Mithel

Affinity Designer has been terrific for making graphics where I need to combine a few things (better than Affinity Photo for this). It would be seriously valuable to me if it had graph / charting capabilities! I've been trying "Tableau" but can't seem to get it to create what I want.

I'd love to see some charting / graphing features added to Affinity Designer! I've had a real need for this. Yes, I can make charts with a spreadsheet program but it's limited. I want a good tool and it would be great if Affinity supplied this!

Thanks Alfred, but those directions don't quite work. Yes, I've accomplished making a 50% grey short cut but it didn't fill the pixel layer. Following those directions and activating my shortcut key seems to set the primary color to 50% grey and then you still need to choose Edit; Fill. So this is still a multi step process: 1) Create a Pixel layer 2) Use your shortcut to set the primary color to 50% Grey 3) Edit; Fill; (or Shift-F5) (assuming the dialog has "Primary Color" selected) 4) Click Apply

Considering how often it is suggested to make a 50% grey layer, it seems like there should be a short cut to do this rather than making it several steps to create one. At the very least, on the fill dialog there could be a button for "50% Grey". (count the number of times the Affinity WorkBook instructs you to make a 50% grey layer!)

I was hoping the workbook would go into a bit more detail. For example page 271 introduces using Frequency Separation and says (for Radius) "a setting of 1.5 px is perfect as it pulls enough skin texture into the high frequency layer (detail) without pulling through too much of the tonal imperfections". Another tutorial (video) suggests a setting of more like 8 px. It would be great if some tutorial video would go into depth on this topic showing examples and explaining why different values might be choosen. I tried "Adjusting Skin Tone" (pages 274 & 275) on one of my own photos and it "didn't work" (certainly it didn't have the effect I expected). This needs a bit more explanation of what they are trying to achieve. I was trying to smooth out some "blotchy" skin and thought this technique might work but it didn't.

I haven't seen any "start to finish" tutorials for Affinity Photo. The tutorials all seem to be individual techniques. You might want to consider the new "workbook" that they just published.

Could the software please remember the last used directory separately for opening and for exporting. A frequent workflow for me is: 1) Open Image 2) Edit Image 3) Export Image (repeat many times) It's a waste of time to have to navigate back and forth between my "originals" and my "export" directory for every photo I edit. Export should remember the last directory I exported to and this should not interfere with remembering the last directory I opened a file from. This is a very simple software change but would save users a lot of time.

^^^^ I followed up on my thought. With those Develop Assistant options set to "take no action" the load time was twice as fast (half the time)! Someone might want to independently test my results I also turned "retina" rendering to lowest quality (fastest).

I agree, I'd assume that Affinity is not displaying any preview. They are completely getting the image ready for post processing as they load it. Unfortunately that gives the user the impression the load times are horribly slow. I loaded up the same image side by side in Affinity (no adjustments) and in Irfanview and there is a noticable visual difference which I'm sure is due to the "Develop Assistant" doing several things: "Apply lens corrections", "Apply color reduction" (noise) and applying the tone curve. Perhaps if they didn't apply those during loading we'd have a far more responsive app. Then they could give us a button to easily apply those if we desired them.

Hardware is usually not the best solution. A bit of software work can usually improve performance far more than hardware can.

If that is true then the JPG preview image is a nice full resolution excellent quality image.

It certainly spikes all of my CPUs (i7) but since loading a RAW file is a blink in other software, my guess is that Affinity is doing "too much" analysis and set up during load. After watching Affinity memory usage during a RAW load, it's impressive that Affinity goes from using 500 MB to using 2.5 GB of RAM to load a single file! And a second file sends it up to 4.5 GB. Thus 2 GB per image! Good thing I have 32 GB of fast RAM! Irfanview goes from 2 MB to 114 MB. Trivial memory usage! Perhaps Irfanview is only loading the JPG preview not the full RAW file?

I'm sure the Affinity developers are working on this as they have said, but I'd like to chime in (and be notified when a fix is made) too. I use Nikon (NEF) raw files and load times (from SSD on a fast system) are about 10 seconds. All other software (Irfanview, Aftershot Pro 3) loads these in a "blink" (too fast to measure). This is an important concern for many users and potential users so hopefully it is getting a lot of attention. This is an operation that is done EVERY time a photo is worked on, any other feature may or may not be used on a photo but this is something we encounter 100% of the time we use Affinity (which I love).

Once you've edited the low and high frequency layers how do you merge them back into being a single pixel layer that you can then do more editing on?

Overall the tutorials are fantastic and an awesome feature of Affinity. However the "Raw: Developing Images" tutorial has a lot of "click on the Chromatic Aberration Reduction will reduce chromatic aberration". Uh, well, if the viewer doesn't know what chromatic aberration is then this doesn't teach them anything (same critique applies to most of the rest of that tutorial for even simple things like "contrast" which probably everyone actually knows what contrast is)