hifred

Thanks Paul,
I’d probably triple check Video drivers (even with all other programs behaving well) when my work would rely on Photo.
It thus far doesn’t. In addition I’m pretty convinced that everything is in order and up to date graphics-wise :o)
Hence I'm somewhat hesitant.
A debug app by the developers to extract what’s going wrong would probably be more effective.
I gave Affinity plenty of RAM, that can’t be the issue either.

Some general performance feedback:
I have both Affinity apps and really want to like them. But – thus far –I only open Photo every other month to check out what’s new in the Betas. One thing what still badly spoils my editing experience is the lack of snappiness on quite a decent (Win) Desktop Computer – its specs are likely above the average 2D graphics computer. You guys make such nicely edited marketing videos which lets things appear as childs play – but the actual work experience here (release version +  latest beta) still feels extremely contrasting to me. I see:
Very long load times already for single raw files Super slow selection (quick Mouse movements often don't even seem to register) very slow Refine Edge even filling a layer with colour lets the program think for roughly a second Changing between Personas takes the longest time: The Tone Mapping dialog needs more than half a minute to initialize My half a decade old Photoshop CS6 still is so much faster, that it remains the obvious choice for my daily work – unfortunately.
Are serious speed improvements in the plans for V2?
Specs: Win10, i76850K, 32GB RAM, GTX1070

Yeah, I had already thought that you suggested as a cure what in fact was the reason for my problems :o). Thanks for having a look – but as this is a legacy driver (Wacom 6.6.19-3) for a discontinued product you probably shouldn’t go too crazy with your investigation. I'm glad that default pen input works again!
 
Hehe, I have left that feedback several times already (also in the feature request forum). No need for a repost. I just took the chance to bring up this issue during a conversation with a staff member. While I understand that you guys don’t comment feature requests, this from the user-perspective isn’t ideal: One would like to make sure that the topic brought up got seen and understood at least :o).

I miss two features for Sliders which are available in other graphics packages:

1) Reset to Zero for individual sliders in Adjustment Layers, in the Developing Workspace, wherever more than just one Slider is present.
Affinity only has a less useful and space consuming global reset button.  Photoshop lets you doubleclick the Label of individual sliders to
reset their values to Zero. Works well with both Mouse and Tablet.

2) Reset to previous custom value by over-dragging.
This one is awesome too, very Tablet friendly and has zero impact to the workflow of people who aren't aware / unwilling to use the featue.
Say you have dragged a slider to a value which already gives a decent result. You aren't quite satisfied and want to push things a little more.
But while still holding the slider you realize that this actually was a bad idea. All you now have to do is drag a long across the end-point of the
Slider. This will reset the Slider to its previous value, not to Zero (unless the Siider was at Zero when starting to drag).
 

I miss two features for Sliders which are available in other graphics packages:

1) Reset to Zero for individual sliders in Adjustment Layers, in the Developing Workspace, wherever more than just one Slider is present.
Affinity only has a less useful and space consuming global reset button.  Photoshop lets you doubleclick the Label of individual sliders to
reset their values to Zero. Works well with both Mouse and Tablet.

2) Reset to previous custom value by over-dragging.
This one is awesome too, very Tablet friendly and has zero impact to the workflow of people who aren't aware / unwilling to use the featue.
Say you have dragged a slider to a value which already gives a decent result. You aren't quite satisfied and want to push things a little more.
But while still holding the slider you realize that this actually was a bad idea. All you now have to do is drag a long across the end-point of the
Slider. This will reset the Slider to its previous value, not to Zero (unless the Siider was at Zero when starting to drag).
 

This is probably considered to be the wrong spot for reporting, please move as required.
I still find Refine Edge painfully slow (4.104 version), already on a plain medium resolution jpg and nothing else in the file. Photo needs to think for roughly
2-3 seconds to at all open the Refine Edge-dialog and every refinement step needs roughly a second to register (I get the progress bar shown with
each brush stroke...).

