hifred

Hey guys,
 
We desperately need some clarification. For the past two years it was mentioned several times here in these forums that you are working on a DAM. However, we haven’t really seen an update on that topic in the past weeks and months. And in your Twitter feed you mentioned a couple of times now that you are currently not developing a DAM. So which is true?
 
With the recent changes from Adobe with their Lightroom software and with Apple still not improving Photos really, it would be a great time to put a great DAM out there right now. Many, many photographers are looking for a new solution to this old and essential problem. Also, MacPhun just announced a DAM for their Luminar app. 
 
In any case, we just need to know if we should wait for a DAM to be released by you guys or if we should look for other alternatives. Thank you!

@Mark IngramThe actual reason also here (in Designer) is very likely an accidental tool-change by pressing the B-key twice. I suggest implementing the Shift-protection for accidental tool change suite wide. Further, I think you should consider inverting the default behaviour – one should have to check a box if one dislikes having to press Shift. I doubt that you will find a lot of users who will freak out. The OP didn't even want to use the tool cycle mechanism – obviously she wasn't even aware of that option: Patricia only wanted to pick a tool – the fact that it was already active before her tea break made the operation fail.

Please have someone  analyze such error patterns. One only needs to read this forum regularly and runs into them, pretty much on a daily basis.

Hi hifred,
When you ⌥ (option/alt) - click a layer it isolates it as it does for other object types (other than adjustments/filters/masks), not exactly a bug but i see the conflict here.

This has been requested many times before I realize, but I am going to reiterate it one more time.
As it stands, the export persona is pretty much useless, because it doesn't allow for a real-time preview of the rendered asset(s) to check the quality before export. Therefore, I don't use Photo's export option, and instead export a full quality PNG and optimize in external software.
There are a number of other issues with the export (jpeg quality<->file size, inability to set >256 colour PNG output, lack of dithering options and resample options), but this is really the major one. I don't understand why this wasn't implemented in the first place, but hopefully it will be at some point.

.

This has been discussed before, earlier in this thread.
A few users would prefer an inbuilt option, but Serif already stated that the DAM will be a standalone product. To me this makes a lot of sense.

I agree with the macros being limited thus far.

@walt.farrell
while technically true, It appears that its sometimes quoted and linked to outside reviews on Twitter, Facebook and other official Affinity accounts.
an example how it looks like on Facebook;

 
 

Thank you. Sorry for misreading – the screenshot helped.

.
 

Walt, while I have not tested this myself, this seems not at all unrealistic. Here's a Lightroom migration guide by a competitor.

This has been requested a couple of times but is not available yet.
The reason of my post is an (optional) change of Grouped Tools behaviour which affects further assignment of Shift + Letters (Numbers).

I'm traveling and away from my machine, but one thing came to my mind: From the various options available to hook up a protection from accidental tool change (by pressing Shift + tool-group shortcut) I believe one has now picked the one which forbids further Shift+Letter assignment, globally.
I could well live with this loss for single commands, but I and likely many Photoshop-trained users would find painful if you for that reason no longer considered default Shift+Letter assignments for extremely helpful - albeit not yet implemented tool behaviour changes.
What comes to my mind is Tool Flow control via keyboard. Photoshop uses exactly the same number key driven scheme as Affinity Photo to control tool opacity (4= 40%, typing 9 and 5 in quick succession gives 95% opacity). That works very well, but the same scheme in Photoshop is also available for Flow by pressing Shift and then typing letters. Gives fine grained control and requires minimal mental transfer.
It would be great if you left the door open for new factory-default assignments of Shift+Letter tool behaviour shift, via Shift key.

To all those whose posts have been hidden
This is a support forum where staff will try to answer questions from anyone who need advise how to use the applications. If you want to criticise those who are are not as advanced as you are then your posts are unwelcome. If you are going to be rude that a user's nationality or character or first language or may not be the one they are posting in you risk being banned.
Step away from threads where you have nothing positive to say about the question.
If Serif staff/moderators do not like the tone of the question it is for moderators to deal with. Period

I just wanted to make you aware that you were likely barking up the wrong tree with your desire for this Zbrush Importer.  
Apart from that I can not resonate with your words – neither with your booming dislike for Adobe applications, nor with you rousing new love for Affinity products. I do differenciate between admirable achievements by Adobe programmers and UX designers and very very unfortunate licensing decisions taken by the management. Affinity is young and promising, but for now and for my usage profile I'm still far better off with Photoshop CS6.
What I found interesting is, that you find Photoshop terribly bloated but have no issue with Zbrush. The latter – no doubt – is a highly interesting application,  but it is just insanely feature crowded. Even regular users do need Youtube at times, as one simply can not keep in mind all the details of the myriads of different geometry creating principles Pixologic offers.
 
 

Click here to download the latest beta
Status: Customer Beta
Purpose: Features, Improvements, Fixes
Requirements: A valid product key (for Affinity Store purchases), or an installation of the full retail version from the Microsoft Store

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. 

We hope you enjoy the latest build, and as always, if you've got any problems, please don't hesitate to post a new thread in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks once again for your continued feedback.

