John Rostron

Hi John Rostron,
 
Thanks for the feedback. I'm gonna try as you suggested and implement the tip of zooming every time it's pertinent.
For my upcoming tutorials I'm also using a new workstation where I have a better/bigger/higher resolution display so I believe it will improve the quality of them.
 
Thanks again,
Pedro

In this tutorial I cover how to create a custom filter to extract details from your images. In this tutorial you'll also find the use of Macros and a bonus for you to use as you like... ;)
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdaySWNEpY0
 
The language in the video is portuguese with english subtitles.
 
Hope you enjoy the video   :)
Pedro

Same OP in both threads...
 
Do note that Vuescan's DNG file isn't like one from a camera. You will not gain anything by saving as a Vuescan DNG versus its TIFF format.

I have corrected this link.
John

Dead link.
 

I thought the Affinity version looked awful so I had a go myself, didn't use tone map, and aligned via rotate etc not perspective and the alignment worked better.
 

I use VueScan and if I tell it to save as a tiff, it does so;  the tiff file is then automatically opened by Affinity with no problem. Try this and see!
 
John

If you want to re-shape the curve, you can try:
 
y-(120*a)*(b*sin(360*x/w/c)+(1-b)*cos(360*x/w/c))
 
Varying the a parameter will change the (vertical) amplitude of the curve.
Varying the b parameter will change the horizontal position of the curve.
Varying the c parameter will change the wavelength of the curve.
 
John

@atfitzy posted a thread about re-shaping a text block. I tried various Equations in Filter> Distort and the best I could come up with is:
x=x
y+(h-y)*(w-x)*x/w/w/a
This produces the required arch in the upper margin of the block. The a parameter allows the user to increase the stretching effect. The default of one has no effect; reducing it will increase the effect. However, I find that reducing the parameter has no effect until the value goes below half, after which it has the desired effect. I can get the desired effect by putting a multiplier at the start of the equation:
y+2*(h-y)*(w-x)*x/w/w/a
Here are a couple of arched images using this formula:


Otherwise the formula works as desired. Before I commit this to a macro can anyone explain this unexpected behaviour in the parameter value?
John

Hello John,
I run it weekly , but never running in the background. I have made sure i have everything else turned off and problem is still there. 
Thanks for the suggestions.
Gary
 

Hi Prrrr,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
Press and hold ⌥ (option/alt) and click the object on top to cycle through all objects below.

@Polygonius, for a complex equation, a macro is probably the best solution. When I am trying out equations, I do as you suggest. I have a text file, an I cut and paste various versions from there.
John

@Polygonius, You seemed to have also seen my tutorial using equations. 
You can multiply by a factor less than one without problems. The result just becomes less than it was before. It is not division. If you divide a value by another that is less than one, the result is greater than before. Thus:
10*0.5=5
10/0.5=20
The expression A/B/C is equivalent to A/(B×C), but I often find the former more easy to write.
 
John

Combining Sines and Cosines
The sine and cosine functions when applied to an image, differ only in the position along the horizontal axis. They are 90 degrees apart, so that when the sine curve is rising from the zero point, the cosine curve is falling from the maximum.If we combine the sine and cosine curves, we can get an overall variation in the horizontal position.
I currently have a work in progress for a general sine and cosine transform (not to be confused with a Mathematician's Sine Transform). This is similar to the solution proposed by @carl123 in a recent posting.:
x=x
y=y+h*a*(b*sin(360*x/w/c)+(1-b)*cos(360*x/w/c))
The a parameter controls the vertical scaling of the curve. It represents the fraction of the image height.This would typically be about 0.2.
The b parameter controls the horizontal position of the curve from zero(all cosine) to one (all sine).
The c parameter controls the wavelength. A value of one means the wavelength equals the image width, half would give two waves per width.
A practical application of this transform is in distorting text (as in the posting referred to above). Here is some Artistic text, rasterized first, and then with the Filter > Distort > Equations applied as above:

I left clearance above and below the original text to allow for the ups and downs of the transform.
These equations could be further parameterised, except that Affinity will only allow three parameters. The horizontal position parameter does not cover the entire subject starting position. It begins between the zero position (b=1), or at the top of the curve (b=0). You can get an alternative position by replacing the plus sign after the y with a minus sign. A final variation is that you can re-position the entire transform by adding a value to the x value. For example:
x=x+150
y=y-h*a*(b*sin(360*x/w/c)+(1-b)*cos(360*x/w/c))
 

