toltec

OK Sharkey, a question. After all, it is your thread :) Assuming you do carry on and keep applying yourself to learning AP, even if only to keep Mrs Sharkey happy, what would YOU like to see? A manual (printed or PDF) a decent help file, an online guide, a set of examples with instructions (like Adobe's Classroom in a Book) more videos or what? What would inspire you and more to the point what sort of things would you want to see in it. Some of the videos are far to "high end" in my view.

As an example, this is only fun stuff, but where are the instructions on cutting out with text or shapes? And don't get me started on Channel Masking. Cutting out and vignetting shapes? or using an SVG path And note. Every one of these images is completely editable later down to path nodes, including the text! Not important for fun but clipping paths, or whatever you call them, are important, sometimes. I had to put images into text or shapes several times during my career but it's not that easy to find out how in Affinity. Or at least, not easy to find the instructions.

The trouble is the trend towards help files was OK a few years ago and for a time, because most people were upgrading and could simply find the newest features in the help file or learn from someone. THAT DOES NOT WORK WITH NEW USERS FOR A NEW PROGRAM !!!!!!!!!! I have lived and worked through it from Photoshop 3 to now. I was a full time user and could build on my knowledge over the years. It was my job. There are also plenty of training courses in the trade for Photoshop or absolutely anywhere for something like MS office. I once ran a Photoshop training course at a college and asked why businesses always bought Microsoft when there were free or cheap alternatives. The answer was that they could send them to a college and get an "instant expert". That was not an option with Open Office. Still isn't 20 years later which is why most businesses still buy MS Office. Something like Affinity is so sophisticated (read COMPLEX) that even I had a lot of problems, just migrating, despite decades of experience. What the Affinity team seems to have totally failed to grasp is that most users are keen amateurs (which is good) and/or NEW TO IMAGE EDITING. They might have bought a digital camera for the first time or are taking pictures on a mobile and have seen clever stuff done online but that is no good. Most wouldn't know the difference between DPI, PPi or LPI like the poor chap who designed a fantastic pineapple for screen printing but didn't know what resolution to start with. Your help files are virtually useless and the trouble is, there is no Google backup. I wanted to cut out a difficult image using the pen. Clipping path?, cutting out?, pen selections ? Try and find how to do that in either the help files on the videos or on Google (I dare you), yet Affinity is brilliant at that. And who would look for vignetting under Gaussian blur? Yet that sort of compositing thing is such a common task. My local night college gives classes in Photoshop. There are loads of books, reference tombs and "how to" books, Classroom in a book, etc. Yet, unlike Affinity, because Photoshop has been around so long you can also Google anything (pretty much) and find a how to. But Affinity ? How do you Google the contents of a video? The help files should be about three times the size and backed up with a PDF manual and ideally a project book. Maybe in version 3 you could go back to a PDF manual. Look at Xara studio. A great PDF manual with an option to buy a printed copy. I have seen it written by a member of staff it that Affinity is not designed to be a direct competitor for Photoshop. So what's it for? It's far too complex and hard to learn for most average users, despite its incredible value for money. So you are left with us Internet geeks and very keen enthusiasts fed up with Adobe pricing. Simply read this forum. Many Photoshop users will find it too hard to migrate without documentation and as professionals it would be too expensive in time and fraught with difficulties if it doesn't do what they expect in Photoshop, of they can't find it. I saw someone complaining that Affinity couldn't do channel masks, yet there is great way to do that in Affinity. It's NOT called channel masking.. No ability to select a colour range within a selected area. Easy enough to do but a new from Photoshop user wouldn't know how, and if he had to do it under commercial pressure (and there is lots of that in the trade) he would simply revert to Photoshop. It's not that expensive. Fantastic software, I can't praise the software team enough but invest some money and pay someone to write a manual. Sorry. Rant over :)

Yeah I have found that too or NO WORDS AT ALL.

