Frozen Death Knight

1.7.0 version has finished development and testing, so yes, that Beta is done and over with. New Betas will start some time in the future, like 1.7.1.

If you are referring to GPU acceleration on Windows, then yes, it is coming. However, the staff has said that it will take extra time to get it fully operational on Windows because the platform has a far wider selection of hardware to support than on Mac. It sucks, but it is how it is. Hopefully we don't have to wait too long for it.

Cool! Nice to see it's out at last. However, I am getting a bit confused by this line: "Symmetry (up to 32-way) is now supported - including on-canvas controls and optional mirroring. We have more symmetry features on the way - so stay tuned during the beta process." This was said during the Beta process of 1.7 as well, so are we now referring to the 1.7.1 Beta here, or is it an accidental leftover message from the previous Beta period?

@Phyphia You're zooming in at 400% in your example image. Any pixel based brush will look pixelated then. Changing the dpi will not really change the pixelating of the brushes. You could have a dpi of several hundred, but if your canvas is only something like 100x100 pixels, that is the quality you are going to get. I'd suggest working on a larger canvas if you are going to use pixel brushes, because unlike vector graphics that can scale to any size without losing image quality, a pixel will not keep its quality if upscaled. It's easier to downscale a pixel image than it is to upscale for that very reason. I work with at least 4-5k pixels in width and/or height to get crisp image quality for pixel art when I export later (either same image size or downscaled) as well as make brushes with the quality that matches that canvas size. If your imported Photoshop brushes have small textures they will produce blurry results as well, so keep that in mind.

Pixologic no longer gives lifetime free upgrades in their latest version of ZBrush from last I heard. They even made a subscription service for it recently, but at least they keep selling perpetual licenses alongside it, so it is a bit more reasonable than Adobe's business model. Besides, is it really that big of a deal that a company wants people to pay for X.0 software when we get a decent amount of free updates inbetween? I bought Affinity Photo back in 2017, and the price was honestly very affordable. For the amount I spent on AP, I've got my money's worth. If the price will be roughly the same for 2.0 as the 1.x version, it will be nearly a guaranteed buy for me, with the assumption that it has new features I need (if not, I will just wait until it does with the free updates or future versions). Remember that you don't have to buy 2.0 package, and you can wait for 3.0, or some later version if you want to save money. I don't really think it's completely reasonable to expect a perpetual software to get free lifetime updates without having to pay at some point. A business has to make money somehow.

Hey again @IDT Adrian! I actually managed to reproduce this. It only happens to brushes that don't have Rotation Jitter on and a value between 1 to 100%. So if you have a brush with texture like in your example video, the brush outline will block the view of the magnifying glass when using the alt modifier for colour picking. Since I use a lot of texture brushes with some form of Rotation Jitter and round/square brushes that have next to no texture, I never really thought about the issue. However, I can confirm that the texture brushes without this specific setting does this, and it is a problem. Anyway, here's how you make it appear or disappear. Double click the texture brush that causes the outline to appear in the Brushes window, then go into Dynamics and change the Rotation Jitter to any setting and a value between 1 to 100%. I tried it on several brushes, and the brush preview outline completely disappears when having it on, even if it's only a small amount.

That behaviour is so strange. Btw, if you want to post a video, just drag the file you attached into the white text box where you type stuff, and it will turn into a video player.

You're welcome! It was fun checking out new types of workflow. As for your last comment about suggestion number 5, I am not sure what you mean by it being in the way. I have "Show brush previews" enabled in Preferences -> User Interface and the preview brush disappears for me and only shows the magnifying glass to get a better idea what colour you're picking (you can remove the crosshair there as well). You should maybe report that as a bug if the preview is ontop of the magnifying glass, since that doesn't sound like normal behaviour. Alternatively you can just disable the feature completely if it is hindering your colour picker until the developers fix your issue.

While many controls are good the way they currently are and you do have decent customization, the problem I currently have is that there are commands for specific tools that I would fix if I could, but I simply can't. I can only give feedback to the developers and wait for them to actually change them to be more sensible, but even then, someone might disagree and want another way to do things. After being very spoiled after learning Blender 2.80 since December last year with its quite extensive customization of keybinds, which includes everything from changing modifier keys to perform specific tool actions to using mouse drag orientation to switch menus, I would would love to have just a tiny bit more freedom adjusting stuff by allowing at least the modifier keys and mouse buttons to be modified, like having painting with brushes to work with R click instead of L click (not something I would use, but at least that level of freedom), and other crazy stuff like that. That way I could fix stuff like alt+R click+L click for changing brush size and hardness and other commands to fit for tablet use at least without the developers having to worry about changing the basic keybinds.

