Medical Officer Bones

Again, an untrue statement. OpenToonz is actively being developed, and the lead (Japanese) developer implemented and still is working on direct requests from studios in Japan. You do realize that OT was (and still is) used in the full production pipeline of feature-length 2d animation films in the past few years? It is production proven. Now, you may not like it - but based on your comments above, I presume you have only played around with it, and haven't spent much time in it. Similar to how you downloaded Moho Debut, and claimed it is 'useless', while again Moho Pro has been used in major feature films in the past few years for various sequences. Your comments seem to be based on hardly any in-depth personal experience with either software. OpenToonz's pipeline and workflow is very effective. In particular when combined with ClipStudio. And in my opinion it is a very comfortable animation experience for frame-by-frame. But not for every type of animation like cut-out animation. All animation software has its pros and cons. And personal preferences also play an important role, of course. Anyway, do I think it would be interesting to see new 2d animation software enter the market? Yes, I do. I completely agree with you that renting software is great for studios, not that great for freelance animators. I don't think Serif will wager a bet on the 2d animation software market, though. It is too niche. Still, I would like to see a basic animation timeline in Affinity Photo/Designer.

That is why I mentioned Krita works well together with OpenToonz. I have worked in ToonBoom for Disney work, and actually prefer OpenToonz/ClipStudio for my own work.

You are entirely wrong. https://opentoonz.github.io/e/usecase.html

Its brother OpenToonz is used in feature film and broadcast Anime production in Japan. I like it very much for 2d animation work myself. Works great with ClipStudio, which exports frame-by-frame directly into OpenToonz. Or combine with Krita, which has nice frame-by-frame animation and superb bitmap drawing tools.

As a work-around for opening Affinity files on Chromebooks / Android, visit PhotoPea in your browser, and load the Affinity file. https://www.photopea.com/ It does not export Affinity files, however, and must be saved as PSD. But it may be a way for you to work on stuff on both platforms.

Why bother with 1bit transparency anymore at this point in time? Browsers support full webp transparency and PNG transparency, as well as animated WebP and APNG files. GIF and Animated GIF files have pretty terrible file size optimization compared to the other more modern formats, and only support up to 256 colours anyway. I see no use case anymore at this point for the GIF format.

Moho is awesome for 2d animated cut-out vector based 'puppets'! When the original developer decided to take over Moho's development again and acquired it back from Smith Micro, I jumped a hole in the air. Best news in ages for the app. As you are aware, Moho isn't that great at frame-by-frame. I use OpenToonz for this, and it supports a fully vector-based workflow, with very good colouring automation tools. ClipStudio outputs directly to OpenToonz, btw. Ah, I remember Fireworks. I still have FW CS6 running on my machine for the odd file conversion. Camtasia for rendering GIFs? You are a brave man. Wow. If you are interested, either OpenToonz or PhotoLine will provide much more control. In fact, PhotoLine uses very much the same layer-based approach as Fireworks did: animate using layers, and export to a gif animation. There's even an animate layers control panel. Each layer may be separately optimized and have its own colour palette. But this isn't really necessary anymore, because... The latest beta of PhotoLine added animated PNG and WebP support, which vastly expand the possibilities for animation on the web with full colour and transparency support! Something sorely missing in GIF based animations, as you probably know (only 1bit transparency and a limit of 256 colours). As far as I am aware, PhotoLine is now the only image editor in the world with support for the newer web animation file formats. It works pretty much the same as Fireworks, barring some things, of course. Also, OpenToonz imports and export GIF animations without any issue either. Just make sure to point it to FFMPEG in the preferences, and work with GIF animations and a true frame-by-frame timeline.