Do check with your printer but silkscreen printing on a teeshirt will typically be around 50 / 55 lpi (lines per inch). Ideally, you want two pixels for every line, multiplied by the size of the print. Therefore, say your image will be printed at 12" high by 12" wide, you need 1200 pixels by 1200 pixels for 50 lpi at 100 pixels for each inch. Your image is suitable for a size of about 7.5 inches wide by 5 inches high. I don't know what size the image will be on the shirt but use the above formula. It is always best though to design much higher. If you designed it at 6000 pixels x 6000 pixels Affinity can easily reduce it at the final stage with no loss of quality. Sadly, going up in size never works very well, you will almost certainly be disappointed with the result. Sorry but it would be best to start again at a much higher resolution.

Hmm, I see your problem. Not a bug then, a feature request. I must say, the ability to save to "last folder" or "specified folder" wouldn't be a bad idea. Professional volume workflows demand professional solutions. More important than the ability to add a drop shadow to a line when its rotated and feathered, or whatever. Submit a request. It is a professional level feature and probably quite easy to implement.

In my day, I would have called that a manual too.

Funny, someone else had this a few days back, not sure what the resolution was. Do you have anti-virus software that could be stopping it. Bitdefender will due to it's Ransomware module but other AV software will too, sometimes. here we are https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/40597-installation-in-windows-10-not-working/?hl=installation

One thing I really like about Faststone Image Viewer (among many other things) is the Print Designer bit. You can select four, twenty or more images and it will arrange them to fit onto one sheet of paper, with a choice of the gaps in between, print margins etc. Handy for proofing or making an instant contact sheet. You can even resize each picture individually afterwards, add a background colour, frames, shadows and speech bubbles. It's quite good fun. Only downside is, it doesn't see Affinity files. Not yet One click contact sheet (OK, maybe two clicks and a drag). I just selected the pictures, went into the Print Designer bit and that was it! You can even save the laid out contact "sheet" as a JPEG, if that's your thing.

It's not a bug, unless your computer is not doing the same as mine? When I load an image, any image, Affinity always exports it or saves it to the same directory I just loaded it from. That would surely be your work directory? i.e. if you put all your documents into one folder (e.g called work), as you load, save and export the images they should all end in the same place when you have finished. Admittedly,if you load from multiple directories, they will get muddled but if you look in the directories you got the originals from, the exported files should be there too. Or am I missing something :unsure:

I used to use Irfanview, very good but I found I preferred Faststone for it's cataloging. I might look at Irfanview again, just for the hell of it. I don't actually remember Irfanview doing cataloging? It was incredibly fast though. It could launch and load images far quicker that Photoshop could even load them. Much better for finding things in a hurry and even making quick edits

Yes, sorry if it doesn't help. I can only say try and keep positive, keep plugging away at Photo and I'm sure everybody here will help you all they can. Was there one particular thing you wanted to learn to use it for?

If it's for Windows, I like Faststone Image Viewer. It links to scanners, catalogs your pictures, grabs screenshots and gives basic editing (it's no Affinity Photo, mind you), cropping, "lossless" JPEG transitions and even makes slideshows for you. You can easily set it up to launch an external editor (like Affinity Photo) so scan (or find) any photo, press E (for external editor) and it launches the image straight into Photo. I have been using it for years. And it's free! It compliments Affinity Photo very well with the scanning and cataloging features that Affinity lacks. http://www.faststone.org FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image browser, converter and editor. It has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping, retouching and color adjustments. Its innovative but intuitive full-screen mode provides quick access to EXIF information, thumbnail browser and major functionalities via hidden toolbars that pop up when your mouse touches one of the four edges of the screen. Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, PSD, EPS, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF, ARW, SR2, RW2 and DNG). FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image browser, converter and editor. It has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping, retouching and color adjustments. Its innovative but intuitive full-screen mode provides quick access to EXIF information, thumbnail browser and major functionalities via hidden toolbars that pop up when your mouse touches one of the four edges of the screen. Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, PSD, EPS, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF, ARW, SR2, RW2 and DNG).