The same works absolutely instantly on the 2012 version of Photoshop (CS 6). The machine is a i7 6850K with 32 GB RAM and a GFX 1070.

Thank you for the surprisingly quick release of Photo Beta for Windows!

I have a few questions / comments on RAW editing as a heavy user of Photoshop and its upstream ACR workspace.
While I like that Serif actually chose a common interface for traditional photo-retouching / compositing as well as
RAW developing there's also features I miss right away.

Photoshop's RAW development allows for global editing of image properties – pretty much in the way the Develop Persona
works. That way one can raise the exposure or increase contrast – changes do apply to the whole image. Apart from that
one may use any combination of tools for non-destructive brush based operations, as well as graduated filters. The impact
of any contributing tool may get changed at any point in time. Even after bringing the edited RAW image into the main
PS application as a smart object and having worked for hours in a composition, one can still go back and each and any global,
operation as well as brush based RAW operations are still Life. One at that point can even delete the original RAW file, as
it has completely gotten embedded into the .psd. If so desired, one could strip out any changes and export to .dng again.

The Affinity RAW editor seems not to have any of the tools I just described. Also, RAW development in Affinity seems to be
understood as the first step in a linear stream of editing operations. One may of course re-enter the Develop workspace,
but all tools have forgotten the settings one had dialed in initially.

I wonder what your plans are in terms of RAW editing: Do you plan to keep Develop-setting Live?
Is non-destructive brush / gradient-based editing with any combination of tools on the roadmap?
 
I also wonder what happens if one uses a couple of RAW based images on a large Poster. In Photoshop one may use
these images at their full size or as a thumbnail. But one can scale that thumbnail up again or paste it into a new file
and raise the output size here. As the RAW information is encapsulated in the Smart Object one never loses resolution.
Obviously one shouldn't go larger that the original RAW but for all smaller output sizes one can practically forget about
resolution issues. Is there a similar solution inside Affinity Photo?

Have you ever worked in Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw, Capture One and the like?
 
Imagine very nice interactive control for refinement of single images, but without layers.
One may apply all tools globally to the whole image as in Affinty's Develop-Persona, but there's
also various ways to apply these tools (and any combination of them) locally to just parts an image.
 
 
If one looks at this concept at first one might come to the conclusion that this is some quick fluff for
beginners, as it's so easy to use. In fact the underlying concept is totally non-destructive, allows users
to freely combine various tools in one stroke, to dial in more strength for one tool while lowering the
impact of another (at any point in time).
I'm well familiar with layer based editing too – I'm just wondering if Serif is considering a highly attractive
alternative concept as well.

It may apply to you that pricing is a critical factor. There's other users who have totally different reasons to avoid / escape Adobe's Software rental and actually had no issues to pay more. Setting up pricing was entirely up to Serif though...
I think that negative, even harsh feedback may be very useful for Software makers too.There's certainly nothing wrong in asking for additional Features.

It may apply to you that pricing is a critical factor. There's other users who have totally different reasons to avoid / escape Adobe's Software rental and actually had no issues to pay more. Setting up pricing was entirely up to Serif though...
I think that negative, even harsh feedback may be very useful for Software makers too.There's certainly nothing wrong in asking for additional Features.

Testing on a Cintiq I'd still say that (Ctrl+Spacebar based) Zoom and Pan work and feel inferior when compared
to Photoshop, unfortunately. The same is true for interactive brush size/hardness change. I wrote about these
issues here (last paragraph) and here.

Whether one can well imagine having Vector Pixel and Page Layout combined in one app or finds that a plain terrible idea: It's at least peculiar how one opted for strict separation in 2D graphics applications and how the exact opposite total integration took place in many 3D graphics apps. A 3D program like say Autodesk Maya by the sheer volume of content, its offerings for different professional specializations and its overall complexity is so deep...
One could combine any raster/vector/dtp tool together, add the most comprehensive font creator, a serious textile pattern creation tool and any other industry specific plugin and still wouldn't have reached half the extend and complexity of the mentioned 3D app: A program which still proved learnable for large numbers of users around the world...

