dave2017
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Posts posted by dave2017
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I could not find an easy way of closing down the photos in Photo. However, as I also have Designer I opened the one of the photo files there, and then tried to edit it in Photo. This then enabled me to have just the one photo loaded into Photo, and I examined it there, though as it needed hardly any processing I closed it up after checking out the effects of exposure changes etc.
Before this Photo clearly was just about bringing our machine to a halt, and eventually crashed it - possibly losing other work in the process - and requiring a restart.
This really is an issue which needs attention.
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We have an iMac which only has 8 Gbytes of main memory - though it is newish and has a fast processor.
I loaded up a bunch of files, including several RAF(RAW) files - from a Fuji camera and everything went very slow. I tried coming back out of Photo, and reloading, but it insists on trying to load the files.
I checked with Activity Monitor, and it's pretty clear that Photo wants nearly all of the 8Gbyte main memory in order to function.
That's OK if I know that I can avoid problems by not loading up photos, or not loading up RAW files, but since Photo keeps trying to load the files it has already loaded that's hard.
I need a way to shut down most of the loaded photos so that I can avoid this problem. I have not found a way to do this satisfactorily yet.
I have another machine which has a slower processor, but has 16 Gbytes of main memory. It is possible that the work could be done on that.
Not being able to reset Photo to a state where it can accept a smaller number of photos for proessing is a real nuisance.
Also - I think that if I were to accept JPG processing, this problem would be reduced somewhat, though that is not guaranteed.
It would be helpful if Photo could check main memory available before trying to load new files, and either prevent a new file from being loaded, or issue a warning. Some form of forced action should also be available to clear out photos which keep trying to load.
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I am inclined to agree. I have been using and testing and investigating stacks quite a bit recently, including the recently added one for astro photos, but many of these tools do some sort of function (average, max-min, etc.) on the image set. Something simple, such as "do nothing" and then unstack would get the images from different files into layers.
That could be a lot simpler for some applications.
Sometimes I find that I have to go into Affinity Designer to get things done. It's not quite the same, but at times the UI and operations are easier to manage. Not everyone will have Designer - it's a slightly different beast, but useful sometimes.
Photo is at times infuriating as it sometimes gets very close to an ideal solution, then falls at the last hurdle.
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On 2/5/2021 at 6:34 PM, David in Яuislip said:
If you've used New Stack and are happy with the result, then Ungroup the Live Stack Group into individual layers
Now rename each layer "Photo-1, Photo-2 etc. though might then replace the first part of the name with the Day and Time."
Go into Export Persona
Select all Layers
Click the Create Slice button at the bottom of the Layer Panel
Click Export Slices button at the bottom of the Slices PanelI wonder if there has been a change of behaviour with version updates.
Now I cannot see any way to Select all Layers from within the Export Persona.
Should that step be before the switch of Personas?
I have - some while back - seen different behaviour, but right now the steps in this sequence do not appear to work in version 1.9.1
Actually something has changed. There is now an option to add an Astro-Photography Stack - though I'm not sure that helps with what I'm trying to do, as I'm not doing astro photography right now. This is very confusing. I don't mind using an Astro Photography Stack or any stacking method which actually works, but this feels like trying to shoot for goal at a moving goal post in the middle of an earthquake!
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On 7/1/2019 at 7:00 PM, walt.farrell said:
You could duplicate the layer and rotate it before creating the slice from it.
If done manually that would be more work, though still less than cropping each shot. Say 3 different rotations - 5 different slices - to produce 15 different output shots.
If a macro were used to do those steps, then it could be less work, though it would also depend on how easy it would be to set up the macro.
I don't know if macros can do switches between personas, which would be necessary.
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I have been struggling with this kind of issue for weeks, and have posted similar requests in the last month.
I don't have any astro photos, but rather photos of a scene with fixed elements. I can create a Stack, and align everything, and then Crop.
What I want to do then is to export each photo - now aligned and cropped individually - preferably as a batch - e.g. Photo 1, Photo 2 etc.
Others have suggested various methods, such as using Slice, but as far as I can see every time I try to do this the Crop reverts, so that the images I really want are not aligned.
I want to use these in presentation with minimal jumping between images. This is very frustrating.
I have tried Ungrouping the stack, and various other techniques.
What I really do want to do is:
1. Create a whole bunch of images.
2. Get them all aligned.
3. Crop through the whole bunch.
4. Then export each one as a separate file. I don't want any photos to be merged or anything like that. What I'm asking for is simple.
I have even tried reverting to doing the crops manually - which is incredibly tedious.
If I'm doing something wrong I'd like to know. I've tried with layers, and with the Export Persona and various other methods - nothing really works well so far.
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Thanks - that's very helpul. The change is immediate if done from within the application. If I make a change in the OS state, will I have to restart the Affinity programs?
