Medical Officer Bones

@SrPx I do agree with you that having it all in one application would be nice. But all the issues I encountered today while doing some drawing in Photo tell me that Photo isn't able to make the cut at this point. I mean, in other painting apps and image editors a simple free transformation is possible, which is still unavailable in Photo. And that is just a very small simple missing requirement. Yes, Photo is nice for image compositing, but if the drawing tools and performance and quality thereof won't cut it, I prefer to do all my digital inking, drawing, and painting in a dedicated application like ClipStudio and Krita. Photo's GUI is rather counter-productive for drawing, inking, and painting in my opinion. I really gave it a try, but the one thing I love about Krita for example, is its artist friendly GUI, meant to get on and focus on illustrating, drawing, etc. Right-mouse click gives me everything I need to work quickly, even without a keyboard. Nothing gets in the way, while Photo's GUI kept on getting in the way. That's why I use a combination of various tools to do my artwork. In the past 30 years I have not encountered one app that does it all equally well, or even on a level that would make me stick to that one application only, and that includes Photoshop. Here's a specific example of comic work: I need to create a conversion of 1200ppi black and white of my line art and create a PDF that consists of a layered colour art at 300ppi and that 1bit 1200ppi artwork. Can't do it in Photo or Photoshop. I can accomplish this in either InDesign or PhotoLine, so I use those for the job. What I am trying to say here is that any general-purpose image compositor is going to have to limitation in terms of specialist usage. I used to work in Photoshop exclusively, until I realized years ago that there were far more convenient drawing and inking apps out there. As an illustrator, I love inking in ClipStudio, and while it doesn't offer all the compositing whistles and bells of Photo, Photoshop, or PhotoLine, that particular step of the illustration process is (for me) far more preferable, efficient and just plain NICE to do in CS. I mean, the cleanup tools for inking are terrific! And vector-based, if required. Now, Photo (for me) can't even get the basics right at this point in time. I hope it will in the upcoming version, or the version after that. But I can't see it ever replacing dedicated drawing software. And I also work on game textures, assets, various graphic jobs, just like you. I wouldn't touch Photo for pixel art either, and use other software. Just another example: 3d texture painting work I do in 3d Coat: I could possible do this in Photo, but that would be severely limit the process and workflow. Even Photoshop's 3d painting tools are pretty terrible, and I personally know of no 3d artist using it (unless extended with plugins). Users here have been clamoring for extensive animation tools in Photo/Designer. Why? I understand the need for simple animation tools, but once the job requirements go beyond a certain scope, a dedicated animation tool is the right tool, not a half-hearted attempt like the one in Photoshop, for example. I can't see any image editor or graphics app do it all and do it in a proficient manner. I don't even think it is possible, honestly, nor do I see the point, because its GUI would overload itself. Not having a good text tool in a painting app is really of secondary concern, I feel. How often do we actually use text? At the end for lettering. I wouldn't use either Photo or Designer for that job either: the lack of threaded text boxes and other typography limitations once again urge me to use other tools. I realize I am an extreme pragmatist: I use the tool that gives me the nicest workflow and best result, and that depends on the job at hand. This automatically precludes applications that attempt to do it all. Now... having said all this, and having veered off the trodden path here... The stabilizer in Photo is unusable for me in its current state. Without the stabilizer zoomed out on a larger canvas the line wobbles terribly, and I get kinks in the round corners. With the stabilizer and the default settings it behaves like one of those Lazy Nezumi stabilizer where the brush follows a lasso. Urgh. Lowering the setting to 1 or 2 px re-introduces wobbles and kinks. Needs more work. I prefer to draw without a stabilizer myself (yes, I have a very stable hand!), and none of the stabilizer settings I tried provided me with a satisfying drawing experience in Photo. And I don't mind, really, because dedicated drawing apps blow general image editors out of the water anyway. Although it would be nice if the devs fix this in an upcoming release. Because SrPx is correct in stating that for simple quick inking jobs you don't always want to switch to a dedicated app, and just do it in Photo itself. And please devs, get that free transform tool in order. PS on a positive note: really loving Photo for the HDR bracketing and tone mapping!