Matthias,
you are putting forward standpoints which partially were valid 10 years ago.
Nowadays OS- agnostic code development is a reality, it's available for years. This means that newly developed tools will run
on any mayor platform without any hickups. Many software developers work that way – and according to gmcg Serif uses this
strategy too, with Affinity. Given that statement is correct Serif artifically restricts this software suite to the Mac at this time.

It is not correct to state that MacOS has global performance advantages over Windows due to more advanced technology.
Sorry, that's just not true. If you don't believe me, just do a Google search on that topic.
And it belongs to the realm of speculation that starting Windows development introduced an overall decline of Adobe's software
quality. Don't you think that a firm with  >11.0000 employees and and a revenue of > 4 billions could deal with instability problems?
(just for the record: I see no such issues).

Hi developers,
I only registered to this forum in order to quickly express my stunning disbelief about Serifs platform decision.
 
You create a promising and contemporary looking modern product line which is clearly geared towards graphics
professionals and really limit it to just the Mac?
  You do this in 2014 with a wide array of mature cross platform software and interface development tools available?
  You want to address graphics studios who boycott Adobe's forced rental contract just with the Macintosh platform in mind?
  You create a comprehensive new suite of Pixel and Vector tools and decide to disregard Adobe's unique selling point:
To be the only vendor worldwide who offers a 100% identical suite of  graphics tools on the 2 most important operation systems?
  You have the  fantastic chance to unify your already highly diverse product portfolio but instead decide to deal with the
same development tasks twice, in two entirely separate product suites: And and you call this more efficient?
  What firms do is of course entirely their business – but I can't bend my mind enough to remotely follow this logic.
Also the option to see Affinity features eventually dripple into your Windows tool Suite holds no promise. A wasted chance.

Hi developers,
I only registered to this forum in order to quickly express my stunning disbelief about Serifs platform decision.
 
You create a promising and contemporary looking modern product line which is clearly geared towards graphics
professionals and really limit it to just the Mac?
  You do this in 2014 with a wide array of mature cross platform software and interface development tools available?
  You want to address graphics studios who boycott Adobe's forced rental contract just with the Macintosh platform in mind?
  You create a comprehensive new suite of Pixel and Vector tools and decide to disregard Adobe's unique selling point:
To be the only vendor worldwide who offers a 100% identical suite of  graphics tools on the 2 most important operation systems?
  You have the  fantastic chance to unify your already highly diverse product portfolio but instead decide to deal with the
same development tasks twice, in two entirely separate product suites: And and you call this more efficient?
  What firms do is of course entirely their business – but I can't bend my mind enough to remotely follow this logic.
Also the option to see Affinity features eventually dripple into your Windows tool Suite holds no promise. A wasted chance.

This is really a weird phenomen: Why on earth software users at all feel inclined to defend actions of software makers?
I don't get this. Why doesn't one leave it up to Serif staff to comment?

As Adobe ceased selling licenses and rolled out their rental only model disappointed customers used all feedback channels to make Adobe reconsider.
The reaction? Numerous fellow users who already happily rented CC obviously felt the the massive urge to explain how wise this step by Adobe was and
how terribly wrong people who prefer perpetual licenses were, and hesitant to change and whiners and so on. Not all of these "advisers" managed to stay
calm, indeed it often got pretty nasty for most odd reasons: Nobody had actually said anything against happy users of CC.

And here?
Graphics professionals on windows complain about Serif's platform decision.
And again people can't resist defending a company which makes a software they happen to like and can use as they happen to sit in front of a supported os.
And it gets nasty too, although nobody had said anything against the qualities of Macs or Mac users.

People who wish the Affinity makers to reconsider and to develop a windows version address the makers of this software.
The opinion of loyal customers who for whatever reasons wish Affinty to stay limited to just the Mac platform is irrelevant for this very discussion.
Whether you think that Serif could move faster when they concentrate, or that there was no serious user base on windows or that windows users suck per se.
 
It's utterly irrelevant for the discussion.