@IDT Adrian, I finished the tutorial on how to set up your Photoshop panel workflow in Affinity Photo, along with explaining some additional stuff you can do with panel shortcuts and settings. Sorry for the audio being in only one ear, since it recorded in stereo instead of mono through Nvidia's ShadowPlay (only did my video in one try ). Desktop 2019.06.02 - 23.37.45.02.mp4

Very interesting! I'll get back to you once I've explored the program a bit more to see if I can get this to work. Will be a fun challenge for sure. Will try to make a video tutorial if I crack the code.

Anyway, if you want to keep the canvas size exactly the same while using "New From Clipboard", here's the way to do it. First off, you need to clear the mask of the HSL Adjustment (don't know how to do this or how to make it a pure solid colour, so please fill me in here) or remove whatever that goes beyond the borders of the canvas with "Rasterize & Trim", or you can transform the adjustment layer so it fits inside the canvas using the "V" key for "Move" and clicking on it in "Layers". Create a "New Fill Layer" and R click to go to "Rasterize and Trim", or just make a Pixel layer and use "Fill". Select everything you want copied as well as the previously made layer and copy. Paste with "New From Clipboard". The canvas will have the same dimensions and size as the old file.

Tried it now. No crashes. I did replicate the size change of the canvas, but I don't think it is a bug. I tried the command on both the entire group and individual layers, and the canvas size is based solely on the size of the object inside the layer, so one layer is causing it (the HSL Adjustment one in this case). Pretty handy if you want the canvas to crop around your image more precisely. like when exporting pieces of a UI to separate work files.

Forgot to add this. Here's a screenshot with the shortcut visible and the customizable, floating toolbar.

I wouldn't mind seeing new customization options personally. Don't really know how such a panel would look like, since I don't use either program. I come from a Photoshop background, so I am more used to that kind of workflow. You can get some of that functionality like brushes, other tools, and colours as a floating window actually. You can double click the toolbar on the far left to undock it, and if you go to View -> Customize Tools, you can change your entire toolbar to fit in more features and sort stuff. You can also make a shortcut to toggle toolbar visibility by going into Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> View -> Show Tools to assign a hotkey to it, so it isn't in the way all the time. Hope that helps.

Thanks! That is pretty cool.

Quick question, how did you make the toolbar on the left side look like that?

Copy is working perfectly fine for me, including duplicate. I used the menu copy+paste and the ctrl+C and ctrl+V shortcuts. Also did not get a different canvas size like a previous user did.

You already can do that. Just double click on the title of each window and they will be minimized. To get the desired effect, you can undock all the windows so when you click on them, they minimize like they look like menus. Here's a quick demonstration: Desktop 2019.06.02 - 17.23.27.01.mp4

Been trying to make a decent macro for flipping and mirroring only the selected layers in a project. While I've managed to make it mirror, the problem happens when you want your image to match the canvas that you're working on. Basically, the settings in the Transform window (see image below) doesn't account for canvas size and proportions, so using mirror macro doesn't match the canvas unless you manually adjust it with the Offset values, which are also quite limiting since the slider only goes up to 1000px (have to type in the value instead). Only way I can make this macro more automatic is if the developers add a slider that takes into account the size of the canvas by offsetting the transformation 50/50 of the canvas size to get a perfect mirror, while allowing you to change that 50/50 value by using the slider with a value of 1 to 100%. Alternatively, you could make more advanced mirroring tools that follow the symmetry lines based on the brand new symmetry feature that's shipping with 1.7. Also an option to flip only selected layers instead of the whole canvas would be nice.

Feels a bit too vague considering that the indicator is on top of where you would start typing the name of the layer. There is also the issue of the indicator disappearing when you have a long name for said layer, making it less useful as a result. Here's and example image:

Desktop 2019.05.31 - 18.57.07.02.mp4 As seen in the video, using the lasso tool and trying to cut out a piece of the image didn't work until I used rasterize on the screenshot. If this is intentional, I feel that there should be some sort of indicator that the image can't be edited like other layers.

They actually are working on GPU acceleration for Windows (see link). It seems however that GPU acceleration is a lot harder to implement on Windows, which to me isn't too surprising considering how open PC systems are over Macs. I know it sucks having to wait (would be a pretty big upgrade for me when I paint actually), but all we can do is have some patience and wait for the developers to figure out a solution. If it manages to come out this year I would be more than thrilled.

Made this quick drawing in AP during April Fools to surprise a friend of mine on Twitter. The character is someone called prince Franz from an animated television series my friend used to watch as a child.

@Chris B Hey again! It's been a bit more than month now since last we spoke, so I wanted to contact you again to see if you had any more information to share about the issue we discussed. Did you and the developer come to some sort of conclusion? Is this issue going to be hard to fix before the official 1.7 release, and if so, within what estimated time frame can we expect it to arrive? Thanks!