Wosven

Hi everyone!
I bring you something I found in an article. It was very interesting and decided to make a palette out of it and share it with all of you.
This amazing 3400 year old paint box once belonged to Vizier Amenemope who lived during the reign of Amenhotep ll, c. 1427–1401 BCE. With a measure of 3.6x2.2x21 cm, It has an inscription inlaid in Egyptian blue.
(Extracted from this article)
This particular vizier, Amenemope, liked to paint for fun when he wasn’t advising the Pharaoh. The paint box, carved from a single piece of boxwood, shows inlay of Egyptian blue in incised hieroglyphics at each end. The rounded squares were carved into the surface to create the paint wells. From the far left the dry pigment cakes are:
finely ground carbon black course ground carbon black green (mixture of Egyptian blue frit, yellow ochre and orpiment) Egyptian blue frit Red (red ochre/red iron oxide mixed with orpiment). The box is in surprisingly good condition and shows only minor cracking along the edges. Surfaces of the paint cakes look slightly dirty which would indicate the smearing of one pigment over another. Not bad for a three thousand four hundred year old artist’s paint box.

Anyway, I took some effort to get the palette and translate it to #hex so we can also make compositions out of it.
Here you can download my compilation of it and make your own compositions.
Hope you find it as interesting and useful I do.
Cheers!

Vizier Amenemope's Paint Box.afpalette

The phrase ‘cheat sheet’ is no more than an example of a literary device, somewhat comparable to describing ‘a zoot suit with a reet pleat’. That aside, looking up something that you might be expected to remember can quite reasonably be called ‘cheating’, despite the fact that there’s no criminal activity, misdirection or deception involved (unless you try to pretend that you didn’t have to look it up).
*Looking up ‘backwashing’ leads to descriptions of water treatment, which is clearly irrelevant here.

The term "cheat sheet" simply comes from the practise of allowing students to use reference sheets in exams. It has no connection with dishonesty, it is simply a means of accessing standard information without the necessity to remember by rote large amounts of basic information which is only needed occasionally. (Such as numerous keyboard shortcuts, many of which you rarely use.)

The problem comes mainly of having the margins the same blue as the text frame blue. If, as logical, the default color for margins was different from the start, (usually magenta), you wouldn't be confused.
I put a request for this long ago, and it was in a different color at some point, but someone decided to use the same blue again, and it's confusing.

It would be better if the app was able to use the last selected options for exporting this document. Perhaps you want "Current page" as default, but most of us 'd rather have "All pages" as default, instead of "All spread", since it's most usual.
And if AD was also able to remember the last used options regarding Artboard, it would be nice.

It looks like Javascript, not PHP.

It looks like Javascript, not PHP.

It would be better if the app was able to use the last selected options for exporting this document. Perhaps you want "Current page" as default, but most of us 'd rather have "All pages" as default, instead of "All spread", since it's most usual.
And if AD was also able to remember the last used options regarding Artboard, it would be nice.

It would be better if the app was able to use the last selected options for exporting this document. Perhaps you want "Current page" as default, but most of us 'd rather have "All pages" as default, instead of "All spread", since it's most usual.
And if AD was also able to remember the last used options regarding Artboard, it would be nice.

10 Easy Eye Assets by Teekfox 
 
 
 
https://teekfox.gumroad.com/l/htswg
 

@VeganPete
Like you, if I design an object without contour/stroke, I don't expect one being added just by switching colours. It should be done by the designer, modifying the stroke's width, and not by the apps.
Especially in AP, where foreground/background are difficult to differentiate, and you can easily disregard a 0 pt black stroke, and end up instead with a real stroke.

Thanks R C-R. If it's there as a feature, do you know if there is any way to turn it off? Possibly the devs can add an option for it in a future update sometime.

Thinking about it, I'm sure it's handy for most people - for me it's a little bit of a hindrance - I use affinity to make transparent png's and transparent screen bezles for game overlays and layered art. It's usually only after import to the game engine that I notice the stray lines that weren't there by my design - or after a final render of an art piece, on closer inspection, I'll notice something not quite as I intended. For quite a while, I assumed the game engine was at fault, so I was offsetting the position and scale by a few pixels to move the lines off the screen - this affected the resolution, so I had to deliberately make the images 1 pixel larger and force sharpness and use a forced aspect-ratio in the game engine (which affects performance).

The ambiera forum suggested I inspect my images in case the lines were actually part of the image. They were correct. Once I realsied it was actually the image at fault, I then had to go back and edit them (or worst case scenario, create them again from scratch - although in most cases, I had saved the .aphoto file along with the render).

A similar thing occasionally happens when I select text, under certain circumstances, it switches back to the previously used colour - rather than the colour I currently have selected. I think it's related but it may be a different issue.

If I could switch those features off, it would fit my workflow a lot more reliable.