. No, but at least not being alone helps with depression ;)

You lost me at "Mac" ;) I have a keen photographer friend who uses a program called Unbound which seems pretty good. It comes from the Mac App store for about $10. It's quite streamlined (not bloatware) but it does the job and is not expensive. Worth a look.

Don't do that! I agree with you about being intuitive though. Despite using Photoshop for 30 years and considering myself an "expert" I found learning AP far from intuitive. It's not all Serifs fault, I found most software I ever used un-intuitive (aka baffling), at least in the early years and Serif have recently baffled me on several occasions. I remember, back in the early days of stone chip memory (and when I still had hair), that I once wanted to put white text on a black background. I bet you can do that!!! At the time (print trade) this was sometimes called wobbing. There was no "intuitive" way to do it in the software (basically a word processor) so I looked in the index of the manual (remember those?) but no luck. Fortunately I was not under the usual time pressure so I took the manual (for younger readers, that's a book) home to read it. I eventually found wobbing was called "inverse video". That's software people for you ;) I ended up reading the book pretty much all the way through because "inverse video" was in a section at the very back and I had not looked for "inverse video" in the index. Can't imagine why I never thought of it. Duh! By reading the manual, I don't mean reading every word, just browsing through and reading the paragraph headings to see what they were on about. Simply knowing what could be done was a huge help. I could remember what it could do and pretty much what it was called (that was when I was still young enough to remember things). That really helped because if I wanted to do something I could always find the relevant page in the manual. Just as long as I avoided the index. Modern software people don't seem to understand that (maybe I'm just showing my age). They think that help files are OK but, if you don't know that what you want to do is inverse your video, how do you look it up? They seem to think that by watching 120 hours of video online, you will stumble across it. I can tell you now, two thirds of what I have since learned about AP came from looking for it, but at least I knew what I was looking for. I simply wanted to do what I could do in PSP. Fortunately as a retired person with time on my hands (aka Boring Old F*"t) I have been able to waste days of my time going through videos and searching for stuff that is either not in the help files or called something else. Like, why the heck is vignetting sometimes called Gaussian blurring? That's software people for you ;) Funny thing is, by searching for stuff, I have learned to do things I could not do in Photoshop, or didn't know it could do and and stumbled some great features in Affinity. When I bought my first computer all those years ago I remember looking at it in panic thinking "I'll never be able to learn that" but I did, little by little, and still am learning, little by little. Remember, the Titanic wasn't designed or built in a day, and look how well that turned out. I suggest you buy a book about learning Photoshop. They are cheap second hand as it doesn't have to be up-to-date. Several are even free to download as PDF. Pick a photo project and figure out how to do it in Affinity Photo, asking on here if you need translation. Maybe I should write a book for Affinity. Trouble is, I might have to make a video on how to use it :unsure: Just don't give up. You can always keep learning. If someone had said to you 30 years ago that you could take a photo, load it into a computer and adjust it's colour or even put white text on a black background. ???

You can't have a Haze Filter Adjustment Layer, so you need to make a duplicate layer first. Do this. Starting from your one (selected) layer. Duplicate the layer. Layer menu - Duplicate or press Ctrl J as a shortcut. Make sure that layer (which is now on top) is selected. It should be. Go to Filters -- Haze Filter and play around to your hearts content. On the bottom of the dialogue box, theres a circle in two halves, blue and grey. Click on that and you can slide the grey line in the middle to see a before and after shot. When you're happy, click apply. You can now switch the view of the de-Hazed layer off to see the unchanged layer below or switch it back on again at will. Both layers are saved with your document and you can retrieve the original layer at any time. That wont work if you export it as a JPEG though, so always save in AP format first.

Above the image, not below. Layers only affect what's beneath them.

Try this, make a selection of a small area of your image with any selection tool, such as the selection brush, do you get ants? If so Press Q Paint on the mask, make sure you have some clear area and some opaque area. Press Q Ants or not?

