Medical Officer Bones

Wait: you embarked on a full publishing project in Affinity Publisher and did not check whether epub export is possible before doing so? And you knew in advance epub export is required (Ingram Spark clearly states what is required for upload)? How could you NOT check for epub export? Anyway, there is perhaps a solution. 1) use a conversion service such as magicepub. Free to register and try the service. It will watermark images, but at least you can try the service before paying for the conversion (which is a couple of euros per conversion). But this service merely converts either all pages to images, or embedded SVG files. I found the img + text conversion to be lacking, and it will need manual intervention. So, since a service like magicepub needs to convert your complex layouts to either flattened images or SVG, why not do it yourself? 2) convert all your pages to SVG, and use an epub editor like Sigil to create a epub3 fixed layout file. Place each SVG on its own page. Save the epub. Or if you want to publish on Amazon, export as PDF, and then use Kindle Creator to create the KPF file. Creator includes a TOC, and converts the entire thing to SVG as well. The advantage of SVG is that text and vectors will be rendered at high quality. Converting the entire page to a JPG obviously results in a fuzzy looking text, and is probably something you want to avoid. PNG works much better, but may blow up the file to unacceptable file sizes. There are many online PDF to epub convertors online, although the quality of conversion varies. I prefer to keep the conversion process under full manual control, so generally for complex fixed layouts I will use SVGs and place those in Sigil.

Now, that: ....is interesting, to say the very least. It actually looks amazing - if you guys get that up to a Substance Painter level of quality, you will gain the support of, and an influx of, a great number of game artists.

@haakoo If you don't me asking: do you understand that this conversation is not about proving whether the effect can be replicated in Photo or not, but rather about the underlying workflow deficiencies?

Having the option to combine multiple layer masks is great, no doubt, agreed. And if I want to work non-destructively I would definitely make use of stacked gradients for masking. But this is not always a desirable or efficient method of working. When the user just wants to quickly block out a mask by combining various gradients, the non-destructive approach becomes a workflow-stopper, because it is a rather cumbersome method. This is exactly how just about any other software on the market implemented the gradient tool. And it is still baffling to me that Affinity's developers seemingly consciously decided against including a blend mode. Compare the Fill tool: why include a blend mode option in the Fill tool if you expect all your users to work non-destructively? Why not just force users to create a solid fill layer then? The answer is obvious: because it makes no sense. It is a ridiculous thought to force your users to create a new layer for each fill. Users want to be able to use the same fill tool multiple times on the same layer, and control the blend mode as well. To want to apply a fill quickly and not caring about a "non-destructive" fill option is quite reasonable: depending on the job or goal, at one time a destructive fill tool is preferable, and at another time a non-destructive fill layer or vector object is the more sensible approach. It is the same with gradients and how these are used in compositing and image editing: sometimes it is far more efficient to just work destructively, and at other times it is not. I challenge you to find ANY other image editor on the market, free or commercial, online or offline, that features a gradient tool that lacks these incredibly basic and expected options. I could not (and I looked today just for "fun"). The reason is very simple: because it is such an obvious part of a basic tool set for an image editor to have. No-one thinks twice about it. So I can only conclude that the Affinity devs made a conscious decision to exclude it - although the reasoning for this is entirely mystifying.

@haakoo This is not a question of HOW to use the gradient tool, or how to accomplish blending of multiple image layers. Rather, the issue with the gradient tool in Affinity Photo is two-fold: it is currently not possible to use the gradient tool in an additive manner in a (bitmap) mask: Photo will replace the mask's existing content and replace it with the new gradient, and; the gradient tool lacks the option to set the blend mode: if the user could change the gradient's blend mode to (for example) multiply it would be very simple to create multiple gradients to simplify blending via a bitmap layer mask. If you've ever worked in alternatives like PhotoLine, Photoshop, GIMP, Krita, you will immediately miss this option when doing basic compositing work. There are other issues with the gradient tool, but this is quite frustrating. In my experience, Affinity Photo is riddled with such small paper cuts throughout its basic tools. The accepted solution would be to integrate a blend mode option in the gradient tool. Why it wasn't added in the first place defies comprehension, because every single other bitmap gradient tool on the planet includes it.

