Alex_M

I've noticed that Affinity Photo seems to be painfully sluggish when painting inside isolated mask layers (after ALT+clicking on them) of documents equal to or larger than 7-8 megapixels even when there is just 1 empty pixel layer with a mask. Painting in the mask layers without ALT+clicking on them is buttery smooth (real time), though. Why is that? On the same PC Photoshop is buttery smooth (real time) even when painting inside isolated (ALT+clicked) mask layers of 72 megapixel documents. This is a real problem for me since I do a lot of masking in documents that most of the time are a lot larger than 8 megapixels.

I know about this feature and I'm not holding down ALT. I actually found out why it happens. If I pan up or down and then very quickly after I drag out a horizontal guide, it will be vertical. I can reproduce this every time. Looks like a bug to me. I can't reproduce the same behavior for getting horizontal lines from the vertical ruler. Should I report this in the bugs section? EDIT: Actually scratch that. It happens when I drag the horizontal guides at an angle, not perfectly straight down. Is it supposed to do this? I also can't reproduce this behavior on the vertical ruler, it gives me vertical guides no matter the angle I drag them out at. So again, maybe a bug? EDIT2: Maybe I was wrong again. I think it happens if I drag out the guide quickly. If I drag it slowly it's always horizontal.

Sometimes when I drag out a horizontal guide from the ruler it comes out vertical. Why does that happen and how do I prevent it?

Is there a way to prevent guides from moving after cropping? For example, if I place a vertical guide at 50% and then crop the image to 50% of its width, the guide will reposition itself back to 50% vertically again instead of staying at the edge of the cropped image. Does that make sense? In Photoshop if I crop the image the guides stay put and don't reposition relative to the cropped image. Let me know if I should show screenshots if you don't get what I mean.

Every time I open a new image, the ruler units and tools' settings revert back to their default values. For example, I often use centimeters as ruler units, but if I open a new image it reverts back to pixels. Same issue with the tools. For example, in the Pen tool I set no fill and red stroke with 2 pt thickness, but the next image I open these are reverted back to white fill, black stroke and 0 pt thickness. So is there a way to keep them from reverting to defaults when I open new images?

Very frequently when I'm panning with SPACE + LMB, the tool that is currently in use activates. So if the Brush tool is currently active I get unintentional brush strokes or if the Clone Brush tool is active I accidentally clone stuff across my image. This is making it pretty much impossible for me to pan with the space + left mouse button combination. Does anyone else experience this issue? Should I report this as a bug? I've never had this happen to me in Photoshop when using the same key combination.

+1000 Frequently I can't see the guides at all, mostly in light images. I can't imagine it's that hard to add simple customization for their color? That would be really great.

It would be really nice if we could cancel the Crop tool in Affinity Photo with ESC key on the keyboard. Currently the only way to do this is to click on the "Cancel" button on the top which is slower.

+1 I need this on a job right now and I just realized it doesn't work.

So no other way to go about this except merging the layers? That kind of sucks. I hope it gets implemented soon.

Is this possible to do in Photo? I tried but it doesn't seem to work. It always affects only one of the selected layers. None of the other layers are locked and all are rasterized and it still doesn't work. On the other hand, Perspective tool works fine on more than 1 layer. Is this a bug? Any workaround for this? I need to deform more than 1 layer but preserve them as separate at the same time. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

That's interesting but I don't really look at raw numbers when I work. To my eyes there is no perceivable difference. Photoshop, in comparison, you could definitely see a difference with the Protect option on and off. And another issue. In Photo if I repeat the same spot several times with the Burn Brush and "Protect hue" option off, that spot becomes grey and lacking contrast. Doing the same in Photoshop makes the spot more contrasty and eventually black which is the effect that I need. Try it out and you'll see. So what really is the point of "Protect hue" if the end result would be pretty much the same visually (again, not talking about raw numbers)? And just to mention, I'm working on a brand new calibrated Eizo Color Edge monitor so the display is really accurate at showing colors and shades.

Hi, It seems to me that the Protect hue option in the Burn and Dodge tools is not working. The result is identical no matter if it's on or off. For comparison, in Photoshop if I turn on this option there's a very clear difference in the result. So is it something with my settings in Affinity Photo or is it a bug? I use the latest official version of Photo. Thanks in advance!

Hi, I've noticed something with Affinity Photo. It feels very sluggish with simple large documents. I'm currently working on a very simple high-res document 10 000 x 5000 px 16 bit, with just 2-3 pixel layers and even simple operations are very slow (merging layers, brush painting etc). Is there something I could do to make it faster? I think that my PC is pretty powerful (please check my signature) and that shouldn't be the problem here.

Any updates on this? Are there any plans to make this possible in the near future?

In Photoshop there's a function that allows removing white or black edges around cut out objects with a single click. It's called Defringe and also Remove white/black matte. It's located in Layer > Matting. I use this quite a lot when working with Alpha channels in 3d renders to quickly remove halos around objects. Is there an equivalent of this in Affinity Photo? I can't seem to do this. I tried with Refine Mask but I don't get the same effect and the edges become blurry and jagged. Thanks in advance!

Yes, please do!

Yes, it's a file for a client that should stay private so I will PM you a download link to the aphoto document. Thanks a lot for your help so far!

Yes, I tried flattening before converting to 16/8 bit but it didn't work. The artifacts still appear.

Anybody? It's urgent, I need to deliver the images and I can't give them this.

I've got an image that I have to deliver any moment and I've got a problem that prevents me from doing so. Photo produces strange pixelated dots when I save it to TIF or JPG. It also happens when I convert the document from 32-bits to 16-bits or 8-bits. How can I fix this? Please see screenshot below.

The color overlay effect works too. Thanks a bunch!!!

Ok, this sounds way too complicated than I expected but I might give it a try, thanks. Or just use the erase white paper filter since it worked well too.

The Erase white paper trick worked, thanks! I would still like to know if there's a more direct way of doing this. Also, the smoke is a pixel layer, it's not an alpha channel. You can see that it says "pixel" right on the layer in the stack.

Yes, I'm positive it's not grayscale. It's RGB 16 bit, I triple checked. I've attached the document if you want to have a look. smoke.afphoto