Medical Officer Bones

And the point of this thread?

Actually, many other design applications feature a similar option. InDesign has a page colour swatch: important for DTP work to see your work in context when the output needs to occur on coloured paper. Promotion NG (pixel art / animation) has a special background panel to control the background colour - important for the context. PhotoLine in Document mode similarly offers a special background colour with optional transparency. Krita has a dedicated image background colour setting that controls both the colour and transparency level too. I completely agree with @twojtyniak here: it is VERY useful to have such a general canvas/background colour setting independent from the layers. I regularly change these settings myself depending on the context of the project at hand. A solid colour layer is a somewhat meager work-around. It is not the same. Otherwise all those other design apps wouldn't include this option, because it is very practical to have.

I second VueScan (and Silverfast which I used a long time ago). VueScan supports high-bit, and is colour managed - profiling is available for scanner, film, and printer. And the output quality is excellent - FAR better than the original Canon driver software was able to achieve. An external viewer can be set up, and the result automatically opened. So no real direct need for Photo to support a direct scanner import option. Dedicated scanner software would produce superior output anyway (probably). But 1bit support is a very different case: we MUST have that supported. It's a glaring omission in the software, and just makes it impossible to perform certain basic tasks in Photo.

Krita. Free option - copy your texture to Krita, turn on Wrap Around Mode (W), and use the clone brush. Infinite wrapping canvas.

If you mean an equivalent in regards to general photo/image editing, then: yes, it is realistic. That part of Photoshop hasn't changed that much in the past decade, and Photoshop is hampered by legacy code, such as a half-baked 16bpc mode (which is actually 15bpc). But it is not realistic to expect the same 3d, video and animation functionality. Nor would I want those, because dedicated applications blow Photoshop not only out the water, but to a different planet. Basically, those features s.u.c.k. compared. Cobbler keep to your last.

I no longer use TinyPNG since I discovered ColorQuantizer. TinyPNG can't compete. The level of control for PNG compression and quality is insane. http://x128.ho.ua/color-quantizer.html

I use Vuescan myself, and the DNG files it writes are correctly opened in Photoshop, PhotoLine, BlackMagic Fusion, RawTherapee, IrfanView, ... Krita attempts to open it, but results in a mess, and Affinity doesn't work, as stated here. If the competition is able to open these DNG files, it would be nice if Affinity Photo would be able to do the same. Then again, seeing that Krita has issues, I agree the DNG files Vuescan writes might be slightly off-kilter.

Related to pixel art in Photo, the lack of an indexed colour mode is severely hampering the options for pixel artists. Then again, I'd never recommend a general image editor for pixel art creation - not with Pro Motion NG on the market. There's just no comparison. Get the right tool for the job. I'd rather have Affinity Photo focus on improving the photo editing and compositing functionality instead of new pixel art features. I just don't see the point when specialist tools exist - Affinity Photo can't hope to match Pro Motion NG in this respect.

I encountered this limitation too. I prepare comics work for print, and for that 1bit black and white high resolution 800ppi-1200ppi images must be created. While Photoshop has the option to work in 1bit image mode, most of the functionality is deactivated: layers do not work for example. And to composite the line art with the colour plate, InDesign is required to produce a PDF. After some trial and error I discovered that, as far as I could find, only one non-Adobe workflow option exists. This assumes the line art is inked in B&W at a minimum of 800ppi or scanned at that minimum resolution. I tried a combination of Gimp, Scribus, but while Scribus supports export to PDFx/4 with 1bit transparent images, I couldn't create a good transparent 1200ppi 1bit image in Gimp. So I do my prepwork in PhotoLine now, which supports 1bit image layers, and these can be combined in the same layer stack with the 300ppi colour work. First I open the 300ppi colour work, then import the 1bit 1200ppi line art, activate transparency for this layer, and remove the white background. Then I add the vector text balloons and other vector elements, and export a PDFx/3 document. PhotoLine miraculously seems to understand that I want a layered 300ppi PDF with a 1bit B&W1200ppi layer printed on top, which was unexpected when I first tried it a year ago. The result is a nice layered PDF which prints the page's colours at 300ppi, the line art superimposed at a crisp 1200ppi, and the vectors at the image setters max res. If you need to prepare 1bit images, just get PhotoLine for this. Work in Affinity Photo, and convert to 1bit with PhotoLine, and output. I use PhotoLine as a InDesign replacement for this type of work. It's an inexpensive solution to a very particular workflow requirement. One caveat with both Affinity Photo and PhotoLine: neither one supports an 8bit (or less) indexed image mode. For this I use Pro Motion NG - which is kinda the industry standard for indexed pixel art anyway. If I need to work on indexed images, I open the art or photo in PM, and it converts it nicely to an indexed image. And PM being a specialized indexed image editor, I get the best indexed image tools in the business. Good for textile print prep too, to get remove those anti-aliased edges :-) So three apps: Affinity Photo, PhotoLine, and Pro Motion NG combine to achieve an even more powerful workflow with indexed and 1bit images compared to Adobe. Not bad.