Thanks a bunch - that did the trick. It was turned on. I think I activated that option when I went through all the preferences, which I invariably do first with each new app that I install to adjust it to my workflow likings. As for brush system issues: uhm, well, I've only done some quick tests in the past hour, or so, and for me personally I fail to see why I would want to do any drawing and inking in Photo. Or digital painting, for that matter. Too many quirks, limitations, and GUI issues to get into right now, but here are the ones that come to mind after trying to ink and sketch a bit: - zoomed out high rez canvas inking and drawing with thin pencils/inks results in bumpy lines and strokes. Round corners look awful: sharp kinks. Stabilizer fixes some of these things, but only at length values which cause indirect drawing "feel"; laggy feeling. So either laggy stabilized drawing (which I hate: I prefer to draw with as little stabilizing as possible), or bumpy lines. No setting that mitigates both. I experienced similar issues in other applications in the past. These got resolved at some point along their development, and Photo hasn't found a good balance yet in my opinion. - the anti-aliasing for thin lines when zoomed out at a zoom percentage other than X2 is (sorry) terrible. I am used to ClipStudio and Krita, which have beautiful anti-aliasing even with thin lines zoomed out on a large canvas. (I also encountered a bug: on a 10.000x5000px canvas the thin lineart disappears completely when zooming out to 25% or lower. Only by dragging the mouse over the hidden line art do these appear once more (in sections). This fixed itself later when I moved the canvas) The anti-aliasing is horrifically bad, though, and unacceptable at these lower zoom levels. - no free transform option. Or at least, no quick selection/free transform to adjust the corner points individually and do a quick fix of proportions of part of a drawing. Yes, I am aware that this is being worked on, but I can't see myself working an image editor or painting app without this option. It is still disconcerting to see it hasn't been added yet. (Yes, I am aware of the perspective tool/filter. It kills the workflow. Make a selection, hit V, and allow the user to drag the corner points individually: how hard can it be?) - the drawing GUI, brush selection GUI and general Affinity GUI is a show stopper as well for me. Works fine for overall image compositing (excepting the layer panel, of which the thumbnails are fixed in tiny sizes), but for drawing and painting? Too many flaws. - painting with relatively simple ~300px sized Drawing brushes caused uncontrollable lagging when making longer strokes on a zoomed out 10.000x5000 canvas. This doesn't happen in ClipStudio, Krita, or Photoshop. I don't want to sound negative (I realize I do). Please keep in mind these are my personal observations. Affinity Photo is a young application. I will wait until the devs have improved the overall drawing/inking/painting experience, and then give it another whirl.

Weird issue I am encountering in Photo. I have a Wacom Pro Large tablet, and when I try to draw with the brush, Photo only registers the first and last position of the stroke, and draws a straight line. Drawing with the mouse works as expected. No issues whatsoever with my Wacom in other software: Photoshop, Krita, PhotoLine, and any other image app with drawing tools, 3D software, etc. Only Photo behaves like this. This is a new installation of Affinity Photo (after using Designer for a while now, I got Photo for its HDR bracketing tools). I thought to give the drawing tools in Photo another chance after having tested them a year ago, but I'm off to a bad start. Anyone have any idea what might be causing Photo to behave like this? Working on a three screen Windows 10 setup, GTX 1080 8GB.

G'MIC has a very nice selection of artistic filters. Download Krita, which has a selection of artistic filters and the complete G'MIC built-in. Open source and free. https://krita.org/en/ https://gmic.eu/ Would be nice if Affinity Photo would include G'MIC at some point. To use Krita, download from krita.org, drag/open your image/developed RAW from Photo in Krita, then open the Filter-->Start G'MIC-Qt. Look under "Artistic". Aside from these you will find a bunch more under "Filters-->Artistic".

Well, you did mention that there's a whole lot of noise relating to ppi and dpi on the web. I just wanted to clarify things a bit more. By the way, you wrote that you have a Canon printer? If it is a newer model (last few years) it may very well support 600ppi prints as well at high quality settings on quality glossy paper. In that case you might want to feed it 600ppi images instead of 300ppi ones. That is another point I made: know (the hardware limits of) you output device.

"Actual inches" don't really exist in the physical world either. When you measure an inch with your ruler in -20 degrees in Alberta, CA in Winter time and at +40 degrees in Summer time, those inches will not be of the same length. All human measures don't exist in the physical world, and are but a human invented tool to make sense of things.