I think Affinity is creating a new pixel layer, which is what you are painting on, not the quick mask! I managed to do that once by mistake Not sure if it was mine or Serifs ;), but I can't repeat it. Try quitting Affinity and restarting. I must say Affinity Photo has been very stable for me. I have only managed to crash it twice and that was by trying odd things whilst learning the package. Believe me, I managed to crash Photoshop far more often.

Do you mean Show Mask As Overlay? You need to press the Q first. Quick mask normally shows a selection as a mask. If you just click on Show Mask As Overlay you haven't made a selection to show yet. Click on Q (you don't need to select Show Mask As Overlay as it should default to that, unless you previously selected a different coour) paint on the mask and when you click on Q again, you get your ants. If you click on Q without a selection first, you get a solid mask but you can still paint with white (or black to reverse that) to make a "hole" and get your ants when you press Q again. If you click Q --- Then you can select Show Mask As Overlay or Show Mask As Black, etc.

No offence to MEB and the team but I think this list of Photo shortcuts is much clearer. Posted by a forum member dmstraker https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/37423-affinity-photo-shortcut-key-full-list/?hl=%2Bshortcut+%2Bkeys

P.S. Don't give up or get disheartened. I spent 30 years using Photoshop and have found some things in Affinity a bit wierd, in the "wrong" place or hard to find due to lack of documentation but believe me, it's worth the effort. I prefer it to Photoshop now. There is a good bunch of people here to help and even the staff get involved.

To start with, why are you flood selecting whole photos? Flood select it to select areas of colour, like sky, as I have done below. No layers at all yet except for the "background" one. Here is a selection using the flood select to select the sky Go to edit fill or press Shift F5 And this should happen [/url] If you click on the custom colour bit, you can fill with any colour you like. This was all done on the one layer. I think you are getting in a mix with layers, if so you won't be alone. It you create a fill layer and put it behind the image layer, if you go back to the image layer (by selecting it in the layers panel) you wont see anything because that layer is still white (in the sky) and obscuring the fill layer. You need to make the sky area transparent to let the background layer show through. The layer order would be Image you are working on (rename it ideally) Blue fill layer (no flood select involved at all) Original unchanged Image "Background" So, make a duplicate of your image and then make a fill layer using the menu option Layer - New Fill Layer and just pick a colour, no need to select anything. In fact make sure nothing is selected first or it will all go wrong. You will duplicate the selection or the selected area only !!! Make sure that fill layer is below the new (duplicated) image layer that you want to work on (drag in down in the layers panel) or go to Arrange - Back One. Click on the new image layer (now the top layer). Using the flood select tool select the area of sky you want to change and press "delete". That will allow the fill colour in the middle fill layer to show through. Remember that if you flood select, Affinity sets selection tolerance by you clicking and dragging on an area of colour with the mouse. So click on the sky and drag right or down to expand the selected area. The context menu will show what it is set to and changes as you drag and the tolerance changes. To be really clever, instead of a fill layer, find a nice image with a nice sky, put that in a pixel layer instead of the fill layer, then when you select the top layer and delete the sky you will see the new sky showing through in just that area. Looks far more natural. Note, always make a duplicate copy of the "Background" image first so you have a copy. The original will also be locked by default (padlock) which can cause difficulties from time to time. Also, please note that there are better ways to achieve this but try the above first so the get the basic idea. I don't want to confuse you. Not yet :)

Not a question, just a bit of info I have just attached a HUION 610 Pro graphics tablet (from Ebay) to use in Affinity Photo. It's only a cheap one at under £50 ($80?) but is a decent size at 10" x 6.25" So far it's working very well with Photo and makes painting on masks so much easier. I can't handle the click buttons on the pen very well (I have the fingers of a gorilla with rheumatism) but they are all customizable so I set them both to left click, which did the trick for me. Plenty of "hot" keys to do stuff (like zooming, moving etc) all customizable. Dead easy to install and set up. Works on Mac and PC. You also get a free glove. Or half of one ;)