First, 300ppi is completely irrelevant. It means nothing for screen work. Only the actual resolution counts, which is 1920x1080. Your gradient blends from a dark grey (56,56,56) to black. That means only 56 shades of grey, and there just aren't enough values in 8bit and on most screens to create a smooth blend at that 1920x1080 resolution. That is a hard technical limitation. The second problem is JPG, since it may worsen the issue due to artefacting. Anyway, the solution is to add some noise, and then export the result. I tested this with your gradient, and introduced a 4% noise, and the visual banding disappears when saved as PNG file (which is lossless). A jpg version needs to be saved at quite a high quality, otherwise the lossy compression will still cause apparent visual issues. I recreated your gradient in Photo, and applied a live Gaussian noise of 4%. Then exported it. It is extremely frustrating in cases like these that Affinity Photo does not provide us with a preview of the exported result, because it results in trial and error, forcing the user to depend on saving, checking, saving again, checking, and so on. Let's hope the developers will soon add a preview option to the export persona. It took me four tries before I arrived at an acceptable JPG compression quality, while in PhotoLine I just adjust the quality slider until satisfied. PS the reason it looks okay in Photo is because Photo adds dithering/noise when the gradient is displayed.

You mention in your video that you like the colour picker's transparency pickup. Pro Motion NG does it even better: the transparency and colour can be picked up separately, which is super handy when doing pixel art. Which makes sense, since PM NG is specialized in pixel art. Most of your wishes are part of Pro Motion NG, btw: easy pick up of brushes, direct manipulation of those brushes (mirror, rotation, etc. all with keyboard shortcuts), dedicated pixel drawing tools which are much more precise than regular image editors, indexed colour mode, excellent colour palette control, animation, tiles, etc. But no advanced non-destructive filters, of course. To be honest, I don't think Affinity Photo is such a great option for pixeling. Too many quirks and limitations. Nor is Pro Motion NG good at general image editing. No app does it all.

I did a quick test, and even scaling down to 50% results in mush. I turned on all the pixel snapping options, and switched to Nearest Neighor. This is what I would expect (not attainable in Affinity - I had to resort to other alternatives): This is Affinity Photo: The top one is scaled layer (non-destructive). It is bad. This is a reduction of the original by 50% - and any image / pixel editor should pass this test with flying colours in my opinion: it is a simple reduction of the larger character to half pixels. Affinity fails badly here. I tested this for fun in a number of image editors. The results are interesting: - Photoshop (CS2), Gimp, and Affinity Photo produce similar 50% scale down results: all a mess. - Irfanview and ProMotion NG deal a little better with this move. (not shown here) - Krita and PhotoLine generate a good result (identical to the first one shown above). The third one is the rasterized layer version in Affinity Photo, and it is completely unacceptable.. Not only is the transparency automatically trimmed (even when Rasterize without the trim function is selected), for some inexplicable reason Affinity Photo decides to resample the graphic, and the result is an anti-aliased mess. Anyway, definitely room for improvement as far as Affinity Photo is concerned.

...Invision, Lunacy, Axure, Justinmind, and many more are operating in this market segment. Way too much competition, with free tiers and some completely free (Lunacy: free Sketch alternative for Windows). Still, Affinity could add Sketch import/export for improved interoperability between apps. Would like to see Sketch import and export.