Right. It's the only time inches actually are inches. That depends. I am going to amend Toltec's answer here. Toltec already explained a bit how image setters work, but for a more elaborate answer check out this article: http://samcoprinters.com/choosing-the-right-image-resolution-for-your-print-job/.html Now, there are three additional variables which may completely change the PPI you need for a physical print: 1) whether the image is a continuous tone image or a pure black and white one, and; 2) your print output device, and; 3) whether the printed result is going to be of (very) large dimensions and seen from a (large) distance or not. So far the discussion has limited itself to regular print work, e.g. brochures, small pamphlets, magazines, books, small posters, and so on. When printing continuous tone images, i.e. a typical colour or grayscale photo, we calculate the required PPI by first knowing and/or deciding what the physical output size is. For example, suppose we needed our photo to be printed in a magazine half top page size. Let's assume we'd be preparing a continuous tone image for WIRED, a well-known magazine that is printed at 8” x 10.875” Final Trim Size (inches) or 20.32cm by 27.6225cm. The top half page size will be 8" x 5.4375". Which means in Photo we set up a document at that size and 300ppi (dpi is the wrong unit in photo's New document dialog). When we check the pixel dimensions this yields 2400 x 1632px (unfortunately Photo allows for decimal pixels, and shows 1631.3px). That is the exact resolution we need to print our image at 8" x 5.4375". When this image is saved, we must also ensure that the file's ppi value is set to 300. When the image is imported into InDesign, the image will be imported with exactly those dimensions, and placed at the correct relative calculated size in WIRED's page layout. [ ! ] I did not calculate bleed into the final size of this image. When an image is printed half-page like described, three of its edges will touch the page edges exactly, and the person doing the layout will have to bleed the image off the page by at least 1/8 of an inch (depends on the publisher). Ideally you would add this 1/8" to the dimensions of your image on those three sides. However, often the image is scaled up a bit, which hardly affects the quality of the print. [ !! ] it is always a good idea to work at twice the required resolution (or more depending) in case the client needs a full page version (or even a full spread, which means working at 4 times the resolution), and then downscaling the result at the very end. Also, keep in mind that many home printers cannot reach the full 300ppi continuous tone quality, but many can. Depends on the desktop printer type. Dedicated photo printers do a very nice job, so keep it at a minimum of 300ppi. Now, this works fine for continuous tone images such as colour and black-and-white (greyscale) photos. But what if we needed to create a pure black and white design to be printed with pure black ink? Then we need to reconsider our resolution requirements. Let's take a black and white comic as an example (something I work with). As Toltec explained earlier, a typical image setter works at a dot resolution of 2400~2540dpi. Ideally you'd probably think that it's a fairly simple calculation: 1 black pixel ought to represent 1 black printed dot. However, printing on paper is a messy business, and the way paper is saturated with ink means it will not be possible to arrive at that perfect print resolution in practice. For higher-quality glossy paper comic pages, ideally we provide 1200ppi pure black and white inks. It depends a bit on the paper, though: I'd say 800ppi is the minimum at which to provide the artwork at (NOT CONTINOUS TONE!!!). For coloured comic prints, the colours (continuous tone artwork) should be again provided at 300ppi and the correct calculated minimum pixel resolution as explained above). The 1200ppi black and white artwork is then printed on top of this colour work. (this is not possible to pull off in Photo, btw - you will need a layout app that supports such layering and output - communicate with your printer how they want this). (Coincidentally, that is also what happens when lettering is printed: a black ink letter is printed at the highest (practically) resolution. This is why lettering looks so much sharper on paper compared to a colour photo: a photo is always converted to rasters/halftones, while text is not. It is pure black. You should never allow black text to be rastered, otherwise you'll get fuzzy looking text!) So, expanding on the WIRED example, if we'd be preparing a pure black and white half-page advert or image, then we calculate the required pixel resolution like this: 8" x 5.4375" and 1200ppi: 9600px X 6525px at 1bit (ideally with transparency for easy layout layering later). This seems like a huge resolution, but we are working at the physical limits of an image setter and paper print. This will allow for the best print quality, and look razor sharp when printed. But again, it depends on the paper quality. If you print on newspaper medium, you can go much lower, e.g 800ppi. To complicate matters, if our black and white output would be printed on a typical laser printer, we would have to check its DPI capabilities. Nowadays most do 600dpi or 1200ppi. Which means you'll be fine with working at the aforementioned calculated resolution. And don't forget it is probably a good idea to work at a higher resolution just in case the client needs to output to a full page or spread later. At which point we begin to realize why vector applications exist since working at these ridiculous pixel dimensions isn't very helpful. Instead, we'd create our black and white half-page design in Designer or Illustrator. And import and bitmap art work at the size we would need (back to the drawing board and recalculate the minimum 1200ppi numbers!). No-one said this was going to be easy or simple. This is why so many people are utterly confused how DPI and PPI work, and how they relate to printing. BUT WAIT! IT GETS WORSE! Because everything that I've explained about so far, is for regular print work that is read from an arm's length distance only. What if our client wants that image to be plastered against the top five floors of a 8 story high building? Do we output that twenty meter by 15 meter print at 300PPI like before? NO. That would result in a file that is unworkable to print. Instead, the image is prepared at a surprisingly low resolution. It depends on the viewing distance. Check out http://resources.printhandbook.com/pages/viewing-distance-dpi.php We would prepare our file at a max PPI of 2. Yes, 2ppi. So, let's take that WIRED half-page example again: suppose we should create a 20 by 15 meters large image that will be viewed from 100 meters and more. 20m X 15m and 2 PPI should do it. Result: 1575px by 1181px. That's it. It means that you could just crop and scale down your original WIRED image to that resolution, and hand it over to your printer (this will be a digital print, btw: no image setters exist that print at those dimentions). The banner printer will take care of the practical output technicalities, but that resolution will suffice. (PS digital billboards work at very low resolutions. Here you would provide an exact pixel-to-LED pixel conversion. A typical digital billboard resolution is 888px X 260px. Just like the old times when working with computer screen assets. Sigh, easy times!) Anyway, just a brief overview. Preparing assets for screen-based technology is a whole different story, and I won't go into that right now. Suffice to say, you can't rely on 1-on-1 pixel conversions anymore, as we did in the past. Nowadays it's actually worse than print, which is relatively easy to wrap your head around. And: always contact your print service provider/printer what they require for the job. And make sure to work on a colour calibrated screen (that means getting some hardware: a Spyder, Munki, etc.! And no, there's no way around this if you value colour correct work. Really, just get one.).

