Medical Officer Bones

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.

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.

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.

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: https://forum.pinegrow.com/t/css-properties-direct-user-manipulation-on-page-of-basics-properties-via-drag-etc/1423

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.

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.

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. http://wizzydev.com/sitemap/

I'll throw PhotoLine into the mix. Seamless steps by holding down the ctrl button and using the scroll wheel to control the size between these two lower and upper limits. I don't believe any other image editor allows such a wide range with its layer thumbnail settings.

Try Pinegrow, it's extremely flexible. Muse is terrible. At least, the code it produces is abysmal, and in my opinion it is only viable as a high fidelity prototyping tool or for simple static sites with a lot of eye candy that are resource-heavy. Learn some simple html and css.

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.