Frozen Death Knight

Agree with @walt.farrell. Certain things will always have some complexity to it that are not necessarily intuitive, but for advanced users it will open up possibilities that will push your work further which they can then teach beginners on how to use in their own work. Trying to be as intuitive as possible should of course be strived for, but sometimes unorthodox methods will have to be taught through practice and discovery, which can then be shared to hopefully become common knowledge. For instance, for the longest time I never used the Channels panel when painting with very few exceptions. This was simply because it wasn't exactly intuitive to use after years of barely even using the Channels panel inside Photoshop. However, when I discovered that you could hide/unhide and activate/deactivate editing of all RGBA channels in any combination you like in Affinity Photo (something that is a lot more limited in Photoshop and in some cases non-existent like editing/locking the alpha channel globally for every single layer), it unlocked possibilities I never could have dreamed of. Now I can't even imagine not having this feature available when painting. Bear in mind that I have been an advanced Photoshop user with a very good understanding of several features and functions, so being faced with a new kind of workflow like this was a delight since I was willing to explore beyond my own expectations of what I thought was intuitive design.

I think in the long run that Serif should invest in their own platform manager which deals with the updates rather than having each program tell you when there is an update available. Doesn't have to be very complex, just designed well enough where you can manage all your installs, including Betas, under one umbrella, therefore eliminating any need to have these sort of pop-ups. Would also make it easier to check all the free assets Serif has given users over the years as well. Not to mention patch notes. I don't expect them to have this kind of infrastructure until maybe version 2 or 3. The current system works for now, but anything that isn't what I mentioned in the beginning paragraph will just be band-aids until that happens.

In that case I would strongly suggest adding Merge Selected and New Fill Layer to the R click menu for the Layers panel. Been trying to push for this change since 1.6, but to no avail. I used these operators a lot in Photoshop. To me they are essential for a solid workflow. As for adding a lock/unlock feature of layers on the canvas, might I suggest adding it to the Move Tool? Would be nice if you could press ctrl+alt+shift+L click to toggle lock/unlock just to make things flow nicely while working. Lock/unlock primarily affects that tool, so giving it this shortcut makes sense from a UX design perspective I think. Alternatively you create a lock/unlock feature directly onto the Move Tool box itself where you click to toggle lock/unlock similarly to how you can rotate or skew your selection. This would be a nice visual to show if something can be transformed or not.

@benrymndAre you referring to Photo or Designer? Pixel brush as in the Pixel Tool in Affinity Photo, or do you mean just a pixel brush vs a vector brush in Designer? What happens when you use the brush you want to use? What's the name of the brush category and the brush in the Brushes panel?

Same here. One possibility I can think of is that they have other plans for shortcut features down the road and left it vacant for that. Or they wanted users to get used to using more than one modifier since there are other tools that use ctrl+alt as well like the Freehand Selection Tool which they also changed in the same Beta along with the other selection tools. Still, it's just speculation until the devs say something about their reasoning.

The new hotkey is a lot better than the old one, especially for tablet users, but I can understand the confusion regarding it being ctrl+alt+L click instead of just ctrl+L click for extra clarity. It is however not that complicated to do with a keyboard either (there are several keybinds that combine modifiers like ctrl+shift+Z to redo, etc.), so it isn't really the disaster you make it out to be when compared to the old one, which was in fact impossible to use on certain tablets with no R click functionality. At the very least it was super inconvenient to use since pressing R click+L click with my Wacom pen was super awkward. I do hope however that the devs will start adding features to fill those empty modifier spots like ctrl+L click and normal R click. Would be nice changing your brush opacity and flow for brushes on ctrl+L click as a separate feature from the current ctrl+alt+L click command. You could also add tool specific settings to ctrl+L click like the Smudge Tool having flow and strength as tool settings instead of opacity and flow that the Brush Tool uses. R click would greatly benefit from having the brush manager open up as a pop-up screen like Photoshop does.

I do hope the devs over at Serif will consider this feature for the 1.x series. It's one of those things that I as a raster artist can't really live without. Currently I use Inkscape to compensate for this shortcoming in Affinity, but it would improve the workflow and overall value of Affinity Designer immensely from this single feature for what I like to do with vector art (i.e. converting my sketch drawings into something that can be reused to save a lot of time for a finished product).