All the justifications in the world for not having a non-destructive RAW development option in Affinity Photo won't make the fact go away that competing image editing software such as Photoshop and PhotoLine do allow for a non-destructive RAW workflow, as do a range of RAW developers like Lightroom, CaptureOne, ACDSee, On1Photo 10, DxO Optics, ... Arguably avoiding Affinity Photo's Develop Persona in favour of a non-destructive RAW developer's output and opening that in Photo may be preferable in terms of workflow over its destructive workflow (and preferably just use an external file layer if Affinity would support an external file reference live link).

I stand corrected. I went on a bit of a rant due to past experiences with Corel, and my disappointment in the development of Painter years and years ago. Which led me to look for alternatives. Reading back my earlier response (rant), I recognize a lot of emotional frustration that was pent up and expressed in it. You are of course right in writing that we all have different purposes when working with digital painting and drawing software. In my case, I mainly do cartoon/comics and conceptual work, as well as game art and asset design. I am not as much interested in fine art, although I have been known to do the odd Bargue drawing :-) That said, Painter is lacking and lagging in key areas (for me at least) which Corel seemingly just aren't interested in fixing. Two of the primary reasons I left Painter behind are inking and overall performance. Inking using Painter is not very nice, and the tools limited, which is why I use ClipStudio EX, which has incredibly responsive drawing tools, and resolution independent vector drawing which feel very natural for inking. The fact that these can easily be edited is quite nice as well. With inking I go up to 1200ppi, and most other software can't deal with that. Krita I do most of my concepts and texture painting in nowadays. And I often need to work in 16 bit per channel for game work - something still not supported in Painter, unfortunately. Currently I favour Krita's GUI over most other drawing software - it allows me to work quickly and efficiently without touching the keyboard (much) and just get on with the job on my Wacom. ClipStudio's GUI gets in the way somewhat, as does Affinity's GUI. Anyway, it wasn't my intention to belittle your use of Painter. Painter still has some of the best blending in the biz, and a lot of favour going for it when it comes down to creating art with it. The latest 2019 release seems to at least fix a lot of issues of previous two versions, and hopefully the Corel devs are planning on modernizing and expanding the obvious holes in the app in the upcoming release. It's good they focused on making a more stable application. Software is just software. I allowed my tribal human self to pop out, and for that I apologize. If the software works for you as a artist, more power to you. Happy painting! PS as for RIF support: is that really necessary? I mean, exporting your work as TIFF or PNG, for example, and importing that in Affinity Photo would work too? That's what I do when I finish off a piece made in Krita/ClipStudio, for example.

My previous post was somewhat off-topic, and I went off on a rant :-) Anyway, I see no point of RIF file support in Affinity. And I would add a third option to your two: - drop Painter like the dead weight it is, and switch to other digital painting software. Use that together with Affinity.

Corel is a terrible company to deal with - or at least how they and their marketing treat Painter. The latest version 2019 was released a couple of week ago, and is pretty much a maintenance update which should have been made freely available to their users. A dark GUI and 650 redesigned icons seem to be the big features in this latest update. As for Painter itself - urgh.. Still no 16/32 bit per channel, water colours and impasto are done much better in competing products (art rage, Paint Storm), no decent free transform tools, it is absolutely dreadful for inking/line art, many tools haven't seen updates in decades,... The list goes on and on. The layer stack is doggone-awful to work with, brush creation and editing is a excruciating experience compared to Krita, ClipStudio, and even Photoshop, and so on, colour management is fraught with problems, and so on, and so forth. And it still is quite crash prone - without a file rescue/restore option! Remember Ryan Church? The concept art guy who used to be a big Painter guy? Well, he gave up on the app, and nowadays works in Photoshop. If that isn't a tell-tale sign, I don't know what is. It got so bad that at some point that the program was abandoned by just about everyone in Japan, for example - and no wonder with an alternative like ClipStudio that is far less expensive. Sorry to be so harsh sounding, but I used to be a big Painter fan a bit over a decade ago, and even taught classes using Painter. It's a train-wreck, slow as heck on larger canvasses (I paint at A4@300ppi minimum and for line art at a minimum of 600-800ppi). Ever since version 7 and Corel marketing their thick paint brush engine it's been downhill since. Corel marketing has run it into the ground.

I hate to bring up a competing product's elegant solutions to these issues, but perhaps these can serve as inspiration how to improve how the layer stack works in Affinity. In PhotoLine this is solved as follows: 1) adjustment layers can be grouped together in one "super" adjustment layer, allowing for simple adjustment layer management, and the option to access all adjustment layer parameters simultaneously 2) adjustment layers can be grouped and duplicated as a group 3) adjustment layers, groups of adjustment layers, and the "super" adjustment layers can be cloned or instanced, and recycled. A change to the original adjustment layers cascades throughout the clones. Which really saves a lot of time and effort. 4) adjustment layers act and behave exactly like regular layers, making it very easy to manage and handle them. They can be moved with ease on top of a layer, or parented. Or even parented to other adjustment layers, affecting adjustments with other adjustments, ad infinitum. It is by far the most elegant adjustment layer implementation that I have seen so far in any image editor (outside nodal compositors), and it would be great if the Affinity devs take one or two cues from that app.