Hi Ricardas. I checked the file, and imported it first in PhotoLine, because that image editor does support 1bit bit depth images and to check for the original resolution: it is indeed a 1bit image scanned at 300dpi. That means the moment it is imported into Affinity Photo, it will convert it to a 8bit greyscale image. It also means that visually in Affinity Photo the result is anti-aliased a bit due to it being placed at non-decimal values. When editing, this may introduce extra anti-aliasing. Exporting as a PDF, it is important to turn off JPG compression, because that results in visual artifacting due to JPG being JPG. JPG is wholly unsuitable for this type of image as a compression algorithm. [When exporting as PDF/X-1, turn off jpeg compression] As you discovered for yourself, turning off that compression will solve the issue, because Photo is no longer reducing the quality and introducing rogue grey pixels. But this comes at a cost: since the bit depth of the scan is automatically converted to 8bit, it results in an 8x image file size increase. Which is something utterly unnecessary, and one of my pet peeves with Affinity Photo: it does not support 1bit images. Which in certain use cases causes issues, such as in this case. Luckily Affinity Photo's PDF export is smart enough to reduce the file size to ~80kb versus the ~30kb 1bit version. So it's not too bad. Still, it is REALLY frustrating: 1bit images are THE answer in cases like these. And file sizes blow up dramatically with higher resolutions. Just imagine if this sheet music had been scanned in at 1200ppi, and the pdf had 50 scanned sheets. 1bit images would keep the file very manageable. No-one in their right mind wants to send 1200ppi greyscale images to an image setter - and in practice those images are then downsampled automatically to 300ppi before printing, resulting in a drastic reduction of resolution and quality. Only 1bit images maintain the wanted resolution when printing. And unfortunately 1bit support may never be added to Photo: the developers have unequivocally stated that 1bit image support will not be worked on in Photo. Frustrating.

I'd be very interested in the original scanned files. Looking at the exported PDF, it seems to me that the original scan was 1bit, and if that is the case, Affinity Photo converts these images to 8bit greyscale ones. As a result, when the OP exported the edited version as a PDF from Affinity Photo, the export setting seems to be set to JPG, further wreaking havoc with the clean 1bit scanned images. @Ricardas Could you tell us how you scanned in the original sheets? Could you provide a sample (without opening it in Affinity Photo)? I ask, because Affinity Photo does not support 1bit images, and will always convert these to 8bit ones - without user intervention possible. Scanning of sheet music is typically a job done by scanning the originals at a very high PPI resolution (1200ppi) and at 1bit bit depth. It makes no sense to scan black-and-white sheet music in greyscale 8bit bit depth, unless it is to be used for screen display (in which case scaling down a high res 1bit image to a screen res greyscale image would also be preferable and result in better quality) .

Not possible to convert pixel selections to a path.

Scale up your art by a decimal factor and use nearest neighbour as the resampling algorithm.

It's fundamentally a linear rainbow gradient with a swirl effect applied to it and a radial zoom/vortex type effect with some masking to dilute the last effect here and there. The swirl effect can be easily achieved with the twirl effect in Affinity Photo, but unfortunately the max value is limited to 720 degrees, I believe. This is easily solved by re-applying the same effect. You may want to use a circular mask to limit the effect of the second twirl effect to the center for a better looking result and more control. Another option is to use the liquify filter twirl function on the linear gradient with varying brush diameters, which works well in Photoshop and PhotoLine, but I discovered today that Affinity Photo's liquify twirl does not work as expected, and it seems impossible to create that same swirl effect in it. The underlying algorithm seems very different compared to either PS and PL. It just refuses to work, and Photo is quite crash-prone when using the liquify option this way, btw. The trick for that zoom/vortex effect is to use the displacement filter with a good vortex map. Then duplicate the displacement and move it at the top, and use some blending/adjustment layers to add the white streaks. I've created a quick example for you. Not quite identical, but that really is dependent on the displacement map. Replace with your own. And the gradient is non-destructive, and can be adjusted as well. Play around with it. It's slow, though. Linkie: https://gofile.io/?c=G91vZO Warning: Affinity runs very, very slow for me with this file.

As far as I can tell, it is NOT an effect. It is drawn, either digitally or on paper (or a combination).

The difference is merely that one was internally scaled down without anti-aliasing, and the other with anti-aliasing. One issue with the pixelate filter is that it creates decimal pixels at the borders, which I dislike. Which is why I tend to avoid that method and prefer a basic scale down move. Scaling down without and with anti-aliasing results in: Scale down with nearest neighbour (which does not apply any anti-aliasing) or any of the other resampling algorithms for a softer anti-aliased result. Then scale up either result without anti-aliasing (nearest neighbour) to its original size. (This will introduce non-square non-precise blown-up pixels unless done in decimal steps - or use Resize Pixel Art Document) That is true pixelation without those ugly half-pixels at the borders. PS be VERY careful when resizing a document in Photo: it allows for non-decimal values, again resulting in weird decimal pixels at the borders when scaling down to a low resolution. Turning on pixel snapping, force pixel alignment, etc. doesn't seem to prevent this from occurring, which is buggy behaviour in my book. The only option is to use pixel values that result in decimal values for width and height.