The equations facility in Affinity is not well documented. There is limited support in some AP actions, but the Transform and Distort > Equations filter offers a wide range of functions. This tutorial focuses on using the trigonometrical functions, sine, tangent and arctangent.
The argument to many trigonometrical functions is an angle. In mathematics this is usually expressed in radians. However, the Affinity functions expect their argument in degrees.
Sines and cosines
The argument expected is in degrees, and over 360 degrees, the value of the function varies between -1  and +1. The sine function starts at zero and rises to a maximum at 90 deg, then falls to zero at 180 deg, falling to a minimum of -1 at 270 deg before rising to zero at 360 deg. If we wish to map this cycle to the width of an image, then we can use sin(360*x/w). Typically we would want the amplitude of the cycle (the maximum and minimum) to be more than 1 and -1, so we add a scale factor, measured in pixels. For an amplitude of 100 pixels, we have 100*sin(360*x/w). This gives one cycle across the width of the image. If we want more than one cycle, we can add a multiplier in the argument, so for three cycles per width, we can use 100*sin(3*360*x/w). Note that I use 3*360 rather than 1080 since it preserves the standard 360 multiplier.
As an example, here is a checkerboard with Filter > Distort > Equations:
x=x
y=y+100*sin(2*360*x/w)

If we apply this to a real image, we get:
 

This is varying the vertical position of a point along the x-axis. We could vary the vertical position of a point along the y-axis by using the equation:
y=y+100*sin(2*360*y/h)
For the checkerboard, this would give:

And for the Severn Bridge we get:

We could even combine them both with the formula:
y=y+100*sin(2*360*x/w)*sin(2*360*y/h)
to give:

or, for a real image:

I will be adding further examples using tangents and cotangents.

Honestly there are more important things an image manipulation or vector manipulation software should do here, I personally won't expect those to offer the functionality or being able to replace other dedicated tools which are entirely specialized on these capture or screen recording authoring tasks. - In short, I won't expect AP/AD to offer here too what Snagit or other dedicated tools of that domain offer.
If I personally need such funtionality I take a dedicated tool for such stuff, since there isn't and never will be that one tool which can do and handle it all!

In windows, you could use the Snipping Tool. After sctivation, you can select  an area and then save it in a format of your choice. 
 
John

Well, they can contain metadata, at least according to the specification for "ancillary data chunks" provided by Wikipedia. Perhaps the PNGs exported by the Affinity applications don't contain any, though

As @walt.farrell said, they certainly can contain metadata, & some of it can include a person's name, for example in "eXIf" chunks that store Exif metadata that can include an author, artist, or copyright holder name.

I have this same question.  There seems to be inconsistency with the Sources Panel.  Sometimes I can close the file and upon re-opening, it's empty.  Other times it re-opens showing the Sources.
 
Is there an answer to why this happens?

I think that my contribution above exhausts what I can usefully advise. However, I suggest that you include a link to your RAW file so that other knowledgeable people can try for themselves.
 
John

Or could it be the other way round?
I notice that in the Affinity histogram, there is a green spike at the RHS, not present in the Nikon histogram. This presumably corresponds to the white on the sign. Have you tried adjusting the levels to get rid of this spike?
John

The current aproach of File -> Save as is the worst... It's like GIMP's very annoying feature.
 
Save as should allow to save all known formats - JPG, PNG, TIFF, etc.
So there are hundreds of forum posts regarding the save as and export commands, it's still not the best way, instead it's the most annoying ever.
 
Save as should allow the user to save the file in whichever format he wants. When data loss may occur a warning dialog is good enough. By saving a document as means changing the working file name and changing the working file path.
Export should save a file to another place, but the app should not change the working file and the working path.
 
 
Forcing users to do it in a cumbersome way to "save as" their work is highly annoying. Practically Affinity Photo is useless for me right now. Anyway, who uses such a software for professional purposes is completely aware of the file format limitations!
 
Please open any other software and see how it's working:
- "Save" saves the currently opened document. If was not saved before, invokes the "Save as..." dialog.
- "Save As" offers a list of known file formats to save the document. After saving, the file name/path is updated. Here, if the chosen format does not supports all extra data, a warning is enough. After saving the app sould keep all the extra data (layers, etc). After saving, a "file saved flag" should be set to not bug the user upon exiting the app that the file wasnt saved.
- "Export" offers a list of known file formats to save the document. After exporting, the file name/path is NOT updated, the "file saved flag" isn't altered.
The above workflow is the best. Implementing another way only annoys the user and renders the software unusable.