+1 from me. I sometimes still use Illustrator for the odd job to do this, but come on: even PhotoLine has a very nice implementation of combined vector/bitmap patterns. And procedural textures. The way these are controlled with intuitive and responsive canvas controls is something that wouldn't go amiss in Affinity.

@SrPx Photoshop CC 2018 runs very smoothly on my (decade old i7) machine without issues, and fast (probably thanks to the GTX1080). As I said, drawing and painting works smooth, excepting in edge cases, where Krita's instant preview mode takes the crown. But really, no issues whatsoever in both applications in terms of painting and drawing/inking. (p.s. I have a full Adobe CC sub) I do think the new version of PS finally answered calls from digital painters for long-standing issues to be resolved, such as the lack of mirror painting, stroke stabilizer, other painting improvements. The trouble I have with PS is more of a workflow oriented one: in my opinion the GUI works against you - in particular for digital painting/drawing. It's a cumbersome tool. And I've used Photoshop professionally since version 3 in nineties. Like you I prefer both CS and Krita, and I tend to prefer Krita over CS because of the GUI. It's small things for me in Photoshop. Too many to get into right now, but to mention but a few: layer mask and selection limitations, no HUD, no middle mouse button to pan the canvas quickly, the silly smart objects workflow (for non-destructive scaling and live effects) which cannot update in realtime when edited, a 16pbc mode that is really a 15bpc mode, and a legion of other workflow issues, many of which originate from legacy decisions in the past. Is PS the best "all-in-one" image editor? Arguably yes. I've set up my pipeline of tools for 2d and 3d work which outpace Photoshop for everything I need to do, though. So even though I have access to PS, I was just tired too deal with all the legacy workflow issues, limitation, and bugs in PS that I decided five years ago to move away from Photoshop and switch to other (more specialist) tools. InDesign is still my to-go tool for layout jobs, though. Publisher needs to be VERY good to lure me away from InDesign. Anyway, I am digressing. I think we agree on most points here. I wish ClipStudio's GUI would be less reliant on the traditional panels. Paintstorm (while gimmicky in places) actually has a lot of in favour for it in regards to how to deal with those panels. In short, I love that HUD in Krita.

@NNois Thanks for the tip - I will try that this weekend. Yes, I did notice all drawing apps have a slight mini-lag, and you've piqued my curiosity now. *edit* So I've discovered something interesting. ClipStudio always felt a bit better than Krita while drawing, and it's exactly what you spotted: in Krita on Windows (and Photoshop) the brush has a mini-lag. This doesn't happen in either ClipStudio or Paintstorm.

Cows, pigs, and the meat industry and humans eating their meat on a daily basis are far, FAR worse for our planet. Let's keep things in perspective, right?

Krita and ClipStudio are the two I use for painting and drawing. I have a nice large Wacom Pro, and I always wrap a sheet of high quality drawing paper around it, because I dislike the Wacom's drawing surface. And it gives me that traditional paper texture feel while drawing . Can't do that with a Cintiq You know, I used Photoshop in the past for drawing, and I gave Photoshop CC (latest version with the improved drawing tools and stroke stabilizer) a whirl today. Simply put, I still don't like it (understatement if ever there was one). I typically work on a minimum of a A4@600ppi canvas (4961 by 7016 pixels). For simple sketching and quick inking both Krita and ClipStudio feel much more direct and responsive. I tend to turn off any stroke stabilizers while drawing and painting (sometimes I use it for inking jobs). The much-touted new stroke stabilizer in Photoshop left me distinctly unimpressed. It lags, and compared to ClipStudio and Krita it's pretty terrible. It just feels wrong how the PS devs implemented it. But Photoshop always left me wanting in terms of drawing feel. It is just lacking after you've tried some of the alternatives out there. Performance-wise I compared the new version of PS with Krita. I used a simple 500px inking brush, and made quick strokes. Photoshop struggles for me. It's laggy, and can't keep up. A trick used in PS is to increase the spacing of dabs, but this results in less than optimal results. But once I started using more advanced brushes at 200px brush sizes, even relatively small sized brushes would lag and at some point updating the stroke became a slide show. Krita is fully multi-threaded while drawing nowadays, but with more advanced brushes the instant preview mode allows for real-time feedback while working. This is something that works really well for me. Compared, Photoshop cannot keep up. At all. Anyway, these type of comparisons are quite academic. I almost never use such large brushes for regular work. I did notice that ClipStudio works like a charm on low-powered hardware, though, where both Photoshop and Krita become almost unusable. Not sure how the CS devs accomplish that, but on a very slow Windows Wacom slate (Asus EPE-121) of mine it is a joy to work with CS. For me the GUI in Krita is by far the best one, though. I don't have to leave the tablet and touch the keyboard, can work in full screen mode, and that right-mouse click HUD just works. Krita is very artist workflow friendly. Working with the on-screen HUD is brilliant. 85% of the time that HUD is more than enough. The keyboard gets in the way in most other apps. It's so easy to assign favorite brushes, and group things. Your last used colours are displayed, and, and ,and. Just a really nice workflow in Krita for the artist to focus on painting and drawing, rather than GUI panels. Photoshop is DREADFUL in regards to GUI for drawing. Really, it's TERRIBLE compared. At least there's a right-mouse click mini hud, but it pales in comparison, and the brush management, while it received a number of improvements in the latest vesion, still cumbersome. ClipStudio - well, CS has that "Japanese artist" type of interface. Hard to put a finger on it - I feel the same about OpenToonz, and apps like Mirai. It's not bad, but CS's GUI is too panel oriented. No HUD, which it would benefit from. I love the drawing feel in CS, but the GUI leaves a lot to be desired. I got Frenden's brush presets, which are nice. But the flow in Krita is much preferable over the one in CS (for me, at least). CS's GUI gets in the way at times. Yeah, and Affinity Photo: no, the (work)flow is really too much alike to Photoshop or other image editors without a focus on digital drawing and painting. Just doesn't work for me. Nothing wrong with that, of course: it is not Affinity's primary objective. The Krita devs always state clearly that they've decided a long time ago to focus on drawing and painting workflow, and not trying to be an super-duper image editor as well. And true enough, I would never use Krita for compositing jobs. So, it would be nice to have more of Krita's GUI in CS. And some of CS's performance on lower tech in Krita. Photoshop for drawing and painting? Blurghhh. Don't see the point (brush). PS Have you tried Painstorm Studio yet? It does some interesting things, and I am evaluating it right now. The semi-transparent panels work well - really well. And all panels are seamlessly scalable. Also some extraordinary nice real-world looking brushes. The price is ridiculously low. Funny tool: there's a tool to paint the interface - no, really! First impressions hold up well so far. http://www.paintstormstudio.com/index.html