If you have a general question about the software, please head over to the Questions Forum, or if you have any suggestions, please head over to the Feature Requests forum.
Fixes
Changed tool shortcuts (optionally, default is off) to allow SHIFT to loop through grouped shortcuts (e.g. SHIFT+B to loop through brush tools) Fixed copied colour name being incorrect when source was a named colour Fixed shortcuts not working when a previewable combo box had focus  Fixed cursor keys not working on Blend Mode combo box Added ability to include an identifier (normally email address) in crash reports so we can more easily locate crashes (users of the beta with Microsoft Store licences can't access this yet) Fixed being unable to resize Procedural Texture UI by dragging Fixed Procedural Texture UI extending when filling the Equations field  Fixed crash when closing the application with the Character panel open Fixed Jpeg2000 loading bug Always show primary and secondary colours in the colour page when using brush tools Fixed PSDLoading creating incompatible masks  Fixed 16-bit luminosity blend mode rendering issues  Renamed "PNG-24" preset name to just "PNG" as it's misleading Added K-only option for Grayscale images Fixed Insert Text from File Right Click Menu  Fixed Tool's information label to use the correct decimal separator Added missing rotate icons in Develop Persona  Fixed Inpainting issues when using RGB32 Tweaked Rasterise menu item order Added missing extend modes in Edit > Inpaint  Make tone mapping preset thumbnails have the correct orientation Added a new dot type to the Halftone filter  Fixed Inpainting with transparency applied causing the application to hang Fixed crash when using fill inpainting mode, and respect opacity and blend mode again Improved reading of Fuji X-T3 RAW Changed Liquify tool to remember brush settings per document Fixed previews not clearing when switching to / from Quickmask mode Fixed Patch tool displaying temporary artifacts on cropped and rotated images Fixed Inpainting Panorama with no missing areas results in a blank image Fixed Focus Merge ignoring colour profile when using JPEGs Fixed crash when Refining Edges on merged HDR Fixed rendering a Panorama then using Inpainting resulting in a transparent canvas Changed Develop to preview the output profile  Stopped clipping to sRGB gamut on developing to ProPhoto RGBA16  

Thank you :o)

Right, I had not watched the clip and mixed this one up with the official Pixologic Photoshop plugin which has the purpose I described.
To me it looks as if you had to ask Joseph Drust for support rather - since he had tailored this Plugin towards a Photoshop CC pipeline:  Although nothing in this script technically would require CC (Zbrush does all the work anyway) I  can't even use it in PS CS6. This very likely only has to do with some hard coded file paths inside his plug-in.
All what's required is pushing a supported third party file to Affinity Photo, to trigger a file open,  possibly to display some dialogs and to have it listen to updates in this external file. Is that really not possible yet, with Affinity Photo?
At any rate your assumption that Adobe is silly and sleeping seems quite odd in this context: It was actually Adobe who, many years ago made their app open enough for external scripters to support a tiny fraction of Photoshops userbase by making the import of layered files from Zbrush more convenient.
 

Sure, Photoshop sucks so hard that everyone in the business is using it.  

No chance here, there is no setable & reusable settings option when batch processing RAWs in AP, also macros aren't of much help here, further processing will take it's time. 

You're correct that there is no macro support in the Develop Persona.
However, you can open RAW files via File > New Batch Job, and batch jobs support macros. That's part of what that topic is suggesting.
This approach has some issues. The photos will probably open darker than you want, and may have other aspects you won't like, as the Develop process during Batch doesn't perform all the standard Assistant actions that happen when you open them manually. But it can be done, and possibly, depending on your needs, camera, photos, and willingness to experiment, might even be done successfully. You would probably want to export them from the batch job as TIFF or PNG files, then reopen them in Photo via File > Open.
Probably, though, one should use a different program for batch developing of RAW photos.

Well, that's the whole purpose of making this layer/ mask preview size editable in PS, AI, IN. If you work with very many layers regularly you can decrease their size - if not - by all means make them big. It should be the user who decides what too much scrolling means. Good Layer filters and Search help too.
Right now the small and hard coded square thumbnails are top reasons why I find the Layer Panel difficult to read - already with just a few layers.

Sorry if this is a bit OT, but I think there is a similar problem with the Assets Panel in Publisher. It would be really nice if you could change the size of the thumbnail and if it wasn't cropped to fit a square. 

Well, that's the whole purpose of making this layer/ mask preview size editable in PS, AI, IN. If you work with very many layers regularly you can decrease their size - if not - by all means make them big. It should be the user who decides what too much scrolling means. Good Layer filters and Search help too.
Right now the small and hard coded square thumbnails are top reasons why I find the Layer Panel difficult to read - already with just a few layers.

If that is what they were/are thinking (which I very much doubt), than that is up-side down thinking indeed.
In truth, the entire layer panel in Photo is in dire need of a redesign. Just that checkbox to hide and show layers, and placement of the checkbox to the far right of a layer thumbnail is quite bad GUI/UX design, and just needs to be fixed.
I've discussed this in another thread a while ago, though, and it doesn't really need repeating here. Suffice to say, compared to the layer panel design in Affinity Photo (and Designer), almost any other image editor (commercial and free) provides the user with a (far) better user experience. And it is not only the Layer panel GUI design that is an issue, but also layer management, or lack thereof. Other applications allow for colour tagging of layers, searching for layers (and types of layers), seamless zooming in and out of layer thumbnails, clear indication whether advanced layer blending options were used, and more.
I expect the Affinity developers are aware of the issues related to the current Layer panel implementation compared to the competition, and will improve things by version 2. Rome wasn't built in a day.

It is unfortunately not possible to increase the size of layer and mask thumbnails, they also always appear square, regardless of the image format.
Edit: R C-R was quicker.