If the files are very important to you, you could rent the Adobe CC thing for a month, install Fireworks (still available under the older apps), and convert your files to SVG / psd. But this will only work on a Windows machine: Fireworks no longer is offered for Mac users due to it being a 32bit app. Another option is finding a working portable Fireworks CS6 which currently roams the net, but I would only touch that inside a windows virtual machine due to malware risks. Not a solution unless you know what you are doing an are familiar running virtual machines (such as VirtualBox).

Actually, there is. Strangely enough PhotoLine includes a very simple "Dynamic Animation" tool that is pretty simple to use and takes its layers to animate with. It supports keying of layer positioning, rotation, etc. Works for very simple GIF animations, and the interface is rather... strange. But it works. It exports the result to an animated GIF (or movie file). It's a rather strange tool, though, because the timeline works similar to Photoshop, but it is entirely separated from the rest of the application. Tracks have to be created separately from the layers, and layers assigned to tracks. Almost like a mini animation tool slapped on top, and a 'unique' approach. Never seen it done before in that way. The animation data is saved separately in the file, so if you wouldn't know about the animation tool, you'd never know there was an animation embedded. But I prefer openToonz for Gif animations nowadays. OpenToonz imports a layered PSD file, and will convert the layers to animatable layers, as well offers an option during import to convert groups to keyframes in those layers. Just make sure to match the new scene size with the original PSD file, drag it into the view, and select the options you need. Done. Start animating with the Animate tool. While OpenToonz seems like overkill, it is easy, efficient, and very straightforward to animate with. Just make sure to point OT to FFmpeg, and it will happily render your animation to an animated Gif. The interface is actually very easy to get into if you've ever worked with animation software before. Best of all, OpenToonz is free, open source, and all that. Latest nightly releases here: https://github.com/opentoonz/opentoonz_nightlies/releases Anyway, two simple* to use options which will take a layered file, animate it, and export to a Gif animation. * simple is relative

Oh, I would love to see a proper modernized After Effects alternative. I am surprised no-one has developed it yet, because nothing really comparable to After Effects exists on the market; it would be a successful product if someone would.

The animation software market is already a heavily saturated one. Very professional and heavy-duty free/open source options exist, so Serif would probably be burning their hands on this. Try OpenToonz, which is free and open source, and extremely powerful. It is in use by several animation houses in Japan, for example. Blender introduced Grease Pencil animation a few versions ago, and the upcoming 2.83 version will really take this to the next level. Also free and open source. And completely integrated with its 3d animation tools. Although it would be nice to have basic animation tools in Designer/Photo. Krita works well for frame-by-frame, and I think a similar animation timeline would be very welcome.

Please take my thoughts regarding the underlying reasons for their decision with a grain of salt. I have no insight in their development or code at all, and it is merely a hunch. Their reasons for not wanting to implement a 1bit mode in Photo are their own, of course.

True, true. InDesign, Quark, (even the old Freehand, I recall) and PhotoLine all support this. As I said, Affinity remains crippled for a wide range of print work if the developers maintain their stance. Bit of a shame, really.

Yep, still very disappointed. I have an inkling their decision has something to do with the underlying draw engine/render/layer code, and it would mean a complete/separate rewrite, which they cannot / will not undertake. Might be wrong, though.

I know, I am very disappointed too. I could not believe what I was reading when the Affinity team announced / confirmed that they would never implement a proper 1bit mode. That said, multi-channel isn't supported either (duo-, tri-tone, etc.). Which means the Affinity range is severely crippled for anything other than a regular CMYK print workflow. Let's hope they will at the very least implement multi-channel support - but without 1bit mode, it will still be considered handicapped for many print jobs. @lilokai PhotoLine supports true 1bit, and even supports layers while working with 1bit images - unlike Photoshop. And the latest version introduced multi-channel image and PDF Device-N support as well. My solution for this type of work.

Krita is not a general purpose image editor, and aimed at digital painting. It wipes the floor with Affinity Photo in this respect (even Photoshop cannot keep up with painting in Krita), and Krita is widely in use by many professional digital illustrators. Apples and oranges.