I always found it interesting that no professional-level layer-based image editor/compositor is available natively on Linux systems in spite of Linux playing a very important role in Visual Effects, 3D and (high level) film compositing and editing. Software such as Nuke, Houdini, Maya, etc. are all there, (support for 3d and high level compositing and VFX work is arguably much better on Linux than on the Mac platform) and I heard and read about how large film studios maintain a couple of Windows or Mac systems with the sole purpose of running Photoshop to prepare assets for import. But perhaps the complexity of the work at high-end studios and the relatively tiny designer user base explain why so far nothing (outside Gimp and Krita) has appeared for the platform: on the one hand the complexity of production-level VFX and compositing work automatically means that a layer-based approach is just not feasible (requiring node-based compositing and VFX), and the lack of powerful animation controls only exacerbates this, while on the other hand the lack of professional designers working on Linux means most users never leave the confinements of relatively simple image editing work (for which Gimp more than suffices and is steadily improving). Gimp is becoming good enough now with the addition of 16bpc and 32bpc (and the upcoming adjustment layers), and digital painting is already catered for with Krita. And if you are working as a 3d artist or compositor your primary tools and workflows wouldn't care much for a high-flying image editor, because excellent production proven tools already are available. As a 3d artist I probably couldn't care less about the presence of Affinity Photo on the Linux platform (or even on Windows and Mac) when I have access to Substance Painter and Designer for my texture work. I'd be heavily invested in those tools, and for the odd simple image editing I'd probably just get something free like Krita or even Gimp. Hence, no real user base exists on Linux that would invest money in a commercial layer-based image editor. Corel tried, and failed. It turned out to be not feasible. So as a commercial company like Serif and Adobe, I'd think twice before committing a lot of human resources and money down a potential rabbit hole with little or no return on investment. And honestly, I just don't see those few independent professional linux-based artists leave their tools for a less powerful tool (for example, David Revoy works in Krita, and whether you like it or not, Krita surpasses both Photoshop and Affinity Photo in regards to digital painting). And besides, many of these artists and designers tend to be advocates for open software, and probably wouldn't give commercial software a second glance, if even a first glance. It's not part of their style or life/work philosophy. On top of all this another concern for commercial vendors of software: when I install Linux Mint on people's machines (like my wife's :-) ), Gimp and LibreOffice are pre-installed, ready to play. Installing other graphics software is just three clicks away. I don't see the average user clamouring for Affinity Photo when they can immediately open Gimp to do some simple image editing, or install Microsoft Office. Unless you'd be a professional 3d artist/film compositor/VFX artst and have need of Nuke or Maya or Houdini or etc. - but those professionals on Linux work in very different industries, and certainly not in the print industry. They couldn't care less for Affinity Designer, for example. Designer wouldn't stand a chance anyway on Linux, not with competing products such as Gravit Designer (and which is available for free too) carving out a niche on the Linux platform. Mac is a completely different ball game, despite the smaller user base: most professional designers and print involved people work on Macs, and the user base for a product like Affinity is just... there. It exists. In particular with disgruntled Adobe users grasping at the opportunity to leave the Adobe ecosystem, even if the tools aren't that strong as the Adobe ones. From the moment when I first saw Serif's marketing, and how it was aimed at the professional groups of Mac users in the existing graphic designers and photographers communities, I knew Affinity would sell well and become a success. It would be impossible to generate that vibe amongst Linux users. It's a very different user base, and the two are living in worlds far apart. I would like to see products like Affinity Photo and Designer on the Linux platform, but when I think about the target users, I just don't feel there's much chance of landing many new users to sell the products to. Photo might make a few hundred sales, but Designer? No chance. All in all, not a lot of money-making potential.

