Medical Officer Bones

Just out of curiosity, I assume you are working on a Mac? I ask, because Krita works like a charm on my (almost) decade old i7 920. The Krita devs are working on improving Mac performance. Anyway, Krita is indeed slow on Intel and lower GPUs. if you are interested in painting/drawing software with very nice perspective tools (not as nice as Krita, though) and very responsive even on very low hardware (it runs absolutely smooth on my aging i5/intel chipset 4gb Windows 7 tablet with 600ppi A4 files!), I'd suggest you look into Clipstudio https://www.clipstudio.net/en I love painting in Krita, but it runs at a snail's pace on that table. And Clipstudio offers by far the nicest drawing "feel" of all drawing software I worked with so far.

Unfortunately, after some testing I've come to the conclusion that it's not very workable: black and white soft brushes create ugly banding/dithering. This has to do with white/light greys becoming more powerful in linear colour space, and Affinity doesn't calculate nice transitions when working in wscRGB colour space and 8bit colour mode. In short, it is unusable. I checked this in PhotoLine and Photoshop too, and the black and white blending when using a linear colour profile is pretty bad in those two as well. In Photoshop it is possible to turn off the linear blending while painting with black and white, though, while in PhotoLine it is easy to assign a non-linear profile to each individual layer if necessary, so it can be solved in those. Not in Affinity, though. And compared to both Photoshop and PhotoLine, Affinity's blending between white and black is arguably the worst. Krita, on the other hand, has no such issues. Just choose the -elle-linear sRGB profile to work in, and blending works fine, both for colours as well as black and white. When I installed Krita's sRGB-elle-V2-g10.icc system wide in Windows 10, it became available to PhotoLine in 8bpc mode too, and worked just as good as in Krita. Although white is still very powerful: nature of the beast when working in linear. But Affinity resolutely refused to allow me to work with that profile with 8bpc images: that profile only becomes available when selecting the 32bpc RGB mode. Very frustrating. Photoshop also allowed me to pick the same linear sRGB profile. In Affinity's case the answer would be to work directly in 32bpc, which is a tad disappointing. That said, best quality is to be had in 32bpc mode. A secondary issue with using the *wscRGB colour profile in Affinity: all the colour palettes become linear too, which is unwanted behaviour. It means it becomes quite awkward to select the colour you want, since the grey/white range is displayed in linear, throwing things off (midgrey in linear is waaay lower!). This also occurs in Photoshop when I selected the linear elle sRGB profile. Both Krita and PhotoLine compensate and keep the colour palettes visually sRGB 2.2, so picking colours is much more intuitive, with no change to the overall workflow. Anyway, it's not that important. But still interesting to compare the various applications and their behaviour in marginal cases like these. My takeaway here is that Affinity's colour management is somehow more limited in its implementation compared to the other applications I tested here, if the user is required or wishes to work with linear colour profiles in 8bpc or 16bpc mode. It would be preferable if the Affinity developers would improve this in a future version. And it is also obvious to me now that the developers behind Photoshop's colour management chose the "easy" way out by implementing that specific colour setting which I asked about in the original post here. But hey, it works.

In Krita this is solved by using one fo the sRGB-elle colour profiles when creating a new document. I copied these profiles to Affinity Designer's ICC folder, and they do show up, but when I select them in the new document dialog, the blending is still non-linear (UGLY!). But that motivated me to try the wscRGB profile, and now it blends in linear space. But it still doesn't explain why the linear elle profiles wouldn't work in Affinity. Ah well, got it to work now.

Does anyone know if there's an option in both Designer and Photo to paint using a linear gamma? In Photoshop a handy "Blend RGB Colors Using Gamma: 1" exists in the Color Settings. It fixes the ugly non-linear blending while painting.

The problem with WebPlus was that it was always tied to its own proprietary file format - just like Muse, as is likewise the case with Sparkle. The second major issue was that WP (and Muse) used their own "render layer" instead of building on top of an existing web layer, which means everything had to be translated from the first one to a published page/website. Importing existing web pages wasn't possible, for example. Compare Pinegrow, which doesn't need all that nonsense: it works directly with the actual web files, and is built on existing web tech. Much easier to maintain and develop for, PG is easily integrated in existing (team-based) workflows, and the latest and greatest web tech is quickly implemented by the developers. And it's not a case of "either or" in regards to coding or not coding. Both are supported. WebPlus and Muse were both incredibly hard to maintain by their respective developers. Always lagging behind the times. Pinegrow has no such chains dragging it down. And building pages in it is actually much faster than Muse and WebPlus could ever hope to be.

The fact that Affinity Photo doesn't support an indexed colour palette, nor an indexed image mode (and no 1bit mode) automatically puts it in the "unfit for pixel art" category for me. Aside from this missing essential part, animation is unsupported, non-square pixels aren't an option, pixel perfect drawing is not possible, colour palette control is limited (again no indexed mode), tile mapping isn't there, and the things you mention... It just can't compete with a dedicated pixel pusher app like Pro Motion NG. Nor do I think it ever will, because the target audience is very, very different. I do my pixel art in Pro Motion NG. I do image editing in AP.

Years ago I owned a freelance edition of Motionbuilder. Paid for it, and then out of the blue they pulled the plug on the license server, and sent an email stating that they wouldn't allow existing (perpetual) licenses to be re-installed if necessary. I and many others were livid. And the issues I experienced with AD forcing everyone (more or less) into rental plans, as well as them destroying Softimage (which I switched over to, but shortly after they stopped development). Now I am a (very happy) Blender user. I won't ever deal with that company ever again. Fool me once... Earlier this year they stopped development on Stingray, their much touted and publicized game engine. A friend of mine adopted that in all of his classes, only to find himself hoodwinked now by AD's 180 degree turns. Sad. I wouldn't be surprised if Sketchbook going free merely means AD has decided to drop the app in the upcoming years.

Hm, no thanks. AutoDesk burnt my fingers before - not touching their software again. Besides, I use Krita and Clipstudio for my sketching, drawing, and digital painting.

I take it you don't own a cell phone and don't use social media? Because those are FAR worse than the Windows operating system.

No, it's not sting. Hint: the message consists of 5 words by John Lennon. Second hint: messages hidden in other messages Final hint: https://futureboy.us/stegano/decinput.html

I am able to make out a face in the circle on my screen, however. A simple circular selection and auto levels reveals it. If anyone is able to figure out the hidden message in this image, I'll buy them a free beer.

I blame CSI.

There aren't that many alternatives on the market that feature good support for 1bit images. Even if they do support 1bit, most features tend to be turned off (Photoshop can't even deal with layers or effects in 1bit mode). The only exception to this rule seems to be PhotoLine, which does a quite admirable job, and layers, vectors, many live effects, adjustments, layer masks, an so on actually work as expected in 1bit mode. It's quite impressive, really, because there is no need to convert to 1bit mode: it all works live. Almost feels like working on an old-fashioned 1-bit CRT monitor of old. It would be great if Affinity Photo could provide us with a similar level of 1bit support in the future. But for now perhaps consider PhotoLine in combination with Affinity to solve your 1bit workflow.

"Some for Blender"? That is an understatement if I ever read one! The number of good Blender tutorials number in the zillions by now. The amount of Affinity tutorials pale in comparison. Trouble is, Blender is far broader and deeper in scope than both Designer and Photo combined. So you will have to pick your battles. Start out with a basic course, and then choose a path: character modeling and rigging, rendering, product modeling and rendering, lighting, animation, visual effects, architectural modeling and rendering, texturing, particle effects, etcetera, etcetera, and so on.