I believe at this point in time only three image editors are able to import PSD files with smart objects intact: Photoshop, PhotoLine, and PhotoPea (online editor). It would be nice if Affinity Photo would at last be added to this list.

Perhaps install LibreOffice on your mac, and save an SVG from Designer, then import into LibreOffice Draw, and export to EMF/WMF? I tested this, and it seems to work fine.

I did a bit of research, and I found a solution for the lack of control over the typeface. Download the Formulator MathML Editor https://sourceforge.net/projects/formulator-math/ (no need to install: unzip as a folder, and run the EXE) Either use Visual Math Editor to save your work as MathML, and open in that editor, or create your formulas in Formulator (which is surprisingly easy to use). Then export as a PDF, and load that up in your design software. All the text objects remain text! Select these items and apply different typefaces. I had tested this a few months ago with Visual Math Editor, but those PDF files wouldn't work properly for some reason. But the ones generated in Formulator do work. Even better, Formulator supports any type family to be applied as well. Select the entire formula (or parts of it), and choose Style-->Other. Any typeface that includes all math symbols will work. Wish I'd found this one last time. *edit* Even the SVG output of Formulator retains text as text elements. Pretty impressive.

What about VIsual Math Editor? I used it last year for a job, and the tool exports SVG, which can be directly imported in any design app. Including Gravit, Designer, PhotoLine, Inkscape, etc.. http://visualmatheditor.equatheque.net/index.html

That image is a pretty bad source image for jpeg export. And did you mean PPI instead of PPP? Btw, PPI is inconsequential for web and screen design (excepting a screen's base ppi for certain calculations). Only important for print. That said, the original's PPI value ought to be left alone by an application and remain unchanged unless specifically stated by the user.

...and in a few years the winds will blow eastward. Flat is slowing down and on its way out again (Windows is re-introducing glassy effects at this point). Who cares? As long as the GUI design does not interfere with usability, and the GUI controls allow for custom colour schemes and seamless GUI scaling across all devices and screens. Which is not the case for most applications, including Affinity. Work on that first, I'd say.

Derailing the thread a bit here... Sure, if you're a system admin who must check large/huge log files, a lean editor is essential. For most devs, however, it's a non-issue: work occurs mainly on partials anyway. You'd be insane to organize mid-sized to large projects in just a couple of large files. I am also aware that Atom is quite slow. Netbeans zooms through semi-larger code files consisting of thousands of lines, while those same files lag in Atom. But I love it for certain jobs. As a Markdown editor it is really nice to work with. The live connection with Pinegrow is very nice as well. SublimeText never agreed with me. It's not really an IDE, although I know it can be extended a lot. But it just 'feels' wrong for me, and is an unattractive editor (my personal opinion). For many coders their text and code editors and IDEs are akin to the clothes they are wearing: a personal preference.

@GrahamMYC No worries. Trying to navigate this territory can be confusing to creatives without much coding experience. And web development seems to become more complicated by the day. Pinegrow is pretty simple to use, but it is still beneficial to understand the basics of html and css. A visual tool like WebPlus relies on specific conversion links/mappings between the visual view and the resulting code, attempting to accommodate web technologies. But when web tech and approaches evolve and change, it becomes an utter chore to maintain these mappings and expand/adjust the code for the custom design view. Pinegrow is built with and on existing web technologies instead, and those mappings are (almost) automatically supported. The view in Pinegrow is actually a real web view (Chrome based), so it really is WYSIWYG, and the developer needs not worry about translating code to view and vice versa. Any other approach would take too much development time - or require a large team to maintain (like Adobe Muse). That is probably why Serif decided to halt WebPlus development: just too costly and inefficient. And probably too few users to back up continued development costs as well. @Alfred While I still prefer NetBeans for heavy duty coding, Atom and Pinegrow form a mighty combo. And bring back some fun in front-end coding.