We, the Ministry of Inclusiveness and Diversity, concur. The imagery of humans on all Affinity product pages is, in one way or another, problematic from the point of view of gender, diversity, and cultural/religious perspectives. What follows is an overall review of imagery as used on all of Affinity's landing pages. Affinity Photo landing page 1 androgynous person at the top (unclear gender: could be both, or neither). This could be an affront to religious (sub-)culture groups. Or make some more traditionally oriented conservative groups uncomfortable. Some males may take offense. Some females may take offense. Better to remove. 1 woman's face to demonstrate retouching tools. This is an industry-targeted image, but the abuse of a woman's image leverages her looks in a feminist unfriendly manner. Perhaps an additional image of a muscular man with fake retouched abs? But that would be man-unfriendly, male-sexist, and gender conforming image as well. Can't do one, can't do the other. Removal would be best. Don't show retouching of any person, bimodal or otherwise. 1 woman used in an illustration in the PSD import/export. Only the face, though. There's a half-naked male surfer. Both are an affront to certain groups. The male is "surfing" the girl, which could be explained in a negative context and perhaps be seen as a symbol of male patriarchal domination over women. The half-naked male serves as an unwanted male sex-symbol, and also may cause friction with certain groups with thyroid issues hurting their self-image. 1 male in the Stunning real-time effects: the thought that only males would be able to drive motor cycles is an affront to gender-equality in the job market in general and motor sports in particular. However, portraying a woman being blown to bits might send out a negative message that alludes to women's inability to drive vehicles and causing more accidents than males (which is untrue, because young males cause statistically many more traffic accidents compared to young females). Best to remove this person, and just show the bike (best to check with motor bike brand if management objects to their cycle being blown up as well). Affinity on iPad landing page 1 female portrayal in the heading. The snake symbolizes evil and the fall from grace, indeed the mortal sin, caused by a certain female in certain religious thinking. This is seen as a negative female portrayal by many sub-culture groups, and is better removed from the page to prevent misunderstanding. Seeing that all art portraying women throughout history somehow may be offensive to any one sub-culture group, it is advisable to remove all such instances or references. Perhaps instead show only the leaves. 1 young female child under the "Capabilities never seen before on iPad": portrayal of children may be seen as unwanted in certain sub-cultures. Better remove any such imagery. Two other instances on this page ought to be removed as well. 1 female at Dedicated retouching tools: See same comment above. Remove. 1 human hand at Fully optimised for iOS 11: a pure white hand may be understood as a symbol for white Caucasians, and be indicative for a lack of inclusive thinking in regards to cultural and racial diversity. The pointing nature of the hand gesture might be seen as an authoritative gesture. Removal is advised. Multiple instances of white hands on this page ought to be removed to prevent further potential misunderstanding. 1 partly visible young attractive female at Super accurate selections: might be construed again as a sexist image. Replacing with an attractive male could be seen as taking advantage of a sexist male image. Replacing with unattractive looking people might stir up negative connotations in other sub-culture groups. Call for removal. 1 attractive caucasian male face partly visible at Dedicated RAW studio: might be construed as a male sexist image. Remove. Affinity Designer landing page 1 depiction of a female snake: suffice to say that this illustration cannot be used safely without hurting the feelings of certain sub-culture groups. A very limited and small range of female and male depictions in the graphics used on this page. For example, a stylized group of humans with ochre red skins might be seen as inappropriate cultural appropriation of certain sub-culture groups of indigenous people. For the sake of inclusive thinking, it would be preferable to remove such imagery. Tentative Conclusions In short, in favour of gender-neutrality and cultural/religious (sub-)culture diversity and inclusion, we (that is, an all-inclusive group of humans with no reference or preference to any gender-biased, cultural, racial, or religious (sub-)culture grouping) recommend the removal of all human forms and shapes from all landing pages. This is to ensure all humans and human members of biological and/or imagined sub-cultures, be it from political, religious, cultural points of view and who may feel excluded and/or misappropriated, abused, or genuinely uncomfortable in the most general and/or personal sense are respected and in no way whatsoever made to experience negative emotions on any personal level, not excluding individual personal subjective realities. Furthermore, It would also be wise to refrain from portraying any animals on these pages, and, in effect, the most inclusive imagery would indeed be to include no imagery at all. Thank you. The Ministry of Human Inclusiveness and Diversity with the distinct understanding that this ministry identifies itself with no specific (sub-)cultural human groups based in any kind of racial, gender, cultural, biological, or religious thinking, opinions, philosophies, nor any personal subjective reality, including the Ministry of inclusiveness and Diversity itself.

If you are desperate to leave Photoshop behind: Krita and PhotoLine both have no issues with controlling layer transformation anti-aliasing and resampling algorithms.

Here is a nice list of pixel editors by Lospec. https://lospec.com/pixel-art-software-list And Lospec also has some good tutorials, as well as great colour palettes for download.

