therossgroupft

That is a SERIOUS need, and you haven't been able to implement it for more than two years? Ugh. Instead of recreating their 30+ year old tools, how about doing something with text more DYNAMICALLY. That was where Macromedia was heading when they panicked and Adobe devoured them. Real time, easy to mess with. Not a horde of buttons and wireframes.

Ok. So I'm running Filter Forge 6 Mac 6.009. I was able to load up the filter in the filters area but it's greyed out. Is 6 not supported? I checked the box to use unknown filters. I've been reading this months-long thread. Really, this A) Shouldn't be that hard for the Serif engineering team to address and B) Affinity team people should be talking to us about this more, and with greater clarity. The FilterForge people remain open to helping Serif. Unfortunately I'm still seeing on there end that there is not reciprocal love from Serif Please fix that and get these into the plugins. Using the external app is slow and time consuming.

I'm long-in-the-tooth in the graphics world. I was involved with evangelizing early graphics and multimedia programs, working with Apple, at the dawn of the personal computer age. One company, Macromedia, had a great idea: Unify vector and bitmap programs under one powerful hood. Fireworks was the eventual product. Unfortunately, Macromedia made some bad business decisions, and Adobe, which badly needed Dreamweaver, and feared Fireworks, bought the company, put Dreamweaver at the front of the suite and marginalized Fireworks. Why? Because they had already joined Microsoft in the idea that a program that is complicated sells training, but TWO programs that are complicated sell even more training. More than 30 years later, we're still stuck with that legacy. It is counter-intuitive though. If you're a designer, you're in and out of Affinity Photo to do this or that, and they've given you some basic text and illustration tools, just like our friends at Adobe, to appease you so you're not in and out of two programs all day, gathering your digital pitchforks and rioting at the inefficiency of it all. If you're a photographer, and you have a messy line around someone's neck edge, you COULD spend ten minutes airbrushing it, OR, you could, if you are in a vectored environment, just build a skin tone line, up it to 2-3pt. and gaussian blur it until it matches the edge of the neck. In the real world, we have one desk, with lots of tools at our disposal, when we're doing physical layout work. Why do we need to keep two in our digital workflow? A modern program which brings the entire suite of tools together in one space, so you're not in and out of two programs, improves workflow, reduces wasted time switching, and allows creatives improved creativity that leads to better work at a lower production cost. Man hours, after all, are man hours, whether you're billing them or paying for them. Steve Jobs said it best back in 1977: Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. So make Affinity the most sophisticated product out there and create Affinity One, a unified product, and I know that I, and thousands of other graphic and photographic professionals will be HAPPY to tell Adobe what they can do with their kludgy, klunky outdated products.

As one of the 30+ year users of Fireworks who refuses to use clunky Adobe products because it kills my billing time, I am coming to appreciate the speed and power of Affinity, BUT, for a company that did so much that's thought out so well, the one thing that Fireworks had that I miss would be the freeform distort tool. Effectively you could grab any corner and tweak the box for images or text and stretch or flatten it to any perspective. The best part was that you didn't have to "rasterize" the text and lose the ability to change it for size, type, color, etc. as you were manipulating it. For doing everything from creating quick shadows of something to mimicking the Star Wars disappearing text crawl in a graphic, it worked religiously well and quickly. Speed's name of the game when you compete with others not only on your talent, but billing by the hour, and flipping more jobs in an hour. This would be most handy. Thank you.

I'm a long-time Fireworks user coming over from the program that Adobe finally killed after 30 years. SO. Let's talk LASSO. In Fireworks, I can use the vector-like lasso to click along the edges of an area. There seems to be something like this, in Affinity, albeit with a bunch more steps. I am trying to figure out how to use it. AND, since I've been reading this thread and it makes no sense, understanding that you have to put transparent mode on to see the changes, particularly on a white background being edited, there really is no tool here to click on a color and just have the wand locate all of it?