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dmstraker

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Posts posted by dmstraker

  1. Good luck everyone! I'm presuming that, despite shock all round, this is good news for the business, customers, and importantly, employees. And please don't forget the volunteers, like many of the people on this forum. Personally, I've created over 900 videos on YouTube in my InAffinity channel and learned a huge amount about photo editing in the process. Affinity Photo (and I presume the other apps) is a brilliant product and I am in awe of how you have created this.

    Well done also on the four commitments. Wisely thought out and should help calm nerves all round.

    I can empathise significantly. I was a sofware engineer in small and large companies, UK and global. I moved to marketing and general business and eventually managing mergers and acquisitions in Agilent Technologies (the $10B spin-off from HP of its original businesses), where I was the Workplace Services (facilities, security, H&S, etc) global M&A manager. The most critical element of this, amidst all the IT, HR, Finance, WPS, etc, was cultural integration. One thing we found was that when acquired, people in a company will go along with many changes for the first 100 day, but will want to settle down soon after that.

    Canva sounds like a good fit with Serif but there will be differences and how these are handled is so important. Australian and UK cultures have a lot of overlap, but they are not the same. Key will be leadership, which is often misunderstood. The first layer of understanding for this is followership. Without followers, you may be a manager but you are not a leader. Leaders also need to understand psychology, a subject I studied while writing the many pages on the changingminds.org website.

    I could ramble further, but you've probably had enough by now and I have a photo competition to judge and potatoes to plant.

    Best wishes to all the wonderful Serif, Affinity and Canva people

    .. Dave ..

     

  2. Thanks, NMF. I'll probably leave it where it is for now as it only happens occasionally and I know how to fix it.

    The suggestion to configure temp and backup stores on other drives still stands. Not an original idea, but would still make life easier.

  3. I've an SSD C drive, which most people have these days. More than once I've had to trawl through Affinity folders there to root out files clogging up the drive until it becomes unusable. The latest was .affinity/Photo/2.0/temp/personabackstore.dat which was 117Gb. I've also found loads of old files in the autosave folder before now. I'm an old techie and was comfortable doing a name change to check that deletion wouldn't mess up the works. I can imagine people with a creative background being stymied by the problem.

    More info: On Windows, I got a 'disk full' complaint, along with a list of culpable folders. Affinity was the 1000lb gorilla here.

    It would be sensible to be able to locate temporary and backup storage on another drive (I have a second SSD just for this purpose). Set it up through Settings.

    Cheers and best to all you good folks at Serif!

    1. Use an adjustment, eg Curves.
    2. Paint black on the mask. Can be seen in mask that appears alongside adjustment in Layers panel. 
    3. Channels, Right-click (eg) Curves Adjustment Alpha, Fill (this erases black on mask).

    Mask as appearing in Layers tab is now white and I'd guess should now disappear. It actually disappears next time the layers panel is repainted, eg when moving a layer.

    Yes, I know, not a biggie. But then you good people have squared away most other things.

    HNY to all Serifims and Cherubims!

  4. A thought: If shortcuts have been changed, does 2.2 install step back? Looking at Photo/Paint Brush Tool settings, for example, there are no shortcut keys set for changing brush hardness. I've not set these myself, but have changed a number of other settings. It does highlight a potential dilemma, but maybe the install can check for user settings and put the new ones in for each change only if the user has not already set them.

  5. Testing brush improvements on Win10, APh 2.2:

    • Shift + number key now changes flow percentage (in the same way that number key on its own adjusts opacity)

    WORKS FINE

    • Shift + square brackets now changes hardness in 10% increments

    DOESN'T WORK (TRIED SHIFT ON BOTH SIDES)

    • Number key in Paint Mixer and Smudge Brush now adjusts strength percentage

    WORKS FINE

    • Fill with Primary colour has now been set with a default shortcut of Alt/ + Backspace

    DOESN'T WORK (OK FROM EDIT MENU)

    • Fill with Secondary colour has now been set with a default shortcut of Ctrl/ + Backspace

    DOESN'T WORK (OK FROM EDIT MENU)

  6. In Procedural Texture, adding Z or R numbers as custom inputs, you can type in a number and it's immediately calculated. The little up/down arrows work fine too. But when you roll the mouse wheel over the number, it is not calculated (and so has no effect).