I suppose as a workaround, I can go back and double check everything before a final render and just manually erase the lines with the marquee selector and cut tool (possible even the eraser with a steady hand) if they're rasterised - or I can just try to get in the habit of adding the extra steps to revert it back to zero stroke width whenever I click on the switch button - or I suppose I can even add a "dummy" raster-layer which I can select prior to making make any changes to colour (as it only happens with vector layers) - then once the changes are made safely (without adding the previously-stored width), I can then switch back to the vector layer I was working on. As a final option, I can convert all the vectors and text to rasters so this doesn't happen at all, then if I want to go back and edit them in the future, I can just delete the layers and re-draw them all as vectors again.

Thanks.

@Wosven thank you! Much appreciated. Glad you had fun.
 
 
 

Winter - like a sketch 

For those who found it useful, another version of the Gradient editor, with added features:
position for the stops transparency repetition of the gradient


SVG_gradient_editor_v5.zip

You think that is bad.  I have a son who is an excellent attorney and also likes baking (at Christmas) who can get melted chocolate half way across the kitchen on walls, windows, and door handles, while he “folds” it into cake batter.  Good thing he is more precise with the law!

Well, I have a son of 15 years. He likes cooking and baking, and produces really great pizza, bread, pasta and other good food. But he always leaves a mess. The image is nothing compared to what I experience in real live. Mostly everything covered in white dust of flour. 

I don't know what type of gradients you need, but I had fun doing this page that can produce simple SVG with linear of radial gradients.
The stops are equaly distanced, and you can only create stops, modify their color, of create them from a list of colors in hexadecimal values (#ffffff). Once exported to SVG, it's easy to open in AD to save as gradient (after resizing the gradient, since it's always larger than the CSS one...)

SVG_gradient_editor_v5.zip
 


SVG_gradient_editor.zip

Hi Wosven, I used the default leading unless otherwise indicated. There's a bit of vertical type next to each specimen that indicates the font size and leading (if it isn't default). I generally left the kerning alone as well, so I'd have an accurate view of how the typeface would look 'as is.'

Hey everyone!

So having been through a lot of the different processes here, I decided to make a colour wheel. Here is what happened:

The method I used for this first one was to use a Gradient Adjustment Layer. Not a bad result, but I wound up with a ton of dithering noise and gradient banding. I tried all sorts of things to fix this, even just to fix the appearance of it and had minimal luck. Worse, if I were to copy the ellipse to another program like Photo, or even Illustrator, -even as an svg file- I would get that incredibly So I called that attempt good and took a break for a while.

I came back later and was nosing around the panels and forgot that there was an effects panel right next to the layers panel. That got me thinking: Is there a gradient effect in there... well lo and behold there is! While the gradient panel here is around the same size as the one found in a Gradient Adjustment Layer, the effects window can be moved all around the screen... and there is a plus! This gradient editor contains midpoints, so you can adjust things with a lot more precision. Dang, if only I had seen this earlier! And by doing it this way, the effect copies along with it, no matter where you put it... even in some other random app.
--EDIT FOR MORE COOL STUFF--
With this option you can create a style that you can apply to any object. I was fiddling around and suddenly it worked. You cannot make a gradient swatch out of it, but you have the ability to make and save a style.

Y'all are great, thank you so much! Here are some pics along the way so you can see my progress... and a bit of a crummy video on doing this:
 


Using Gradient Overlay Layer Effect.mov

No. Sadly.
It's a feature asked for:
...

Of course. Each one of us have different worflow, but some will use more some features than other. For the ones that create complexe gradients, being able to modify them in a larger panel is important. For those who have a huge collection of gradients swatch, and need to use them on object or in gradients map, being able to pick gradient swacthes when using the gradient map is important,etc.
I suppose that  people asking for features need them more than once.
We can always use tricks, but if there a simpler and logical way to do things, that's always better.

Better said MY problem with large canvases and brushes. Perhaps others with better PCs don't have lag.  Maybe artists like me are a rare breed: Using Photo for painting (instead of Designer, or the very varied products from other brands laser focused in the painting specialty (but severely lacking in all what Photoshop and Photo do, which is essential for illustration/graphic design/comic)), and having a PC with a good CPU but terrible GPU.
Maybe the problem is not happening with 3060, RX 6800 or 3080 cards (that now cost like a whole computer), but with my 1650 it was not practical to paint in Photo. Or maybe other people do not mind the delay on the start of every brush stroke. Probably it is only a few of us having this lag ( I dunno). Maybe not many people are required to paint on huge canvases for print (300 dpi), needing good performance in 15.000 x 12.000 pixels (and the like). It was not working well even in 8000x8000 (a bit above the hardware limit of an iPad pro, I think).
My specs: Ryzen 9 3900X, GTX 1650 4Gb (non super), 32 GB 3000 Mhz CL 16, SSD for Photo and Windows, HDD for files, Wacom Intuos Pro XL (~ A2-A3)).
 
