kaffeeundsalz

@PhilipJohnston I think I understand where you're coming from, but with the way your question is phrased, it can't be answered in a meaningful way. There are approximately hundrets of features that InDesign has and Affinity Publisher doesn't. That's because you're comparing a program that has a 20 year long history with a product that's still relatively new to the market. People complain about missing features for sure – but different ones depending on their use case. For any guess about what you might be missing in Publisher, we'd need to know what you use InDesign for. But even then, your best bet is the one you already started: download the trial version and try replicating one of your real-world projects in Affinity Publisher, first a simple one, then a more complex one. In doing so, it's pretty safe that sooner or later, you will discover most of Publisher's shortcomings that are relevant to your workflow. Then, ask here in the forums for a workaround and decide if you can live with it. Also note that the trial period of the Affinity suite is still a whole 90 days at the moment. That should be more than enough for you to make a choice.

It's what always happens when RGB goes to CMYK. These are the two color spaces you're converting between. It has nothing to do with the file format. And yes, the loss of bright, saturated blue tones is expected when converting to CMYK. These colors are simply not part of the color model because physics. Your only way around this is the use of spot colors in print, but this is probably too complicated and Affinity lacks proper support for spot color channels. In your case, I would first try to add an HSL adjustment and shift the master hue about 20 degrees clockwise before converting. This will significantly alter the sky color towards cyan, but it should at least bring back the bright colorful appearance of the original image.

I still find the implementation not entirely convincing. For example, how do I select multiple LUTs in the Adjustment panel? From what I've found, it's not possible. So I can add multiple LUTs at once but have to remove them one by one – or delete the entire category, which seems equally desparate. Moving LUTs between categories can also be done only one file at a time. In addition, I don't like that Affinity Photo doesn't prompt for a name when creating a new category. These are simply named "LUTs [index]" by default, and renaming them always involves an extra step. Granted, this is at least consistent with Photo's behavior in other places of the UI where categories are used. Do you plan do address these issues as the beta progresses?

From your screenshot, I can tell that the color of your Fill layer is set to black. Is that really what you want? The video clearly shows that the Fill layer has a red color tone. With the Fill layer's blend mode set to Multiply, I'd expect that Blend options give different results based on brightness and saturation of the source layer's color.

Also, from what I can see, Serif applications don't respect the "Show scroll bars" setting of macOS under System Preferences > General. I just noticed that when you're on macOS, you can make the area in question disappear by setting System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars to "When scrolling".

It's not always empty – it's the place where the vertical scroll bar appears when the contents don't fit into the Layers panel with its current height. Granted, I don't know why the column is always visible given that other panels do behave differently indeed. For example, both the Channels and the Adjustment panel in Affinity Photo hide the scroll bar area entirely as long as it's not needed. Also, from what I can see, Serif applications don't respect the "Show scroll bars" setting of macOS under System Preferences > General.

So what you want to say is that InDesign is an example of good user interface design? If so, in what way?

With all objects selected, activate "Transform Objects Separately" in the context toolbar. Then, while scaling, hold down the Cmd key (or Ctrl on Windows).

@Patrick Connor Thank you for these insights. Much appreciated!

Just wanted to confirm that this is happening for me, too. Additionally, sometimes after drawing the shapes, the cursor icon will change to something else like e.g. the move cursor or the rotate cursor.

Hi @walt.farrell, I really don't get it. I do know how PDF passthrough is different from interpreting a PDF file. And I see that Affinity interprets a PDF on opening. I just don't see why this should be a necessary behavior given that a placed PDF with passthrough enabled perfectly exports as raster images as well, with all the fonts correct etc. All I ask is to be able to do this in batch, too – rather than creating a new document with the same dimensions as the PDF, place the PDF inside of that document, go to the Export dialog and set PNG as the output format to finally get a result. And then repeat this for each PDF.

