Wosven

Workflow Bundle: Shortcuts, Macros, HDR Tools & Brushes
Hey all, I'm very happy to be posting this collection of tools that I hope will benefit your workflows in Affinity Photo!
This toolset contains custom shortcuts, macros and brushes that are designed to enhance and speed up a variety of different workflows, from typical image editing to more complex masking scenarios, archviz scene creation, HDR image mastering/tone mapping and more.
The bundle includes each resource in a separate folder and can be downloaded here: https://affin.co/workflow
Here is a quick overview of what this pack features:
 
Workflow Shortcuts
Introduces a number of custom keyboard shortcuts designed to speed up image editing workflows, including:
 
Layer manipulation: showing, hiding, rasterising, mask creation, fill layer creation, flipping and flopping, rotating. Layer stack manipulation: moving layers inside/outside of other layers, insertion inside for next added layer (great for clipping adjustment layers/live filter layers). Matting, filling with primary/secondary colours. Flattening the document, placing embedded documents/images. Quickly creating specific adjustment layers and live filter layers including Live Perspective on Ctrl+T. Pixel selections: selecting partially transparent, sampled colours, saving to spare channels. Rotating the canvas in 15 degree increments, resetting the rotation. Toggling various functionality panels e.g. Macro/Library panels, 32-bit Preview panel, Scope panel, Assets panel. Setting fill to 50% grey, resetting fill to black & white.  
Workflow Aids Macros
Provides a set of macros to speed up common operations that power users might use. These macros make extensive use of the Procedural Texture and Custom Blur filters as well as channel and masking manipulation to simplify what would otherwise be time-consuming actions. The available macros include:
Fast alpha matte creation from white, green, blue and red backgrounds. Great for cutting out stock imagery non-destructively. Mask creation macros: create mask layers from tonal ranges, alpha ranges and colour ranges. Smoothing: Subtle Gaussian smoothing, both cumulative and luminosity-based, to reduce over- sharpening on stock imagery and out-of-camera JPEGs. Various filter masks: create edge detail masks from laplacian, laplacian of gaussian, directional and sobel filters, as well as luminosity and LAB lightness selections.  
Selective sharpening, local contrast, high pass and clarity filters: quickly set up inverted live filters which you can paint onto to reveal their effect. Retouching Setup: set up frequency separation with multiple high pass layers and additional non- destructive retouching options (vibrance, tonal crunch etc). Channels to layers: convert channels to greyscale layers, mask layers and colour data layers. Channel isolation: quickly isolate red, green and blue channel data onto separate pixel layers. Curves with blend modes: quickly add an entire group full of Curves adjustments that use every blend mode available, allowing you to easily experiment with each option. Rasterise and Inpaint Alpha: quickly trims the canvas bounds, creates and grows a selection based on antialiased transparent areas, then inpaints. Great for when you want to quickly fill in alpha areas created by rotating an image (e.g. when you correct the horizon level). Red/Blue Channel Swap: performs a channel swap with additional user options for infrared imagery. Infrared Emulation: performs colour inversion plus a channel swap and other user options to take regular imagery and give it an infrared look.  
Workflow Brushes
Provides two new brush categories, Masking and Shadows, designed for quick access to suitable brushes for composite and architectural visualisation work.
 


Masking brushes:
Soft round brushes at preset sizes (64px, 256px, 1024px) with tight spacing and full flow. Ideal for consistent brush strokes which are required when painting on and off mask layers. Soft and hard edge variants provided. Textural brushes with dynamics to randomise X/Y spacing and rotation. Great for more realistic blending with cut out layers. Shadow brushes:
Oval shaped brushes at preset sizes (64px, 128px). Saves having to create custom brushes with modified shape and rotation. Square shadow brushes for diagram and plan work.  
HDR Authoring
Macros to help author HDR (High Dynamic Range) content and tone map it to SDR (Standard Dynamic Range). The tone mapping to SDR macros can be used with SDR displays—the other macros however are intended for use with HDR or EDR displays where the extended brightness values can be displayed.
 
 
 
 

The macros include:
Tone Map to SDR: tone maps values exceeding 1.0 (SDR range). The user can tweak the aggressiveness of the tone mapping and also the scale to suit the type of document/image. Tone Map to SDR Advanced: performs tone mapping to SDR but provides additional user options like separate shadow/highlight mapping, brightness/contrast control and local contrast enhancement. Clamp Max HDR Brightness: restricts the headroom (dynamic range) of the HDR document and clamps it to a specified brightness value. Clamp Max HDR Brightness RGB Mix: as above, but with individual control over how the RGB colour channels are clamped. Filter Only HDR Values: filters through only values above SDR, which is useful for visualising the HDR values in a document. HDR Colour Map: visualises the HDR colour contribution and colour crossover with the ability to modify the threshold for the RGB channels separately.  
----
I hope you find the above useful, and in case you missed it, here's the download link again! https://affin.co/workflow
Any feedback and/or suggestions are always appreciated.

Link to Metallic Gradients Share
Here are some fancy metallic gradients I put together.