I agree it would be handy (and expected) to display the current image/layer dimensions in the info panel. I would also expect to see it displayed there, instead of "Memory Efficiency" or "Memory pressure", which seem quite useless to me. In fact, the Info panel already displays the colour mode, bit depth, and colour profile, so it is somewhat incomprehensible that basic image properties such as image / layer dimensions are omitted. Or just in the bottom bar at the right, or something. It wouldn't take up any extra space. Combine this with a current layer size would be quite handy as well and not necessitate the use of an extra transform panel. Or a simple option to include the dimensions in the displayed title, just like some of the alternatives do. And the behaviour of the move tool is inconsistent in that it will display the layer size of an image layer, but not of a pixel layer or background layer in the tool properties. Instead it *does* display the PPI value for all of them - so why not their pixel dimensions? PPI is a useless value unless the actual pixel dimensions are known! For example. To figure out the dimensions and PPI of a pixel layer, I must open the transform panel to inspect that layer's dimensions, select the move tool, and read the PPI values in the tool's properties bar. Which is somewhat awkward, to say the very least. (not mentioning the mid-tinted grey used to display that PPI value, which makes it unnecessarily hard to distinguish and read...) Conversely, to figure out the dimensions and PPI values of a placed image layer, I merely must select the move tool, and both values are displayed in the toolbar (in white text!). In any case, I don't believe this Hand tool trick has been mentioned yet: - With any tool active (other than the Hand tool) press H: the current document dimensions are displayed in the top left toolbar properties. Press H a second time to return to your active tool. This is quick and effective to note the current document dimensions, and switch back to what you were doing. Unfortunately it still doesn't fix the incoherencies and inconsistencies related to the move tool and the lack of a consolidated group of image/layer property values displayed in one location in the GUI. But at least it allows for a quick document resolution check.

FilterForge is a terrific plugin that specifically supports Affinity Photo. FF includes a number of different normal map filters and bump map ones. It also is a great general texture generator with PBR support and up to 65000x65000 seamless texture export with normal map, metallic map, roughness map, occlusion map and height map automatically generated as well. https://www.filterforge.com/ But yes, would be nice to have built-in support like Krita.

That's great news! I had not expected it to work with pages. At least there's an exit possible now for FW users and their files.

The developer of Photopea (an online-only Photoshop clone) implemented Fireworks file support last December. It works quite well, and allows us to convert FW files to PSD versions (which can be loaded in Affinity). Not sure about pages, though... photopea.com/

Yes, still in development: the latest update was march 2021. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.krita Perhaps use cloud based software such as Photopea? It's a Photoshop clone working in the browser. As long as your device can run a modern browser, all your files are shared via the same account. https://www.photopea.com/

Yes, we are still waiting. In the meantime other apps are starting to implement animated (!) webp export. We can but wait. Or use other apps to do the conversion. I very much like the free Color Quantizer which also exports to WebP - if you are on Windows, that is.

Well, true 1bit support will never be added. They unequivocally stated that last year. Which is a bit of a problem for a variety of professional print production scenarios. Otherwise? No idea. Let's hope for the best, expect to be disappointed. That is my outlook in regards to Affinity. (And I am very hopeful. 🙂 )

Interestingly enough I recall Fireworks to have this exact feature. It was a bit clunky to work with, but still quite useful for quick previews of simple animations. I believe ImageReady also had this option. The only other software that I am aware of with this functionality is PhotoLine: I use this when importing existing GIF animations. By the way, I read that the latest PhotoLine beta offers support for animated PNG and WebP files... Affinity? Are you hearing this?

@fde101 Figma - Scroll Lunacy - Scroll PhotoLine - Scroll Godot - Zoom OpenToonz - Zoom Moho - Zoom GDevelop - Zoom GameMaker Studio - Zoom Construct - Scroll Indeed. Seems very much 50-50 or thereabouts. Personally I absolutely prefer to zoom in with the mouse wheel. In any case an application should allow the user to adjust it to their own preference.

I agree that this is awkward. It was one of the first things I encountered when I first opened and began to explore Affinity Photo, and it is also one (of quite a few basic workflow) issues which keeps me from adopting Affinity Photo in my daily workflow. Let's hope this will be fixed at some point. The fact that 80% of your students experienced this as a major workflow issue means it needs to be addressed.