But for those in my situation :
- To solve the problem of menus and everything getting non clickable super often (constantly), so, brush and mouse could only paint but suddenly become unable to click on menus and  palettes, I even had to exit with Alt+F4, and hit "n" or "s" in dialog windows. Removing "Windows Ink" (maybe I had set it so in the past, like a lot of people do for PS) preference in Photo's, and setting instead "high precision". Also (as if not it wouldn't work...) in my Wacom control panel, the profile I had made for Photo, in "projection" tab, I did set off "Windows Ink".
- To solve the lag occurring even with 8k x 8k px canvases (and I still noticed some very subtle start-lag in quite smaller ones) - and these solutions work well in a 15000x12000 canvas, while it'd be very rare to get a project of bigger dimensions (for me)-  , followed Dan C's indication (but  I had before, so, some combination was different) of disabling hardware acceleration in preferences. What I never had tried (I believe) was setting Retina in "low quality", Photo's preferences. As I feared some bad dithering or bad aliasing would show up. I... don't notice any artifact; maybe I am not looking well enough, but I don't see any problem.
- Also, I have always set 'dithered gradients' and the other option "clipping something" ON. I am not sure why, lol. If there's sth wrong with  that, pls, chime in !
 
... The thing is all these combined (including kicking windows ink towards outer space and beyond) results in a very responsive, fast, and no-lag brush stroke.... Finally! I've been years without being able to see it in my Photo installations,  lol.  :D. Is not that you couldn't paint. It's that fresh, spontaneous drawing and painting it was indeed quite a problem. Hopefully it helps to the people doing subtle photography retouching with the brush as well.
I was really needing in many projects the alignment/smart guides and other snapping, distribution, selections/layers power, text, color management, PDF/X export, brochure design, etc of the perfect combo that Designer and Photo make, but couldn't use any of them for the painting stage of every project (which is almost always needed, in my illustration/design/game art work). And with increasingly complex projects, is better to have it all in one shop. 
Now, if only I would get a way to make Photo remember to use a 5x5 or 17x17 color picker sample (needed in large resolutions to not pick an odd-unexpected color of 1px with most brushes, specially textured ones)  -as I use ALT (programmed in my pen button) to temp-pick colors as I paint, at top speed- then it all would be perfect. I wonder if it is possible to add to the assistant, in case just making it work by default is too much of a revamp of the code.
Really hoping this helps some other artists trying everything in silence.... 😎 

EDIT : (surely very relevant for a case study/performance, as is double the pixels for the card memory? dunno...) . Since some time I now have a 2 monitor setup (3 at the end of this week, Eizo ColorEdge is coming) in clone desktop mode. I've heard this can damage overall performance in some graphic applications. But I have all set at 60 Hz refresh rate and 1080p... It's a Huion Kanvas 22 display-tablet that I only use now as references and panels monitor, as after heavy testing I -unexpectedly- rather much prefer (even antique..) Wacom's pen control over the stroke and its sensitivity, even while it's (besides old) classic vs (modern) display-tablet.
Edit 2: Quite important, as surely is more heavier to process for the PC, I am all the time working with 16 bit mode files when the app allows it (ie, CSP can't, as far as I know), as transitions are quite smoother when painting. SO, all those huge canvases were as well 16-bit, not 8-bit.
Edit 3: Perhaps I did not mention it: This is all on Windows 10, not Mac.
Edit 4: Forgot yet another big thing... There's one more factor that adds lag in this use case: Not only I'm using very big canvases of 15k per side, I'm also using 250 - 300 px brushes which I make from scratch (nothing too fancy). I have been able to create "blocking brushes" as big as 700 -1000px wide (just dumbing them down... more spacing, less features, etc). Tho to be honest, that very initial blocking stage can be done as well with lasso tool and fill, or, my preferred route : Just do a lot of experimenting with basic composition and grayscale values (specially scenery) in super tiny resolution (even just 2k x 2k), super fluidly to experiment fast, then scale up a final one, as in blocking stage artifacts don't matter. So, really, 300 px brushes are the ones that have to work with every feature on (and now they do!  )

When I have several paragraphs selected, some of them with different settings applied for space before or space after paragraph, the panel displays a value of 0. Instead it should show no value. When Publisher behaves like this it is harder to discover why text behaves the way it does. The same goes for leading. Why don't you just leave it open if multiple values are included in the selection? The same goes for the character panel, Position and transform. 
Bottom line: if Publisher shows a value for the selected text, I should be able to trust that it is that exact value. If there are more values in the selected text, it should display no value, so that I can set it to my preferred value.

@TedThompson Hi.
Try View > View Mode > untick Clip to Canvas.
That should do it.