Fast morning art - Jack O'lantern. Needs some more work, but he is nice fella  
 

Hi both,
What you describe is not a bug, no. However, that new swatch that's being created is a bug, as it should not create any swatches from a pixel layer. 
Thanks,
Gabe. 

People love to complain about how long it is taking for their favorite "must have" feature to be implemented. Yet the above was requested of those who want this feature over 4 years ago, and I still see no examples posted by those who consider auto-tracing so essential.
Please show some real-world examples demonstrating why you consider auto-tracing essential. Please post screenshots of both the "before"  (the original raster) and "after" (auto-trace results), not merely at the same size, but zoomed in sufficiently to make the actual functional improvement evident. And show the results before any manual post-trace path editing.
The most often claimed "need" for auto-tracing is ostensibly to gain the technical advantages inherent to vector-based artwork: resolution independent scaling. So that improvement needs to be demonstrated in the examples. If the net result merely swaps one kind of ugly jaggedness (raster pixelation) for another (jagged or inaccurate vector paths), there is no functional gain.
Remember: Except for uses such as NC cutting fabrication, everything gets rasterized in its final reproduction anyway, whether printed on paper or viewed on a monitor.
JET

Yup. I indeed use inkspace for :  spirals (very recently, it was an essential part of a project), specially when also combining with distribution along the line, autotrace (very rarely, when I feel lazy or in lack of time), vector shape deformation aka warp, mesh gradients, and when painting something freehand that can only be vectors, as I totally love the inkscape ink tool (the brush line u get is more "wysiwyg", it's more 1:1 with your gesture and pressure). And that might seem like a lot, but with design based projects, my usage time of inkscape (if needed) would be at most like 2% in total time. As those things are fast to do and export. Am a bit short of free time atm, but will try to cover gaps left by others (meaning, if others do tutorials), in functionality not yet covered by Affinity, but needed for pro (or hobbyists!) workflows. As I've always believed it's a pity not to use a tool that you prefer -for different reasons- just because not knowing (or not willing to use them, but that's a wrong path, imo) a trick to supply the task or stage in the project with other tools. So, I don't mean only Inkscape, neither only A. Designer. My big issue is... dunno if wouldn't be too much off topic, or not "nice" towards Serif, to do such thing. 
And there's no section to....
Wait. There is. That one called free resources or something, in the forum. I guess one could make the tuts there, and link 'em whenever a user needs a particular workflow not present yet in Affinity. I hope that's a valid approach.

Hum… I'm not sure what you want to do. Text frames are for text to adjust to frame, the frames delimiting the columns width or height needed. There are few cases when you need the frame to be adjusted to the text, or you would use Artistic text.
With artistic text, you won't have overflow if you decide to have a larger font and modify the Paragraph Style. If you keep your frames heights wider, you won't have overflow either.
For this case, I'd rather use frames of the size of the blue rectangles, with text centered horizontaly and verticaly.

 
With real column/paragraphs of text, double-clicking behave as expected.

Here are some fruit assets (vectors) to share:

fruits.afassets

Hi everyone
I've created some Neon sign styles in an Outline and Solid effect, hope you like and make good use: Neon Style set.afstyles
 
 

List of fonts used if interested:
Magneto
AR Delaney
Burger Joint Neon Light JL
Rage Italic 
AG Stencil
Broadway

@Alfred Thanks Alfred, you are too kind but when it is a matter of "tastes and colours", there is just no arguing...
Pictures for autumnal days... I guess it can stick to this theme.

 

I like sepia tone of photographs like the one I posted previously but I wanted to test different tone mapping and blending of these on this specific photo in APh.
Also, I've started to play with blending different images to give a colour pattern on a particular shape. Hope you like it

You friend can convert it to curves in Illustrator, or you can do it with inkScape:
You rasterize the stroke(s) and cut them (I did it one by one to keep them independent) You open inkScape and paste it You vectorize them You cut and paste them in AD

The files:
CHAPPAS2.afdesign
CHAPPAS.eps
 

You friend can convert it to curves in Illustrator, or you can do it with inkScape:
You rasterize the stroke(s) and cut them (I did it one by one to keep them independent) You open inkScape and paste it You vectorize them You cut and paste them in AD

The files:
CHAPPAS2.afdesign
CHAPPAS.eps
 

Good day everyone, I'm Allen, from Manila, Philippines. I'm a Sr. Art Director / Sr. Graphic Designer by profession who has worked for various multi-national ad agencies in my country for 16+ years. I have been using Adobe Suite of Applications since it's inception but have been looking for an alternative that can ultimately replace my Adobe Suite. I couldn't much longer afford the subscription rates and Adobe hogs computer memory too, with that said, it was all but natural for me to switch to Affinity Designer.
Now I'm slowly grasping the ins and outs of Affinity Designer, thankfully it's a short learning curve for me, since I'm well versed in Illustrator already, the shortcut keys are pretty intuitive save for some that needs a little bit learning. So it's was really easy, painless switch for me when I bought a copy of Affinity Designer last month. I've already made a few magazine layout designs which I have attached below as proof of my learnings.  
 
