Medical Officer Bones

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.

Have you considered FreeCAD? Also, Blender is now shipping with precise CAD drawing tools (the PDT add-on). The developer behind this addon is an experienced and trained draughtsman as well as a highly qualified mechanical engineer. He and others have been using Blender for serious CAD work. Their intention is to even include a 2d drawing module. https://github.com/Clockmender/Precision-Drawing-Tools/wiki https://clockmender.uk/blender/precision-drawing-tools/

That is basically what smart objects in Photoshop or placeholder layers in PhotoLine achieve. Or comps in After Effects. Would be nice to have smart objects in Photo.

In Publisher (and many other design applications) opacity is a LAYER property, rather than an OBJECT property. Similar to Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Designer, and many other layer-based design applications, the opacity control is found in the layer panel. Interestingly enough, many layout applications (InDesign, Quark, ...) tend to 'think' differently, and assign opacity on an object level: which means it is generally located in a properties panel. I suppose we have two distinct 'schools of thought' here. You expect(ed) opacity to be an object property. Not so in Publisher. In my personal opinion I prefer the opacity to be part of the layers panel. I always found the opacity and blend mode controls in InDesign rather clunky and illogically placed in the GUI (let's not even mention Quark). The Adobe devs must have shared my concern, because in the latest versions of InDesign these properties are now also available in the new properties panel (which is still rather clunky...). One more thing: I found that many InDesign users just don'[t care about layers, and ignore them. Which makes sort-of sense in InDesign, because it is more object oriented than layer oriented.

That depends. Vector graphics are often converted to a bitmap at the end for various purposes - and this conversion can result in rather bad quality depending on the rasterization and resampling methods used. For example, Illustrator produced (and still does) rather sub-par lower resolution exported bitmap versions. Compared to Designer, Lunacy/Sketch and other vector editors, the output of an (for example) 240px by 240px icon with simple shapes just looks pretty awful: too soft, and it often introduces pixels at awkward positions which affect the quality of rounded shapes. In short: the base vector-->bitmap conversion in Illustrator is not very acceptable in my opinion. A legacy trick to improve the overall final quality has always been to export a much higher resolution bitmap version and then use another tool (image editor or dedicated optimization tools) to scale the result to the required lower resolution. This results in a much more acceptable lower resolution variant. True often even for other vector applications (Designer, Lunacy, etc.) which already produce (much) better output at the original required low resolution. Rounded corners look visibly more rounded: the base exported low resolution versions often cause slightly too straight looking rounded corners, for example. The resampling method plays a major part in this last step. I tend to stick with Catmull-Rom myself when scaling down vector graphics that are exported as larger bitmaps. That said, really, generally the output of Designer and most other vector apps is fine, and there is no real need to perform that in-between step. Unless, of course, you work with Illustrator But if I have to work with high-resolution bitmap versions of what used to be vector art work, and need to produce lower resolution versions, I always avoid resampling algorithm such as bilinear, bicubic, lanczos, or Mitchell-Netravali. Those result in too soft looking downsampled results. Catmull-Rom or even Box work best in these cases. Catmull-Rom also preserves the most detail in scaling down photos to lower resolutions, by the way (since most software does not support this resampling method, I rely on ColorQuantizer for this last step).

I once had a client refer me to their website (early 2000s) when I requested logo files for a print job 😭 Their response: "Just grab the logo from our website header": a 150px wide anti-aliased pixel mess with unclear lettering.

Yes, I agree. I think Affinity has many nice features, but unfortunately marred by as many paper cuts, such as this one. These are the main reason why Photo is a complementary application for me, not the main image editor in my daily workflow. I remain hopeful, though. 🤞

Ah, yes, I understand what you mean. I've had my fair share of clients sharing bitmap files of their logos with me and lost access to the original files/vectors... Generally it means I have to trace them manually and recreate as vector 🙄 Clients sharing low resolution badly compress jpg bitmap logos embedded in a Word document - good times indeed! 😉

Uhm, no: it is a workflow used for drawings in comics publishing and CAD/technical manuals everywhere. Also quite a bit in academic publications. Last week I tested Publisher's new PDF Passthrough feature: I created a PDF with a 600ppi 1bit image, and placed it in Publisher, expecting it to at least leave the content alone. Right? Placing an external PDF in passthrough mode should NOT change the contents in any way. Much to my surprise it converted the bitmap to a greyscale 300ppi one!!! Even though a 'true' pdf passthrough ought to leave the contents of an existing external placed PDF alone, Publisher happily converted that externally placed PDF's contents! This REALLY needs to be looked at by the Affinity developers.

If you worked with Krita, Gimp, Corel Draw before, than you ought to be aware of default panels like layers and channels. These are generally the first things that I look for in any image editor. They should be, as @fde101 states, visible by default, but for some reason they were turned off in your Affinity Photo workspace. Turn them back on like @fde101 suggests, and things will become more familiar.

