Medical Officer Bones
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Posts posted by Medical Officer Bones
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4 hours ago, sparkle said:
Nothing strange and I'm not threatening anyone. It's frustrating when my group asked me to review the product and nothing good to say about it.
Load from my card, Portable Hard Drive, and camera. i use win 10 ( cpu@ 1.90GHz) 64bit .
Many Thanks
Wait, so you are loading and editing on a USB drive? I hope USB 3, otherwise things will slow down.
Based on your CPU's speed, I'd wager a bet and say it's an Intel i3, which means (together with Win10) you are probably running a Surfacebook or other low-powered laptop. Which points at your GPU being a low-performance Intel one. The i3 and on-board Intel GPUs are bottom of the barrel products, and your system doesn't quite meet the minimum system requirements for Photoshop, for example (minimum 2Ghz CPU).
Intel GPUs are notoriously bad for OpenGL and they are widely known for their limitations for professional graphics work (in particular on WIndows-based systems: the drivers are pretty bad and do not support more advanced GPU features): Affinity leverages OpenGL to drive the screen rendering, and in my experience working with OpenGL-based graphics software on a similar i5 with Intel graphics and SSD will cause all sorts of lags and slowdowns. Krita, for example, will run like a hog, as will Affinity. Adobe applications take forever to load up, and are laggy as heck. Forget about multi-tasking.
Your RAM should be at least 8GB - 4GB is going to cause slowdowns again, and you can't have any other applications open simultaneously without causing more slowdowns.
Don't forget that Affinity is aimed at professional work (as is Photoshop), and your system, truth be told, seems to barely hit the minimum system requirements.
Hence, together with working from a portable drive / card, things may slow down to a crawl, depending on your workflow.
If you could give us more specific hardware info, we might be able to assist in improving your experience with Affinity Photo.
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Second scripting support. When the Krita devs did their kickstarter two years ago and asked their users which feature(s) they wanted most, this is what happened:
QuoteWhen we offered python scripting as one of Kickstarter Stretchgoals we could implement next to vectors and text, it won the backer vote by a landslide. Some people even only picked python and nothing else.
https://docs.krita.org/Introduction_to_Python_Scripting
Krita 4 now has scripting.
Other competitors are taking note of this as well, and have already or are implementing scripting support as I write this. I had high hopes when Affinity first came out that the developers would have (obviously) implemented a scripting interface, since they started from scratch, and it seemed like a no-brainer to add this right from the start. Unfortunately, that did not prove to be the case at all, which I still wonder about why they did not.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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2 hours ago, EMHmark7 said:
I think, not only businesses but also endusers are ready to pay whatever fair price, especially low, for a software that they appreciate and use. Not necessarily yearly xxx$, but definitly xx$ yearly.
Another strong decision maker is that we are fedup of MS open door for spying our data and expensive updates. WE WANT TO BREAK FREE FROM THAT NONSENSE ASAP, ASAP.
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.
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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
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5 hours ago, carl123 said:
The attached screenshot shows how we reveal the image which is surprisingly simple, just using a levels adjustment with a very high Black Level setting and increasing the Gamma a bit for more clarity. ( The Black and White adjustment is not really needed, it is just there to show the image in Black and White)
But how to reveal the hidden image is only half the mystery, part of the wizardry is how to create such an image in the first place and that relies on the fact that the hidden image is still there but something the human eye cannot see but your PC/Mac can.
Try it.
We use a similar (but different) technique to add invisible watermarks to our clients' images which is why I was interested in how many of you could decode the image and how you did it.
Humans may be top of the animal kingdom but include the machine world and we are now in second place and the machines will continue to outpace us at a rate we will never catch up to.
So be nice to your kettle this morning because in a few years time it could be instructing your laptop to upload naked pictures of you to the Internet if you abuse it.
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.
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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.
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1 hour ago, dave2017 said:
There are some for Blender, and the ones I've seen are good, but I'm not sure - having only sampled a few - whether they are comprehensive enough to cover most ot the things which are possible, or which one might want to try to do. As you say you "have to know how to get around in Blender".
"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.
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5 hours ago, lastfuture said:
It would be amazing if I could just use continuous BMP export of my game / app assets directly from Affinity Designer without needing to take extra steps of encoding and having to remember to do it every time for every asset I have changed.
That's what task runners are for. Set up a grunt or npm task to watch a folder where you save your images, and have the task runner automatically convert the images to bmp with the use of ImageMagick and save those to the game assets folder. All automated, and no need for manual intervention.
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Macaw ended at v1.6. Pinegrow is at v4.6 and still going strong! Besides, Pinegrow blows Macaw out of the water in most respects.
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The Pinegrow developers are planning to add Macaw-like design features. Keep an eye out.
And their new all-visual WP theme building tools don't require a single line of code - only understanding of basic WP theme building concepts.
Check out this thread:
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It's not as simple as it looks, though. I recall that the Krita developers mentioned similar canvas anti-aliasing issues, and a lot of time was spent to arrive at the result they wanted. Looks great now, but it took them a lot of programming effort to get there.
PS ClipStudio has brilliant on-screen canvas anti-aliasing. Even thin pencil lines are rendered beautifully zoomed out.
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Change can be hard, in particular when years and years of using and working in Photoshop is ingrained in your skin and pores. Whenever I learn a new application, I take the concepts I know, and approach the new application with an open mind. I explore the GUI, and translate those concepts and workflows to adapt to the new application's workflow.
Trying to placate your expectations by telling yourself and others that everything must work the same between various applications is merely deluding yourself. Yes, Photoshop is the so-called "industry standard". But it's an old standard, and by now a number of new applications have arisen that are rewriting some of those old assumptions how an image editor is supposed to work.
Photoshop is old, and has many usability problems and other rather obvious weaknesses. Many bugs, and the situation is not exactly improving since Adobe went rental only.
In short, take the concepts, but leave the old Photoshop workflows behind that are no longer efficient. And keep an open mind. Affinity Photo is NOT Photoshop. Simple as that.
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I found a nice sitemap flow UX kit, which is free (CC BY4.0). Unfortunately no Affinity Designer template, but a SVG version is available. Perhaps someone could convert it to a Designer version.
- mediamaffia, neryx and mondze
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Pixel-art persona
in Older Feedback & Suggestion Posts
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I would recommend Pro Motion NG, which is pretty much the gold standard. No Mac version, although it works via Crossover or Wine. I wonder why the best pixel art editors are only available for the Windows platform, though.
https://www.cosmigo.com/