Looking forward to meet more of you guys here.
Since I already have Affinity Designer, I Will buy the Affinity Photo, the next month after payday. 
By the end of the year, I will have the Whole Affinity Suite so that I can use the Affinity Studio Link feature. Yes!!!
Disclaimer: The Magazine Mockup was made in Adobe Photoshop, since I don't own Affinity Photo yet.
By the way, you can also follow me on instagram as AffinityDesigner_Art. It's an instagram account dedicated to my journey to discovering the wonders of Affinity Designer. Here's the link: affinity.designer.art

This file whether an EPS or PDF, will not open as anything other than rasterised images in Adobe Illustrator, telling the exporter to not rasterise anything will lose the strokes texture because it is a raster image and you will end up with this...

In Adobe Illustrator, their brushes are pure vector files, so based mainly on eps, ai files. A comparable Affinity scenario would be creating vector brushes based on afdesign files, this is not possible at the moment but I hope they will get round to it soon so we can have pure vector brushes in Affinity, meaning vector graphics on curves/paths.

When you open a large number of tabs, the active tab is not displayed.
It would be logical for the tab to be displayed for any number of open tabs. You can close a document only through the menu.

Hi,
I know it was already improve once, but it's not enough.
The overflow red dot (or triangle for flowing to another frame) is only visible depending of the height of the frame: if we zoom out to create and adjust a new frame, it disappears.
And the level of zoom needed for it to appear can be important! For example, if I need to flow ±325 footnotes on 250 pages, needing sometimes only 1 line at the bottom, I'll have to zoom in/zoom out 500 times!
Second bug with this: it's impossible to find overflow in small frames if the zoom level doesn't allow enough space between the blue nodes of a  frame to display the red dot. Looking for overflow with a zoom of 270% on a document isn't a good workflow.
While in text mode those indicators should be displayed, and perhaps bigger when zooming out, so it's easier to click on them. They should be shown with other tools too, but smaller.

When creating or modifying a Text Style:

And therein lies the problem. Text styles in Publisher are confusing to understand and cumbersome to use—and much of that seems to stem from this totally unnecessary feature that allows you to use a paragraph style as a character style.
Granted, Publisher does some things better than InDesign. For example, the 'Sum space before and after' option is easy to overlook, but it's such an inspired feature! It's like collapsable margins in CSS—something I'd wished I could have in InDesign CS6. But when it comes to simply managing and applying these styles, Publisher gets funky at the expense of usability. The fact that we're having such a long discussion on this, which is now delving into the nuances of 'Base' style inheritance, tells me something is very wrong. We shouldn't have to wrap our heads around this stuff. We should be able to apply a paragraph style, choosing to either keep or strip character-level overrides, and the app should do exactly that.

The other solution is to create Character styles and use other shortcuts (I usually use ctrl+numeric pad number for [ italic | bold italic | bold ], and for variants like medium or black ctrl+alt+ num pad or ctrl+shift+num pad, etc.).
You can asign shortcut to the Paragraph|Character styles. 

Right. In InDesign, you need to hold down Option while clicking on a style in order to clear any overrides.
As a long-time InDesign user, I can confirm that it's an uncomfortable adjustment… but not for the reason you gave. I can't speak for the workflow of others, but one of the very first things I do with any sizeable document is to convert meaningful character formatting (italics for publication names, emphasis, etc) into character styles for two good reasons:
To lock them in and avoid losing them. This isn't just about accidental removal—it's about removing all other nasty artefacts from the client's text, while not losing the important stuff! For consistency and the ability to change formatting later if required—basically the same reasons you use any text styles. So in practice, it's actually pretty rare that I want to apply a style and NOT remove overrides.
It's also pretty rare that I want to remove all the character styles (once they're applied), and the main reason I find myself wanting to do it in Publisher is because Publisher is applying these sodding "Heading 1 + Heading 1" duplicate paragraph-cum-character styles all over the place!
I think I'm starting to confuse myself even as I try to understand and work with Publisher. So I agree with you here… InDesign really does get text styles right… from separate panels for paragraph and character styles, to the much simpler way they work. I think Affinity would have been far better served to keep it simpler and just imitate the behaviour of InDesign in this regard.

Wow guys. I found the solution. You can use this "Blend Ranges" method also directly on vector clipping masks! That makes them act just like illustrator's Transparency Masks! Amazing this, hey. 

Did you tried playing with Blend ranges?

I can see how this can be useful if the font does not support all characters of the current keyboard layout (and especially if the keyboard layout deviates significantly from the US/UK keyboard), but the feature sort of backfires in certain situations:

As can be seen here, the special keys of Fin/Swe keyboard with åäöÅÄÖ are fully supported in all styles of Noto Sans, yet all fonts belonging to the family are grayed out. This can be considered a bug, and it might well have been fixed in later versions of CorelDRAW. Noto, of course, is kind of a crazy exception as its goal is basically to support all possible scripts.