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I am often happy enough to see panels on my computer screen with dark or black backgrounds and white lettering. Recently I noticed that some users really dislike this and find it hard to read white letters on a black background.
Today I'm sitting in front of my screen and the sun has come up outside. This makes it very hard to read white letters on a black background. Are there different settings in Affinity software which allow role reversal of panels and lettering?
I use MacOS - and at the OS level there are options for light and dark configurations, but I'm not sure whether these pass over to applications, or whether applications should in fact provide something similar themselves.
Some users might prefer completely different combinations of colours and brightness for different visual aspects. Are these available in Affinity software?
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Getting back to this after a long while.
John's comment re cropping - yes I do want to crop through all the aligned photos. Each image has an area of interest which is the same in all of them.
So if the basic crop is non destructive - and reverts with other operations, then I will try the solution of exporting to a raster format which was mentioned.
It's a shame that the export only does one layer at a time if Export Persona is not used, but it's better than nothing.
There is a hint that the Export Persona might be able to do what I want - but I've still not figured that out.
Slices in AP terminology seem to be almost the equivalent of several different crops done on the same image, so that was what I meant when I wrote earlier that was not what I wanted.
There may indeed be a way to use the Export Persona to do each of the aligned images, though sadly I've still not found it.
I am however getting close to something which serves my immediate purposes.
What would be really great would be if each layer could be associated with the Exif data from its original image, or alternatively if one could easily overlay a time on each layer.
Thanks for the answers - I'll see if I can make the final steps now.
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Hi - sorry wasn't able to get back to reply to David/Ruislip or John R yesterday due to password issues.
I finally got something to work, though it wasn't ideal, but at least made sense. I note that Walt had posted something about it being tricky way back in 2018.
One thing which is not obvious is ungrouping the stack. As I recall from a day or two back, one clicks on the Stack label in the Layers, then clicks on that with a CMD-Click, which causes a drop down menu to appear.
Ungroup is available from that. This causes all the individual photos - now hopefully aligned and maybe cropped to appear each as a separate layer - and the Stack disappears from the Layers display.
Then switch to the Export Persona and use the Slice feature - together with Export Layers.
I really do need to go through this again, taking notes as I go, as it is very easy to miss out a step and things which work and are needed operations in the Photo Persona don't work in the Export Persona, and vice versa.
Thanks to those who replied. I didn't intend to upset anyone, and even now I'll need to check all the steps.
When I've done that I'll come back and hopefully produce a definitive version of how to do this - though one of my shots came out completely the wrong size - I"m not sure why. I'll try to post details of a workable process anyway.
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No it's not.
Let's start again. I have several photos which are roughly the same shot, taken from the same location, though not with a tripod.
The zoom settings are probably the same on each, so the major part of each photo will overlap with the others.
The photos were taken at different times of day or even on different days.
I want to align them all, then crop the aligned photos so that they are all then the same size.
Ideally I'd then like to call them Photo-1, Photo-2 etc. though might then replace the first part of the name with the Day and Time.
I can apparently do part of what I'd like using Stacks. I can upload all the photos to a stack.
What then?
The suggestion to use slices hasn't worked for me, though I can now see a similarity between slices and crops.
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Tried a few times. Not at all obvious how to get each layer as a separate file with a sequence of names - say Name-1, Name-2 etc.
Slices were interesting, but didn't seem to be doing what I wanted, but rather slicing the whole image - with all the layers into different photos.
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OK - thanks. Now successfully got a stack set up and aligned. Is there an easy way now to just get a sequence of shots - say Stack-1, Stack-2, Stack-3 etc, where Stack is the name associated with the photos taken as a whole? Or do I have to save each one separately, which would be tedious.
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I have taken a set of shots from my window at different times of day. Mostly they are very similar - same distance settings etc., but I didn't use a tripod.
Is it possible to trim the set slightly using Affinity Photo, so that I have a set of shots which are more or less accurately aligned?
I think it might be possible to do this using a stack operation. I have used stacks for panoramas and HDR in the past, but this is a slightly different application. I want a series of individual shots, but all lined up within reasonably accurate tolerances.
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It seems that this problem has been known for some time, yet there is little evidence of a fix coming along soon. The comment about Windows suggests that there are different issues for the desktop versions. I use a Mac for "desktop" work, but the iPad version is hopeless for some applications even with an Apple pencil, as it's not possible to see what's actually happening well enough.
In the meantime Serif seem to be putting effort into Publisher and other products. This is a pity, as perhaps a little attention to some problems and user feedback for existing products would pay dividends. I still fee that the Serif tools are good, but the problem with not being able to see the size of the brush with visual feedback in the iPad versions is a real pain.