WordPress is a content management system, and can't be compared directly with a visual web editor such as WebPlus, Muse, or Xara WebDesigner. All three produce quite terrible html and css code, but that is to be expected. Perhaps PineGrow is an option for you? Not quite as much design freedom as the aforementioned three products, but produces clean code, and is a lot of fun to use. You can build a static site in a matter of a day or two. Browsing through your website, I think WordPress might be a bit overkill. And PineGrow supports responsive sites out of the box. Or use the PageBuilder plugin for WordPress, in combination with a good clean theme.

Another option is OpenToonz. https://github.com/opentoonz/opentoonz/releases The new v1.2 version was released in December, and includes a new horizontal timeline and the powerful MyPaint brush engine for bitmap animation. To enable GIFAnim export you must also download FFMPEG https://www.ffmpeg.org/download.html PS both are open source and free! 1) Start OpenToonz and open the preferences File->Preferences>Import/Export and then point the FFmpeg path to the BIN folder of where you unzipped the FFMpeg folder. 2) Create a new project File->New Project. Name the project GIFAnims. From this point forward you may want to use this project to create your GIF animations. 3) An empty scene is automatically generated. Change the output settings to mirror the ones you need for your GIF animation. File-->Output Settings. Adjust the width and height to match what you need. 4) You could import all your frames individually in the timeline, or rename the file sequence to NAME.XXXX.ext. XXXX is a number that must start at 0001 (0000 will crash OT). ext is the extension of the file format. PNG will work with transparency, but avoid indexed PNG files - full colour ones work well. 5) Place your renamed image sequence in the INPUT folder of your project. 6) in OpenToonz, open the file browser. Windows-->File Browser. Navigate to the INPUT folder, and turn on Icon view. You can preview your animation here, if you like. 7) drag your animation into the timeline. If you dislike the vertical Xsheet, click on the "Xsheet" labelled button to switch to a horizontal timeline. You may have to move it to the bottom of the screen for a better screen setup. 8) If you like, change the timing of the frames. Insert frames, move things around, layer stuff, etc. OpenToonz is an extremely powerful animation app. 9) change the FPS in the Scene settings: main menu Xsheet-->Scene Settings. 10) Save your work before exporting. File--> Save All. 11) Open the Output Settings again (CTRL O). Change the file settings: name your animation, change to GIF, and adjust the save location if needed. Click the Options button to control whether your gif animation must loop or not. (Before the GIF export option becomes available, you must, I believe, restart OT first after telling it where it can find FFmpeg.) 12) Hit the Render button. Wait until the animation is processed, and open the folder where you saved your work. 13) admire your beautiful animation. This workflow works quite well with Affinity Photo / Designer when starting work on a new animation. Work on a frame in Affinity, save that frame as the next numbered (bitmap) file. Then extend the animation level downward in the timeline in OpenToonz (for as many of the new frames that must be accommodated), and reload the animation to update it with the new frames from Affinity. It is even possible to convert inked bitmap lines to controllable vector drawings in OpenToonz. Or save your Designer frames as a sequence of SVG files, and load those in OpenToonz (be careful to keep the SVG files very simple, though: inked lines work well).

It doesn't have to be that way, though. At least one competitor (that I am aware of) keeps a bitmap-based gradient "live", as long as no transparency is used in the colour values. So in theory Affinity Photo's developers should be able to mimic the same behaviour.