Switched to Davinci Resolve a while ago from Premiere. Did not regret it. The base version is free and suffices for general video editing. https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/

Sure, but have you checked the new export preview? It is so rudimentary, that I assume it cannot be anything else BUT a first version. I am quite happy with many of the other improvements, though, in both Photo and Publisher. Haven't looked at Designer yet, because I hardly use it in my work or personally.

I mean: I just tested the latest version of Publisher with a simple 600ppi 1bit drawing. Publisher still misinterprets the correct dimensions it should be placed at, and relies on the document ppi - while it should be interpreting that 600ppi according to the file's native ppi. Which means the 600 ppi drawing is placed at twice the original scale at the document's 300ppi. Twice too large, in effect. Scaling the drawing down by x2, and then exporting to PDF still converts the drawing to a RGB bitmap. Unusable. If they resolve these two things, Publisher and Designer will at least be capable to deal with existing 1bit imagery and properly outputting those PDFs. These are the 'bear' necessities for prepress work, even if Photo will never allow for true 1bit editing. At least it will allow for 1bit image export, as a semi-acceptable workaround solution. Other users (like myself) who need to edit such files regularly will continue to use alternative image editors for this particular task, but they will at least be able to rely on Publisher and Designer to keep the files as-is. The need for placing 1bit high resolution bitmap in Designer and Publisher and output to PDF is non-negotiable, however. Unless Serif is fine with limiting Publisher to an 24bit RGB/CMYK workflow and leave out a pretty big chunk of the publishing market.

All these workarounds are okay for the odd instance that someone must work with 1bit imagery, but not very workable if one has to deal with many 1bit files and edits on a regular basis. For that a native 1bit image mode will have to be implemented, which is never going to happen. Which is fine, because other alternatives exist to handle that situation. The 1bit export is a step in the right direction, although in its current state hardly usable in an efficient 1bit workflow. But I appreciate that the Affinity devs put this on their action list, and this will certainly work much better once they implement a proper preview in export mode. Besides, the point is moot: as long as Designer and Publisher do not support proper placing & processing of 1bit high resolution images while exporting to PDF, there is no easy workaround, except to use an alternative that does provide that option. I expect the devs will have implemented this rather essential option by version 2.

Converting 1200ppi 1bit images to vector is just not a feasible workflow in stressful production scenarios. Aside from the problem that for very detailed line work it produces very heavy and difficult to process vector files, for more detailed inked art work it just can't resolve the details sufficiently. Take comic printing as an example: it is entirely impractical to convert hundreds of pages of line art... And having to check each page for problems. And, as @MikeW pointed out earlier, as long as imported high resolution 1bit artwork isn't even retained in the PDF output, the whole point is moot. The preferred solution is for [1] Affinity Photo to natively support 1bit images at any resolution, and allow these to be edited that way. [2] Publisher and Designer should be able to process them, and output to a PDF. Colorizing should be possible in Designer and Publisher. The developers have already stated that [1] will never be implemented. (I suspect this might be related to them wanting to avoid a complete re-haul of the core processing engine.) Instead, they have seemingly decided to output 1bit images only. Which leaves [2] - and this must be added before Publisher can be fully integrated in many regular prepress conditions and workflows. [2] is absolutely essential for prepress work. Simple as that. No workarounds, no excuses. That said, I am pretty certain the devs are aware of this, and will implement support for this at some point. It should be given top priority after the latest 1.9 release. I agree with @loukash: be software agnostic. If Affinity or other software will not provide what is required to pull off a job without turning upside down and twisting left and right, then switch to other software that can. I still use InDesign for FXL ebook work, because Affinity Publisher lacks this option. Similarly, any 1bit high resolution artwork editing I do in PhotoLine, which is the only image editor that I know of that allows for native 1bit editing AND use layers! Nothing else on the market, including Adobe Photoshop, handles 1bit images that well. Being able to edit layered 1bit images is pretty darn awesome when an important part of my workflow revolves around manipulating 1bit high resolution imagery. 😎 Same for indexed pixel art jobs: Affinity Photo, Photoshop, PhotoLine, and just about any other general image editor out there cannot handle 8-bit (or less) indexed fixed colour palettes with full layer support. Either it is not supported at all (Photo and PhotoLine) or the editing is severely hampered (Photoshop only allows for a single layer in indexed colour mode). Which means I use alternative dedicated pixel art software (ProMotion NG, but there are other options). Anyway, what I am trying to say: the job at hand should, in the end, dictate what tool fits best to handle that job. Endless work-arounds may be helpful in the odd unexpected bind, but are useless and time-consuming if used in a common day-to-day pipeline and workflow. Then it's time to find an alternative solution to fill the gap.