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I have some JPEG+RAW photos taken with my Fuji F600EXR camera. I was surprised tonight that when I processed the RAW version of one of the shots using Affinity Photo it was significantly larger physically than the JPEG version which the camera produced. Overall I felt that the quality of the image, once I tweaked it, was better than the camera generated JPEG, with better colours, but I was surprised at the extra "border" to the shot. Is this normal with RAW?
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Ouch - just noticed that the heading has the "word" - "dimentions" - not the correct spelling "dimensions". If someone could fix that I'd be grateful. Maybe there's some auto correct feature which is doing this, as it just happened again!
Re Sketch-up and LibreCAD - I certainly didn't know about the latter, and I probably used the former when Google called it something else.
I agree that most people won't want added technical features, but today I just wanted to send some quick designs off to friend who is contemplating some new developments/extensions to his house, and while I was doing it I thought "surely I can do this more accurately ....". Some of the rounding or non rounding features of AD seemed a bit of a pain too. Is it possible to constrain it for example to mm, so that when working in metres and one is trying to get a length of 0.85 metres, one doesn't keep getting 0.8492 or 0.8523 - i.e values which are unwanted? I did discover how to get measurements accurate (or seemingly so) and OK at the resolution levels involved it really doesn't matter, but it just didn't feel right. Saying that there are other tools, or that AD wasn't really designed for this is all very well, but it can nearly do this, so why not make it work? It's a better proposition than trying to do 3D surely, which was one of my other suggestions before I realised that there's no point and tools like Blender can do that already.
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12 minutes ago, R C-R said:
I have not experimented with this much but I think the problem is the maximum dimensions are limited by the DPI setting -- even though vector objects can be scaled to any size, since AD & AP both support raster objects too, a max pixel dimension limit is enforced. Anyway, in Affinity Designer I had no trouble creating a new 100 X 100 meter document if I first set the DPI to 50. Maybe that will work for you as well?
You can probably speed this up by using Grids & Guides together with snapping, but it would depend on your workflow how well that worked.
Thanks again. I wonder what the resolution is. I had suspected that DPI might interact. The assumption that users would only want to work with smallish numbers of modest units which may suit many users can fail. What about city planners who might want to deal with kilometres or miles - say 30 miles by 45 miles - with a 5 x 5 miles core? Road designers also.
Obviously it could be done by "mental effort" use scaled values, but I was hoping that AD and AP could cope even with quite large units and fairly large numbers. I believe that city planners do this kind of thing, though the software they use might have auto scaling built in. I'm not sure what the limits are in Adobe Acrobat Reader, though I know some planners who use that for houses, and they use loupe tools for fine detail. Presumably they also use Acrobat or some other tools to create the planning documents.
Most of us "lesser" mortals probably don't have such extreme needs.
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Thanks. That was helpful though I'm still finding my way with this approach.
I just tried to make a very large artboard for a garden design, and I couldn't enter a figure of 100 metres for one of the dimensions. The largest number I seemed to be able to put in was just over 90.
I have been assuming that everything would be scaled so very large values should be possible, without having to effectively design and think in scaled up or down units.
I also find that using the drawing tools the dimensions may not be quite right by drawing/dragging - or is there a way of fixing that in the interface? I can force things to the dimensions I want by getting them approximately right, then doing fine tuning for each object, but is there a quicker way to just get some of the dimensions right first time?
One other thing I wanted to do was to truncate the corner off a rectangle to model a shower tray. I did this by creating another rectangle and trying to rotate it by 45 degrees, and then overlaying the rectangles and subtracting one from the other. Almost worked, but I didn't quite get 45 degrees for the rotation angle. I know that as a multiple of 15 degrees that should be possible easily, but what if I'd wanted exactly 42.45 degrees? Is there a way of doing that without having to do a lot of fiddling about?
Still, definite progress - so thanks again.
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Although I've been using AP and AD for some time now, I haven't really got to grips with absolute dimensions. I assume they are "in" there somwhere, but I haven't really found them, or how to control them.
Today I wanted to share a few bathroom designs with a friend, and I knocked up a few using AD, and emailed them to him. However I had to guess the dimensions for my images.
What I really wanted to do was to specify units (e.g. metres - today) and then to be able to put in absolute values for lengths in metres. What I got was OK, but it would have been better if I could have linked to units. Also some people might want to work in cm or mm, or even feet and inches.
Maybe this is possible, but a search for "absolute dimensions in Affinity Designer" revealed a quite interesting video about how to use the pen and pencil tools in ways I did not know before, but did not address the dimension issue I was trying to find out about. Perhaps this information is in the Workbook(s) for AP and AD.
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I'm not sure if this is a feature which is already provided in Affinity software.
Sometimes it might be helpful to password protect documents, either whole or in part.