Just tested this myself. While I prefer AA for font rendering in Windows, I use this tool to improve the contrast: https://github.com/bp2008/BetterClearTypeTuner If this tool is run as an administrator, and font AA rendering is turned off, most applications will stop rendering fonts with AA. But Affinity will not. Then again, the latest version of Photoshop also only partly changes its fonts to non-AA ones. Perhaps it requires a computer reboot in that case - have not tested this. Applications like Krita and PhotoLine work without a hitch, though. Krita arguably looks more readable without AA! So it seems the Affinity developers will have to actively support this in their apps' font rendering in WIndows, otherwise it will not function.

I stand corrected! I have been using IrfanView since - well, since Windows 95 times. At the time it was, I think, free. Just checked via Wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20001019015314/https://www.irfanview.com/ It used to be freeware. Anyway, $12 is a steal for commercial use: IrfanView is very useful for batch work. It's been part of my toolset since the nineties. Which means I am getting a license this week, because I wasn't aware of the change in license. Thank you for making me aware of this.

Irfanview's batch conversion will do all of that. Set the new size to "set one or both sides to 1500x1500, preserve the aspect ratio, then look for the Canvas Size/Add Image Border option, and pick a background colour for the canvas (or duplicate-blur part of the image into the canvas borders). Simple. Irfanview is one of the oldest (and best) image viewers and completely free. https://www.irfanview.com/

Inkscape is free and open source, yet features a cool smart fill function that offers more functionality than CorelDraw. Comparison of features based on software cost alone isn't valid (anymore).

I mainly work on Windows myself - and the clipboard used to be notoriously wonky for these types of copy and paste actions. Luckily, we seem to be past those worries for the most part nowadays. As for Adobe: through my work I have access to the Adobe suite. But aside from file conversions, I hardly use it anymore.

@loukash Hey, that is actually a good idea! I copied the shapes from Designer into Inkscape, used the fill tool to quickly fill shapes, then copied them back into Designer. Good tip. Because of legacy issues in the past related to copying and pasting vectors from one application to the next, I intuitively avoid such workarounds. But it works well enough here.

I agree with the OP: a vector fill tool is very handy to have for quick artistic work, as well as kinda essential for architectural/map jobs. Booleans is not the answer. Imagine having to use booleans on architectural drawings in vector format? Or scanned in b&w illustration traced to vector? Unthinkable, really. Impossible in actual practice. CorelDraw, Illustrator, PhotoLine, Animate CC, OpenToonz, Inkscape... All have vector fill tools that allow for freely filling spaces with vector shapes. Serif's own Affinity Designer predecessor Draw Plus(?) had a similar feature I have read. Heck, PhotoLine extends the regular fill tool to simply switch between bitmap or vector fill - with the option to overfill the edges to prevent seams. Inkscape also features a grow/shrink numeric input field to control this. Inkscape and OpenToonz also include a gap option! Both are open source and free... I don't want to criticize the efforts of the Affinity team - they are doing an excellent job overall. It is, however, mystifying to me how a number of long-requested basic workflow features are seemingly continuously put on the back-burner. Features which long have been part of the base toolkit of just about any members of the competition out there. For now, if you need to quickly and efficiently fill with vector shapes: download Inkscape, do the job in Inkscape, and import the result in Designer. Let's hope version 2 will finally, after years and years of patience and waiting, close all those smaller and bigger user experience gaps.

Might not be a big player, but the PhotoLine devs actively support running their software on Wine. Combine with Krita and you have a pretty good solution for doing design work. Even color management is supported via Little CMS under Wine and Linux in PhotoLine. I beg to differ. Digital painting in Krita is brilliant, and the overall workflow and GUI are just fine. A marked improvement over Affinity Photo in regards to digital drawing and painting in my opinion.