  7. 1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

    Saving directly to servers is well-known to cause problems. I have no idea what functions pCloud provides, or how it works, so I can't say anything specific about that one. But Serif has long recommended saving to, and opening from, a local copy of the file and then later copying back to the cloud.

    It's a new one on me and I'm still puzzled as to what exactly might be going on. I've not heard of this happening with other applications. It would be enormously helpful if AP is unable to save remotely that it gave you an option to save locally rather than crashing out.

    Nevertheless I'm grateful for the knowledge and will follow your advice, Walt. Thanks!

  8. 7 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

    Presumably you mean 2.1.1.

    As always, the first question must be "where were you saving the file"?

    Ideally, to a local drive that is not managed by a Cloud service like OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.

    Yes, 2.1.1.

    Saved to pCloud, a Swiss service and has proved very reliable. How might saving to a server cause such a problem?

  9. I've just lost hours of critical work after "Save failed because ownership of the file could not be verified. The document must now be closed."

    I re-edited the image. An early save worked. A later save didn't.

    To say I'm unhappy would be an understatement.

    Version 2.2.1 Affinity Photo

    Edit: I tried resaving the original image (a jpg) with different algorithm (Lanczos) and restarted edit. I saved at regular points along the way. Eventually I hit the same barrier. I exported the original jpg as tiff and restarted, with the same effect. I also hit the same problem with a separate image which was a RAW .NEF file.

  10. "Save failed because ownership of the file could not be verified."

    Plus the delightful "The document must now be closed" (with no chance of saving). Boom.

    Fortunately when I reopened it, it recovered where I was. Got me going for a moment there, chaps.

     

    341426311_afbug.jpg.92ed39d04191e5cf809d4fd18a205dce.jpg

  11. Can't remember if I submitted these (also not found on search here, and beta database unavailable):

    As in attached and starting with gradient layer, black to white along x-axis. Add Luminosity Range Mask and adjust nodes as shown.

    When curve hits top or bottom edge of adjustment square, the effect is sudden, unexpected and presumably incorrect. 

    Also when blur is increase, an edge effect around the periphery of the image is seen, much as would be found using a Gaussian Blur. It looks like a 'Preserve Alpha' checkbox is needed.

    gradient bug 2.jpg

  12. One last note, and perhaps something that Serif can address.

    In the Gradient colour panel, when you reduce opacity, the colour as displayed decreases to grey. But if the colour is still being used (as it is) in creating the gradient, then perhaps the colour should remain, hence giving some indication that you are going to still get the colour within the gradient. 

    Image attached.

    gradient bug.jpg

  13. Understood and accepted.

    There's also the psychology of perception to consider. Looking at the red-with-zero-alpha node in the gradient panel or on screen, it appears to be transparent node. Yes, showing it as 'red with zero alpha' could be tricky. But cognition is often based on simple visual cues more than an examination of further panel data. And so (as with me), it is easy to assume that what is seen is all there is.

    This is what, in my development/QA/HF days we would have designated a 'usability defect'. There is clear logic in why it is what it is, but nevertheless it is experienced as a confusing difficulty.

    What the solution is here, I don't know. Nor is it a hill on which I plan to expire. I'll leave it to the good people in Serif to figure what to do about it.

  14. 3 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

    Why do you rate this as bug?
    the gradient will create a mix of:

    black/ 100% alpha

    via black 50% alpha,  red 50% alpha

    to black 0% / red 0%

    so for me it is correct that you see a mix of black and red with reduced opacity at the middle of the gradient.

    This makes sense. 

    And yet by setting the opacity to zero, you can also argue that the gradient is from black to no colour.

    Hmm.

  15. Being able to increment values with the mouse wheel in number boxes (often next to sliders) is wonderful, and the use of Ctrl and Shift for smaller and larger change is brilliant! 

    However, only the left Ctrl works for the small increment function. The right Ctrl does nothing. 

    This may seem like small beer, and for right-handed people who hold the mouse in their right hand, using the left Ctrl is natural. However, for left handed people this necessitates an awkward, cross-body stretch to perform this maneuvre. Many of the increasing number of creative people who use Affinity are lefties, which adds further to the priority of implementing what seems likely to be a trivial fix.

    Thank you.

     

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