Hi Serif, the new PDF passthrough feature is quite remarkable, but I think the Batch Job feature would really benefit from having this as an option as well. Right now, batch conversions in Affinity Photo are not really suitable for PDF documents since you need to have all the fonts installed that are used in the PDF to get predictable results. A simple PDF passthrough checkbox in the New Batch Job dialog would be enough. And while we're at it: Why do I have to place a PDF document to get the passthrough option? Shouldn't this also be available when opening a PDF file? Greetings kaffeeundsalz

Is this coming to Batch Jobs as well? In the current Beta, there's no option for PDF passthrough when adding files to the Sources panel in the New Batch Job dialog. This means Batch Jobs can still not be used to bulk-convert multiple PDFs without having all the required fonts installed.

What the OP probably means is that brightness/contrast and tint of an image area doesn't necessarly match the area that it's cloned to. One could try to play around with the patch tool which sometimes does a pretty good job at blending areas of different appearance. Personally, I end up using manual corrections with nested Curves layers most of the time.

Also, do you mean the blend modes of the live filter layers themselves, or are you asking how other layer's blend modes affect the appearance of live filter layers?

I basically agree, however it probably won't take years for @vivviv to understand what mistake he/she made and how to set up document spreads and pages properly.

But it should work just the way you describe. Make sure you set up the layers like so: The important part of this is that the gray pixel layer needs to be a clipped, not masked. Note the slighly larger indentation of the mask layer. With the blend mode of the 50% gray layer set to Overlay, non-destructive dodging and burning (which also needs to be done on the gray layer) works as expected.

Just to avoid confusion: You have really just taken a known state of the image from the document history and used it as a brush source to paint on the currently selected layer. It's nothing more than that. Append the following steps to your instructions: 1. With the background layer still selected, go to Filter > Colors > Solarize. 2. Delete the triangles. 3. Select the step before solarizing as your undo brush source. 4. Paint over the background layer with the undo brush tool. You'll see that this will indeed undo the solarization, but you'll also paint the triangles back in as pixel data to your background layer. I you don't happen to have a history step where your background layer is in the state you need it as the only visible layer in your composition, you're lost. I'm sure you might be able to alleviate the problem with the use of the alternate history feature. But it remains a rather makeshift approach given that you could have just solarized a copy of your background layer / added the noise as a live filter layer.

I never really perceived the color circles as being primary or secondary. For me, they're just two equivalent colors between which I can choose for convenience. Maybe you should just look at it this way? Why is it important whether the top left color circle is the secondary one?

The selection brush tool is typically used on pixel layers, not on mask layers. Use the paint brush tool instead. Apart from that, mask layers shouldn't get rasterised if you do use the selection brush tool on it. Can you provide a screen recording to demonstrate this?

Interesting! Do you know any way to create such a squircle in Affinity Designer? Specifically with the curvature continuity diagram in mind? Or is this just not possible with the standard vector tools?

For the same reason you can't travel back in time and murder your grandmother: because it will produce a paradox or at least completely unpredictable results in most cases. The very definiton of history is that it's a chronological list of all your editing steps that all depend on each other. Affinity's behavior would just be way too chaotic if this was possible. For example, what if you used a reference layer for your clone brush and then later decide to delete that layer from your document history? Which layer should Affinity then use as the cloning source? And what is supposed to happen if you have nested adjustment layers and then remove their parent layer from a point in history before the child layers were created? In your case, rather than scrubbing through document history, you can just select your noise layer at any point in time and delete it. Because you did use a separate noise layer, didn't you? A non-destructive workflow is key for not having to mess around with time and try to wipe out undesired events from the past. See also: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Year_of_Hell.

No one will be able to give you an answer if you keep quiet about what exactly you're trying to achieve, how you expect Affinity to behave and what happens instead. There is no magical "if things don't work, do that" solution because it depends on your individual case. Just as @carl123 said: Please describe your problem as precise as possible, include a screenshot with the relevant parts of the user interface visible and also tell us whether you're following a specific tutorial and what you have tried so far to solve the problem.

Pretty sure there's a motion blur effect involved here. The blur might have been done right at the scene by first shooting the still image and then another one while moving the camera up or down with a slow shutter speed. I'm much more of a retoucher than a photographer though, so I can't say for sure. It can certainly be done in post: I would duplicate the image layer, apply a motion blur filter with vertical direction to it and then mask out the center part of the image to reveal the original area with the church floor.

In Preferences > Tools, tick “Select object when intersects selection marquee”.