For example, it is now becoming more common for documents to be sent via email, and then parts have to be signed and returned to the sender. This could be done by regular mail, but that is slow. If it's done via email, then this exposes both the original document, plus the signer(s)' signatures to the world at large. One way round this is to encrypt the signed output file, and notify the original sender of the password by another channel. For photographs, some may have commercial value, and again it might be helpful if the files could be encrypted so that only a small group could access the photos.
It is possible to send some documents with encryption using various tools. For example, PDF files can be encrypted, so AP or AD could be used in conjunction with a PDF viewer (Adobe Acrobat or Apple Preview) to encrypt files, and thus provide a more secure format for data exchange. For the iPad version of AP, output files can usually be read by iOS Pages, which also supports a form of encryption.
However, these workarounds are a bit clunky, and I wonder if it would be possible and/or desirable to embed appropriate encryption within the Affinity progams.
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I sometimes have a group of photos to process. Each one doesn't necessarily take long, but the whole sequence of operations might.
I may use other tools as well in the process, and eventually bundle the results off by email to an interested party.
As an example, today I was asked to take close up photos of a table top. I took a bunch of photos - then I wanted to upload them all to AP. Then I wanted to select a few, and make some changes, such as blurring out the background, and finally I wanted to save them somewhere unique, and then send them off.
I don't know how big a problem this is with other photo editing tools - it may actually not be any easier - but as I have already written, each small step adds up and in the end the process becomes tedious.
A more streamlined process would help.
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I noticed today when trying to download and save a photo that I had an option of HEIF format - which may be going to become a new "standard".
Out of curiosity I created one, and then tried to open it with Affinity Photo. It seems that AP doesn't handle this format - yet. This may become more important in the future.
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I am gradually finding a work flow with those MP4 files which works for me. It's a bit tedious, but does "the job", providing the job is simply getting the "best" image from the MP4 sequence. It does not improve the focus over the whole imaage. Looking at the MP4 files in Quicktime it is quite surprising that often some of them are completely out of focus. Some are indeed, as one migh hope, capturing different parts of the images in sharp focus. I don't know what algorithms Panasonic use inside the camera to sharpen the focus - that does generally seem to work quite well, though I think it's only supposed to sharpen the focus on user selected parts of the whole image, which again is not quite the same as focus stacking.
My current solution is to view the image sequence in Quicktime, and scan through to find an image which looks the best for the intended purpose. Then put QT into full screen mode, and wait until the forward/reverse markers disappear. Then use the key combination cmd-shift-3 to save the screen shot. The resulting file can then be adjusted further using AP. If one wanted to do more work on the whole it might be possible to extract several frames with slightly different focus by this method, and to use a focus merge stack in AP. I don't do that at present, but I do often "optimise" the image by adjusting the levels, using a curves adjustment to get a further perceptual improvement, and possibly applying an amount of sharpening. Sometimes, to my surprise, blend modes give a pleasant result, though this is quite often a trial and error process.
While this seems to be a somewhat clunky process, it does work quite well for images taken in landscape mode. Portrait mode is slightly more difficult, as AP might not do the 90 degree rotation so well - truncating part of the image - so if that happens I use other tools, such as Preview to get the rotation done. I do also use crop to get horizontal (or vertical) lines into the clossst approximation to the "correct" position with the straighten option.
General question about graphics pen tablets
in Pre-V2 Archive of Affinity on Desktop Questions (macOS and Windows)
Posted
This question is fairly general and related to graphics tablets in general, not just to Affinity software. I bought a Huion pen tablet and I can configure it with shortcut buttons for common tasks. The particular tablet is the H1060P, and it also has some soft keys as well as the programmable hard keys.
I have seen videos of similar tablets, for example by Wacom, and how to configure the tablets to work with Wacom and software packages. What I really need to know is whether typically artists/designers configure the tablets for just one program, or whether it's possible or easy to configure them to work with different applications and to switch between them, and whether many (any) people actually do that.
For example, someone might want to develop text in Microsoft Word, then do some photo editing in Affinity Photo, and then using copy and paste etc. work on a larger document in Affinity Publisher - using a pen tablet with configured shortcuts to hopefully simplify the process in each application.
I think I can write a program to allow me to change the configuration to match different software applications, but this might not be necessary. I have so far linked the tablet to a couple of Affinity programs - Photo and Designer, but I might need to figure out a set of keyboard shortcuts which are compatible with different pieces of software. Otherwise I'll have to work on a switch solution - probably importing/exporting the tablet configuration file to match each application, with different shortcuts for Photo and Designer. I also have Publisher, so I might want to configure shortcuts for that too - and of course the shortcuts would have to be compatible with my OS.
I'm using MacOS and have now largely figured out how to use the tablet as a mouse, and also to do very specific operations within each application.
Also, as I'm not a designer, or graphic artist, are there any other forums where I could ask questions about this kind of issue - including whether it's worth having a tablet with a scroll wheel, or using a trackball?