I am experiencing similar issues with Affinity Photo and Windows 10. I have 48GB ram, and an i7 920 running at 3.6ghz. Large Wacom Pro 4 tablet. The trouble is that in Windows, when zooming out on a large canvas (A4@600ppi) and drawing strokes, the lines become wobbly and uncontrolled. [A] were drawn zoomed out. (B) was drawn zoomed in, although not at 100%, and it still displays some wobbly behaviour. This is a known issue in Windows. It happens in Paint and other image editors/painting tools that rely too much on the mouse interpolation values in Windows - only when software correctly applies a smoothing algorithm is this solved. Generally a stroke stabilizer will take care of this - but strangely enough in Affinity Photo the stabilizer is worthless in this case, because the type of stabilizer or stroke smoothing algorithm we would need is not implemented in Affinity Photo. Photoshop may also suffer from these issues, but the effect was always less pronounced due to their custom interpolation code running in the background while drawing. PhotoLine exhibited similar issues as Photo, and the developers implemented a nice stroke stabilizer that gets rid of these issues even at very low settings. The same holds true for Krita and ClipStudio: these have again very nice smoothing algorithms and stroke stabilizers that prevent the wobbles and jaggies in Windows. ClipStudio arguably does the best job by far (a joy to ink with). Beautiful lines and extremely responsive. In short, Affinity Photo is kinda useless in its current state for inking. It will have to be solved by the developers. PS Of all the painting and drawing software I used, ClipStudio is the only app that remains responsive and smooth to work with even on older low-powered machines (with large high resolution canvases!).

You may like PhotoLine in that case, because it has a very nice "Vector Lasso" tool that automatically switches a selection ("lasso" in PL) to an editable path without the need for conversion. Switching back to any other tool turns it back into a selection.

I realize now that I wrote my previous reply in a bad mood, so I apologize for the tone. Just wanted to mention that if you used Canvas before, you might as well want to download the trial of PhotoLine for comparison. It's similar in intent as Canvas, but more powerful in regards to image editing. And has all the features that you mentioned (well, the latest beta has scripting and a com interface, and is not yet released): including an auto-trace option. Much more affordable too. Although the result of auto-tracing is much better/cleaner in dedicated tools, of course.

You can't be serious about Canvas X, right? The bitmap editing tools are dreadful! The GUI is terrible outdated in many places, and the developers still insist on using "SpriteEffects". And that dialog isn't even scalable. The layer panel is a relic from the beginning nineties, no bitmap previews. Tiny icons. The bitmap drawing tools are incomparably limited to what current applications offer. The vector drawing tools are okay, but again pale in comparison to the user-friendliness of Designer and other current vector illustration tools. Bitmap editing is a pain in Canvas. The new "Dynamic Effects" they've just implemented in the latest version are inconsistent in regards to UI design, and the late and limited implementation is typical for Canvas development. Canvas is an odd beast: it has interesting features, a lot of half-assed ones, the GUI is neurotic (part of it is somewhat modernized, although a lot of its GUI design still lingers from two decades ago). The developers are aiming it at engineers, architects, CADCAM, etc. users, and don't really try to compete with modern illustration software. I am not saying Canvas isn't an interesting application, but for hobbyist and professional creatives Canvas is too limited and awkward. It's targeted at a very different audience. If you want try an application with great bitmap editing tools and reasonable vector tools combined at a tenth of the price of Canvas, you are better off installing PhotoLine. But the drawing tools, although much better than Canvas X, still can't compete with the likes of Affinity or Krita. I also don't understand your statement that hobbyists shouldn't be installing multiple applications, and then you suggest Canvas X: a tool that is obviously marketed at professionals working in technical design industries, rather than creatives. And the pricing is definitely not aimed at hobbyists either. Just makes no sense. Your argument about having to re-learn an almost never used option sort-of undermines your argument for a built-in auto-trace option in Designer. And with very focused auto-tracing tools such as the ones mentioned by V_kyr, you wouldn't have to re-learn anything at all. I would suggest to crawl out of your well, and find a good combination of tools that cater to all your needs. At this point I feel you are merely digging in your heels. Of course, you are free to spend $600 on one somewhat antiquated application with limited bitmap editing tools and a very confused GUI.

Well, it is your own personal choice, of course. I know of no illustration software that "does it all". Illustrator, CorelDraw, GravitDesigner, ... they all have limitations. Illustrator's trace option I almost never used, instead opting for third party solutions. No vector illustration app can import 3d models as vector either, for example. I feel your argument that only "pros" will have use of multiple applications to accomplish illustrative work quite short-sighted. People use many different apps on their phones and tablets for tasks, correct? No different on a desktop. Best to be software agnostic: they're just tools. Having said that, I wish you well in your well (I made a pun!). Let us know when you find that magical application that does it all.