@boriscargo you could do far worse than Krita for pixeling work. Available for Mac and completely free. The timeline is perfect for pixel animation. But why didn't you get Asesprite for Mac? Same price as PiskelApp, and native Mac. Well, you will have to deal with that GUI (personal experience may vary).

You should be able to get your money back - most consumer laws in countries allow you to change your mind within a week. That said, a quick look at the reviews and comments on the Mac store show that it hasn't been updated in a looong time. Abandonware indeed.

@SrPx For fun download Deluxe Paint 5 at https://thecompany.pl/game/Deluxe+Paint+5.2 It's a packaged Amiga Emulator with Deluxe Paint, and runs as a regular desktop application (well, almost...). Hit F12 to change the view mode (I prefer windowed mode: modern screens ruin the proportions it was supposed to run at originally). It's fun to play around with. PS I made the mistake to download Jetstrike from that site, and I am completely hooked again. I tried PiskelApp a few months ago when I first heard about it, but again the palette isn't a true indexed colour palette, which I prefer to work with. Aside from this, the GUI drives me insane, because everything is fixed in place, nothing can be customized. The preview is tiny on my 2560x1440 screens, and cannot be properly zoomed in or out. When I open the preview in a popup the window hides behind the main window. Urgh. And I can't move the canvas freely when zoomed out: it locks at the edges of the canvas. Layer functionality is severely limited, and opacity is controlled via an awkward popup. Palette control is nigh-on non-existant. The pixel drawing tool doesn't support 1px drawing, forcing me to do more cleanup. And so on. It has a couple of interesting option, I agree. Good for beginning pixel artists. But too confined and limited for my taste. Still, it is a free product. The thing that bothers me most nowadays is that most apps just don't offer very good or controllable timelines to do animation with. And if they do, then they generally don't focus enough on pixeling tools. Or lack an indexed colour palette option. No one app seems to offer the perfect balance. Since I do a lot of animation, any tool I use should have good animation control and tools. Affinity lacks animation and an indexed colour palette option. The tools are okay for pixeling. Lacks in various departments: non-proportional pixels, 1px clean drawing, etc. The lack of animation tools are an automatic fail, unfortunately. Photoshop has an indexed mode, but turns off most functionality: no layers, most filters don't work. And besides, the timeline is pretty horrific to work with, but at least PS has animation. Again lacking focused pixeling tools. It's okay for pixel art. Similar limitations as Affinity. Asesprite gets a lot right, and so much wrong at the same time. The timeline is nice, and layer-based. Great pixeling tools. Indexed is there if you want it. But the GUI. The GUI makes no sense at all to me: why force a low-resolution pixel interface? Why is everything static and nothing can't be customized or at least the workspace tailored to a user's individual preferences? The low resolution affects the app's usability in SO many ways, it is difficult to know where to start. Just look at the layers GUI: extra popup dialogs to change the opacity, the blend mode, etc. Krita. Really nice animation timeline, layer based. Nice onion skinning, very controllable compared to most other editors. Pixel brushes now come standard, and a pixel grid. No indexed colours, though, and tools such as the circle tool don't work properly for pixel art (devs are working on this, I read). If only Krita had an indexed colour mode. PhotoLine lacks proper animation tools, although the layer stack can be used as a timeline for animation. Similar situation as with Affinity and Photoshop. Good and bad things for pixel art. Again no indexed colour mode. Good control over anti-aliasing of vectors, though. GraphicsGale is kinda nice to work with, although the GUI is rather outdated and clunky. Good indexed palette support. Good pixeling tools (including pixel perfect drawing). The timeline is frame-based and doesn't work with layers, unfortunately. Similar to Photoshop and PiskelApp and many other off-the-shelf pixel art editors. Pro Motion NG leaves little desired for palette control and pixeling tools. Brush workflow may not be everyone's cup of tea, though it is powerful. Nice proper standard layer controls and GUI. And the GUI is very customizable. The timeline is the standard 1 frame no layers affair again, sadly enough, which is maddening since it is pretty close to what I envision to be the perfect pixel art animation app. Just a small comparison. What strikes me as odd is that no singular app gets it completely right for pixel work in my opinion. If good pixeling tools are present, the timeline is wanting. If the timeline is great, no index palette control and the pixeling tools aren't good enough compared to other applications. And so on, and so forth. If Pro Motion NG would have a layered timeline like the one in Krita or Asesprite it would be almost perfect. But it doesn't. But even those timelines leave something to be desired. The timeline of OpenToonz would be the perfect finishing touch. Ah, one can dream. At least I am no longer using graph paper The more we get, the more we desire, I suppose.

I think Macs are traditionally used in graphic design, while Windows machines are generally used more for game work, VFX, and 3d jobs. Well, the lines are much fuzzier nowadays than they used to be. My first sprites I drew on graph paper which I printed on a dot matrix printer way back when my brother and I got our first "proper" home computer: a C64. (Still got those sheets archived :-) I then poked the data with basic. Later, when we got our first Amiga (1000), I used a hacked version of Deluxe Paint to do game art. Like you, I worked on art for various games with mates who did the programming. That's really the reason why I like to work in Pro Motion: it is a spiritual successor to Deluxe Paint.