to update, which I did. John

After browsing a subforum, I usually click on the Mark forum read button. Usually, this gives me a box to confirm. I click on OK, then click on he Return button and I am back in the Main Forum. Sporadically, when I click on the Mark forum read button, it does not give me the confirmatory box, it just marks all messages in the forum as read. Now, when I click on Return, nothing happens apart from what looks like a page refresh. If I click Return again, it will now usually return. (Or I can click on Home.) It seems more likely to behave this way if there are just a few unread threads. This happens when I am using my Android Tablet and Chrome. I have not noticed it on my Windows PC. John

No it does not work. It enlarges the image all right, but the canvas remains at the original size. John

Try using a batch job. (File > New Batch Job). This allows you to specify a new width (or height). See this link here. You could also include a macro to do the sharpening. John

I have only tried my macros in downsizing images. I doubt if they would work in upsizing, but I will give it a try. John

Affinity Photo's plugin support is limited to filters in .8bf format. These are programs which affect the pixels of an existing image. It requires that the software developer provides an .8bf file (commonly called Photoshop plugins). Looking at what FotoSketcher does, it would guess that it should work as a plugin provided that the developer provided an .8bf version. From what I can see of GMIC, this utilises a different interface to Photoshop, and would not work as an .8bf plugin. You could try contacting the software developers asking them to provide .8bf plugin versions. This has been known to work. John

Here is a worked example of the procedure described above: 1. Create two blank layers. 2. Add a Perlin.noise filter to each. (I actually created one layer, added Perlin Noise, then duplicated that layer.) 3. Apply the Affine Filter (Filters > Distort > Affine) to the top layer with displacement of 50% for X and Y. 4. With this same layer, use a soft brush to erase the horizontal and vertical hard-meeting area. Erase up to, but not reaching the edges. You can use a broad brush near the centre and a narrow one near the edge. Because of the Affine filter, the top layer will tile. (Note that I set the visibility of the bottom layer here to zero to make the erasure clear.) 5. Choose a suitable blend mode to give the effect you prefer. Normal may be OK. (I used Normal here, after setting the visibility of the lower layer to 100%.) 6. Merge the two layers. It should work because of the randomness of the Perlin effect. To test this, I applied another Affine filter with displacements of 70% and 30%. This brings the edges to the body of the tile. As you can see there is no obvious tiling. John

Have you seen my macros to set an image size to a fixed maximum? John

Dick, I would strongly advise you to change your user name to anything other than your email address. Using your email address can attract spammers. Sorry I cannot constructively advise on your basic problem. John

I don't know if you have noticed, but clouds do tend to be blurry! If you want a sharper effect, you could try adding a Posterize filter. John

It is not tiled. However, you could create a tileable version as follows: Create two blank layers. Add a Perlin.noise filter to each.. Apply the Affine Filter (Filters > Distort > Affine) to the top layer with displacement of 50% for X and Y. With this same layer, use a soft brush to erase the horizontal and vertical hard-meeting area. Erase up to, but not reaching the edges. You can use a broad brush near the centre and a narrow one near the edge. Because of the Affine filter, the top layer will tile. Choose a suitable blend mode to give the effect you prefer. Normal may be OK. Merge the two layers. It should work because of the randomness of the Perlin effect. John

@Blueprint I presume that the South Serif Ocean is the location of the famous San Seriffe islands featured in the Guardian on the first of April 1977. John

It is not clear whether you need to rotate the entire document (in which case use @Fixx's suggestion) or whether you need to apply rotation to just one axis, in which case you can use the Shear tool Filter > Distort > Shear. John

You will have to see if any Mac users of these plugins have similar problems. John

What OS are you using? I have both these plugins and they work well for me on Windows 10. John

That is because, except for printing where the software needs to map pixels to physical measurements, the dpi is irrelevant this is true for screen display or for web graphics. What sort of graphics are you creating here? I would guess it is vector graphics exported as PNG files. Any blurriness will have been generated in the conversion from vector to raster format. How did you make your conversion? John

Depending on what you are aiming for you could try to Posterise your image. Use Levels > New Adjustment Layer > Posterise... This will reduce the number of colours in your palette, but not necessarily exactly the same as the number given in the dialogue box. John

I created a 2in by 2in AD document, with a dpi of 72. I then exported it as a .png putting 2in in each size boxes. I then opened it in various applications: In Affinity Photo: Size was 2in by 2in or 144px by 144px, dpi was 72. Corel Paint: Size was 2in by 2in or 144px by 144px, dpi was 72, Inkscape: Size was 2in by 2in or 192px by 192px, suggesting a dpi of 96, Inkscape asked what dpi to use when importing, that in the file (which should have been 72dpi) or the Inkscape default I then repeated this exporting from Designer as .svg (specifying 72dpi for any rasters): In Affinity Photo: Size was 2in by 2in or 144px by 144px, dpi was 72. In Affinity Designer, I imported the .svg and then exported the .svg file to .png, and it exported as 144px by 144px. This loaded into Photo as 144x144 at 72dpi. However the image was corrupted! In Inkscape, Size was 463 by 341 the resolution was given as 96dpi. The image also seems to have acquired an extra point at the end. In Corel Draw X7: Size was 2480 by 3508px or 8.27x11.69in implying a resolution of 300dpi. It also had the extra point. It did not give me an option to choose any other dpi. My interpretation of all this is that the metadata in any image file does not specify the size in physical units (such as inches). It does, however, include the pixel dimensions of the image and the resolution (in dpi). When the image is loaded into an Application, the application does the sums. For inches it simply divides the number of pixels by the dpi. I think that Inkscape, despite it asking what dpi to use, imposes its own default dpi. Same goes for Corel Draw. From your point of view, provided that any software exports an image in your desired pixel size and dpi, that should be enough, especially as most apps allow you to specify the size in the physical units of your choice. The app will use the dpi to calculate the equivalence. John

Yes. It should also disappear if you reinstall the non-beta Photo. What you do need to check on is what program opens your file if you double-click on it. Is it the standard Photo or the beta? John

This is difficult to answer without knowing what you are starting from. Could you upload the original image before exporting as a gif? Could you also describe the steps you applied before export? What are you expecting to see? BTW, what are the to red arrows pointing to? John

@mi_cky, Welcome to the forums. I am guessing that what you have is a view of a cylinder with an image wrapped around it so that the sides of the image are laterally compressed but the centre is not distorted. In my macro to wrap an image around a bottle, I had the reverse problem. This was solved using the Filters > Distort > Equations filter. If you can confirm that my guess of your requirement is correct, then I can see if I can create a macro to do it for you. (Unless you want to create your own macro.) John

There is fairly good plugin and macro support in Affinity Photo, but not in Designer or Publisher. Many (but not all) Photoshop plugins that are .8bf files are compatible. These are those that act as filters on a single pixel image. Photo's macro support is good but limited to actions that you can do with menu items and their associated dialogue boxes. It cannot deal with opening or closing files, or with multiple files. However the combination of a Batch Job plus macros acting on each opened file is very powerful. @MEB has a list of Photoshop Plugins that are known to be compatible with Affinity Photo. It may be out-of-date though as new plugins appear. John

To build your own plugins, you need to follow the Adobe plugin specification. If you google Photoshop plugin sdk, you will find pages on how to do it. Note that Photo can only use .8bf plugin files. These are the ones that implement filters on a pixel image. John