kaffeeundsalz

Hi @Ulysses, very well spotted! Rectangles and ellipses cannot be changed before drawing because the context toolbar doesn't offer any controls for them – disregarding the color selectors for fill and stroke and the stroke panel, all of which do work as expected. The other controls only appear after drawing the initial shape. Why this is only the case with the few shapes you mentioned remains kind of a mystery to me; I'd consider this an unnecessary inconsistency. What's more, the iPad version of Affinity Photo does show all the controls from the beginning. It's just that they don't react, just as shown in my video. There's obviously some room for UI refinement here. That being said, I share your enthusiasm about how shapes work in the Affinity suite. They really are very flexible and powerful.

@Ulysses My confusion probably comes from the fact that I’m much more familiar with the Mac version of Affinity Photo: In the desktop version, it’s no problem to configure a shape just after selecting the tool and then start drawing when the parameters are set. I guess I am just very surprised that it doesn’t also work this way around in the iPad version.

@befehr and @RNKLN – this is something many users (including me) had trouble with. Please follow the steps in this forum post to fix it:

Hi @Alfred, that‘s it! I need to change the controls after drawing the shape. I still find it a strange design decision that I can‘t set up my shape beforehand, but if that is how it works … okay. I‘m also not sure why it didn‘t try this myself. But that‘s why forum members are smart, right? Thanks so much for your help! All the best kaffeeundsalz

Hi everyone, I‘ve just noticed that in Affinity Photo for iPad, when I select a shape tool (like e.g. Rectangle, Arrow or anything else), I can‘t change any of its properties. Whenever I try, every property in the context toolbar immediately resets to its previous state. Please see the attached video for a demonstration. This doesn‘t happen with the other tools like Paint Brush or selections. I have tried to quit and re-open Affinity Photo and I also restarted my iPad. I have Affinity Photo 1.7.1.143 and a 3rd generation iPad Pro 11-Inch. What am I doing wrong? The forum search didn‘t bring up anything useful. Cheers kaffeeundsalz DE31F22E-3FFC-4162-A2ED-5CDEF9C1D2FD.MOV

I don't know the German interface of Affinity Photo, but from what I can see in your screenshots, the "Ineinanderkopieren" blend mode is at the exact same position where "Overlay" is in the English version, so I assume these two are identical. I'm pretty sure that "Ineinanderkopieren" is the blend mode your're looking for and non-destructive dodge and burn should just work as expected with it. Concerning the translation, I wonder what the German word was before the alleged change. Did it actually say "Overlay"? In the German UI? If so, that would have been a missing translation that got fixed with the new version. Serif probably tried to match the blend mode names with those found in Photoshop whenever there's an equivalent. Now, I don't know about Photoshop in German language either, but this site is an English - German dictionary for Photoshop's UI. Just scroll down to the very bottom of the page and you'll find the section with blend modes where "Overlay" is indeed translated to "Ineinanderkopieren". I don't know how old that site is and whether Adobe changed their translation in the meantime, but if they didn't, Serif's translation is probably correct.

Hi Dieter, I'm not sure what you mean when you say it's no longer available. Just create a new pixel layer, fill it with 50 % gray color and set its blend mode to overlay. It works as it has always worked, and it's possible in both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. Cheers kaffeeundsalz

You can't. Unfortunately, there are still many print shops around that simply don't know what they're doing.

No, you need to drag the square-sized handles in the corners of the image.

I had this problem, too, with Affinity Designer and Photo 1.7.1 under macOS Mojave 10.14.5, and @GrinningSharks solution fixed it perfectly. So the instructions seem to hold even for the most recent versions of macOS and Affinity apps. Thanks for getting this sorted!

Hi everyone, I know there are already a couple of macOS App Icon templates around here in the forums, but none of these were suitable for my needs. So I created my own from scratch in Affinity Designer and decided to share it here with you. It's complete with editable shapes, custom grid and guides. As you may know, there are three basic app icon shapes in macOS: circular, square and tilted rectangle. This template is for the circular version and contains only the basic elements. This way, it's easy to bring in your own design. For example, I've created the layers in a way that the inner circle can be easily used as a clipping layer to make sure that when placing a file, it won't exceed the boundaries of the actual design area. I used Apple's iBooks icon from Mojave as a reference and tried to match gradients, strokes and shadows. I did however change the icon size and guide positions by just a few pixels to strictly constrain to the 8x8 pixels grid Apple suggests in its design guidelines. Apple's own icons are often slightly off-grid; I decided to correct this at least for the basic shapes and sizes found in the template. Speaking of grid, I made one with Affinity Designer's Grid and Axis Manager which is 64 pixels with 4x16 pixels subdivisions (not 8 pixels to not make it look too dense). Since Designer doesn't support circular and diagonal guides, I created these as actual curves and shapes in the document and put them in their own group (diagonals snapping is however enabled via the Intermediate angles feature). For more information about the macOS icon grid, see here. Any comments and suggestions are very welcome. macOS Circle Icon.afdesign

Hi @carbon22, the Nik Collection is (and always was) only available for Windows and macOS, not for iOS and thus not for iPads. Cheers kaffeeundsalz

I can reproduce this here on my Mac. The PDF doesn't just crash Publisher, but also Photo and Designer. This does however only happen on placing it inside an existing document, not on opening the file in one of the Affinity applications. Copying the vector objects from there and pasting them into another document works just fine.

Which is still a very good price if you compare it to other available solutions. You could as well spend as little as $50 for the Windows version of Affinity Publisher and it would still be a pretty good deal. This is the business model Serif chose. I have not seen any info by Serif recently where it wasn't absolutely clear that Affinity products for Mac and Affinity products for Windows are seperate purchases. What about those friends who only use one platform?

I don't know of any chart like this, but if it exists, it's probably useless. First and foremost, a feature comparison chart only tells you whether or not a particular feature is available. It won't tell you anything about the quality of that feature and the different implementation in both apps. Affinity Photo has many features that Photoshop has, but some of them are not as refined and others are superior, at least from my experience. Also note that Serif has repeatedly stated that Affinity Photo is not intended as a clone of Adobe Photoshop, and a feature comparison chart cannot reflect anything where both apps just follows a completely different approach. Last but not least, charts of that kind are usually terribly biased depending on who created them. In fact, you could piece any set of features together in that table, making Affinity Photo either totally outperform Photoshop – or lose big-time against it. If your friend doesn't trust your enthusiasm about Affinity Photo, let him download, install and use the trial version.