dmstraker

Baltimore cruise was a bust. Drove 10hrs to Boston and picked up cruise to Montreal and back. Now in sunny Halifax, Nova Scotia. Close to 1000 photos so far. 10kg camera bag keeping me fit. Editing pix from previous trip with AP on MS Surface in the onboard gaps...

Spoke too soon. Me in Washington. Ship in Florida. Should board in Baltimore tomorrow. Hurricane Florence in between. Could well be a bust.

Small celebration. I've now uploaded 100 Affinity Photo video tutorials to my InAffinity YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOnLUmyPHr2rayOHVHWsHVw Mostly, they are for beginners, though I throw in recent discoveries, effects, etc. To properly celebrate, I'm now off on a photographing jolly, up the American East Coast, as far as Nova Scotia, no less. TTFN.

We desperately need a 'what the heck is Affinity Publisher' set of descriptions and examples, even for Beta folks, giving a quick overview, showing what it can do, worked examples, etc. Well done folks! Dave

Still tinkering with this. On the Apply Image Equations front, in RGB space, I've tried two alternatives. Original: First (and I think best) is: Duplicate layer. DR=max(SR,SG,SB)-min(SR,SG,SB) DG=max(SR,SG,SB)-min(SR,SG,SB) DB=max(SR,SG,SB)-min(SR,SG,SB) Then invert layer and convert to mask. This is based on the principle that 'greyness' increases when RGB vallues are closer to one another. When R=G=B, then a shade of grey is displayed. So max-min calculation gives the range. A variant ion the above is simply to use an average, which take account of the middle value. This third value doesn't really affect grey, but it's an interesting difference to play with. DR=average(SR,SG,SB) DG=average(SR,SG,SB) DB=average(SR,SG,SB)

Start with a layer with a gradient from black to white. Add Colour Balance adjustment layer. Adjusting colour balance has different effects with colours and tones: Magenta Shadows creates a much stronger effect than other colours with a quite hard line 1/3 of the way across. RGB Highlights create a strong red line about 2/3 across but CMY have a much weaker effect. Midtones adjustments seems to be rather wide. Example below + .afphoto attached. Note esp. red and green highlights and magenta shadows. colour balance gradients.afphoto

If you're using Camtasia to record training videos (I use version 9.1 for my InAffinity YouTube channel), I've come across a couple of gotchas. First is that drop-down menus may not work. Or at least seem to work. I find this happens particularly with Blend Modes. They are 'there' but have not been painted (sliding up/down makes them appear). A bit of clicking eventually gets them. My approach is the moment it happens I stop talking, which shows up as a blank on the sound timeline in Camtasia. I then talk when it appears and edit the gap out (which is easy with a mark/right-click/ripple delete). I've reported this as a bug and Serif have agreed and are going to look into it. Second gotcha is that the Camtasia recorder snags Ctrl-M for dropping a marker into the timeline, which can be a pain if you want to use it to pull up Curves. Fortunately this is easy to fix. Click on Record (or use Ctrl-R) from the main record screen. Go to the Tools menu item and Options, then select Hotkeys. You can then reassign the Marker hotkey.

Thanks, owenr!!

It would be great if I could apply adjustment layers to mask layers. For example I could do a luminosity mask and then apply a curves adjustment to this. Woohoo!

I use a large, hi-res screen for editing (40", 4K) and the histogram in both the Develop and Photo Personas are rather small, making examining it rather difficult. I can stretch them sideways but not vertically. It's a critical tool, of course. Please can we make it bigger? Thanks!

Don't know if this is a bug, but here goes: Version 1 Duplicate image Add Curves as child, pull down, blend mode Overlay. Blend mode of top image Overlay. Result is highlights brightened Version 2: Duplicate image (as above). Add Curves as child, pull down, blend mode: Overlay (as above). Group this top image/curve. Blend mode of group: Overlay. I thought that the second method would give the same result as the first one. But it is not. However, if you change the blend mode of the group to Screen, the result is the same. Attached is image file with both of these in (version 2 group on top, with Screen blend). Am I just misunderstanding something? blend confusion.afphoto

A continuing annoyance is that when I go to selected an existing node in Curves, AP creates a new one, with the result that the slightest movement makes the curve go haywire. A simple fix is a 'snap to node' where a click close to a node results in the node being selected rather than a new one created. Perhaps this feature could be selectable in preferences. Intelligently, this would take account of screen size and resolution (and maybe even eye-screen distance, such as where desktops are likely to be further away than laptops, which are further away than tablets). Tx

I don't know why, but when I go to select a drop-down box when recording a video using Camtasia, the box doesn't immediately appear and I end up fumbling and clicking again. It is never a problem in normal AP usage. Yes, it's interfaces with third party software (I often met this in my software quality days) which can be a pain, but I thought you'd be delighted to see this. This video shows an example - start at about 4:10.

There is is! Thanks, MEB. Another puzzle solved.

When you load an image and erase some, you see the grey/white chequerboard. When you create a new image, add a new layer and erase, you see white, which can cause problems. How do you get to see a chequerboard in the new image scenario? Thanks!