One aspect I hope gets resolved in 1.9 is the fact that the Colour Picker Tool does not share its settings with all the other colour pickers in Affinity. What I mean by that is that the Colour Picker Tool is able to change its settings to Current Layer among other things, but every single tool that has a colour picker can't use those same settings. See this link for reference about addressing the various shortcomings of the Colour Picker Tool and colour picking in general: This combined with the previously mentioned problem that there are no sticky settings for several tools, which forces you to change it to Current Layer for the Colour Picker Tool on start-up every time by pressing I on the keyboard to properly select the colour you want. When you have nearly a hundred layers on top of the layer you want to colour pick from, this becomes a lot of tedious extra work to set things up properly. Speaking of sticky settings, one aspect that I hope the new Studio Presets will eventually address is saving your sticky settings along with the rest of the workspace. So if you happen to have a tool setting you normally like for a specific workspace, you can save that with your preset. If you combine this with being able to export/import your Studio Presets so you have an easier time setting up Affinity for work wherever you go, Affinity as a whole would become a lot smoother for workflow.

Fully agreed on all points. Also, fix the bug where Affinity does not remember which brush is being used when changing brush size and the bug on Windows where Affinity does not remember which brush category was open from the last session and instead resets to the Basic category every time. Super annoying to deal with to say the least.

Same. It worked the first couple of times, but later when I tried running a test with my GPU active as Mark Ingram requested of me, I wasn't able to because of this. Then I stopped working altogether even when I reactivated my GPU in the Device Manager.

Divide blend mode =/= Divide booleans. Check the Layers panel and change the layer blend mode from Normal to Divide. That is the feature that was added in the Beta.

With the exception of Liquify feeling a bit snappier, I am having no luck with OpenCL right now (I use a 980 myself). For example, in Photo I am having significant lag and even freezes when working with a tablet specifically. I don't think my hardware is the issue here, since the brush lag with tablets is even noticeable on the smallest canvases you can create with the current library of presets. Something is most definitely wrong when what I could do in 1.8.5 and older versions of Affinity doesn't work as it should in the Beta.

Tried the Contour Tool as well. Very impressed with the results. Easy to use and it looks good in pretty much all tests I've tried. I also like how the tool works well with other functionality like the Vector Shape Tools. You can still use the modifiers to reshape the object while the Contour Tool keeps doing its job non-destructively until you finally convert it into a destructive transformation. If the devs keep pumping out tools of the same quality as this one every major update I would not have many reasons to use Illustrator over Designer in a couple of years.

@PaRunk Don't we all?

Agreed, but I think you might have mixed up Divide booleans with Divide which is a new blending mode for layers. The latest Beta added this blending mode to help with the kind of stuff shown in the link below, which are not really boolean related. 1.9 booleans are no different from 1.8 booleans as of now. ^^

First off, thanks a lot for adding this! Been waiting so long for this feature and I have been having a blast with it for the last hour. It works like an absolute charm. Super easy and to the point to create a new texture brush without going through the old method. That said, there are two aspects that I think could be improved. For one, there is no way to create additional Brush Nozzles from a selection and add it to a single brush. You still have to export all the brush textures you want from the canvas and then import them as Brush Nozzles in the Texture tab. Another point I think needs improving is the fact that you can't access the textures from other brushes you've made in the Texture tab. This complicates things a bit when you happen to have two brushes whose textures would be good together in a chain, but you have to first paint one of the brushes on the canvas, export it, and then import it to the other brush as a Brush Nozzle. Desktop 2020.09.16 - 14.11.12.04.mp4 Adding these two features to the Texture tab when editing your brushes would really complete the circle and make Affinity fantastic for brush creation. So it still has some room for improvement, but what is already there is fantastic. Again, thanks, and keep it up! 🥳

Made some additional tests on a very small canvas (600x800 pixels). The lag is very noticeable even there as well.

Another example. This time I'm using a file which I have no problems with when painting in 1.8.5. Desktop 2020.09.16 - 13.30.22.02.mp4

Been trying the new GPU acceleration feature in the Beta and found out that brushes were very unresponsive when I used my tablet. I can't use ctrl+alt+L click to do simple things as changing brush sizes and the program became overall very unresponsive when using those tools. Down below is a performance test using an 8k canvas with a 1k+ pixel sized round brush. The first test was using just a mouse for resizing the brush and filling the screen with paint, which worked fine. The problems started when I switched over to my tablet (you can see when I released the ctrl+alt+L click keybind and the brush resizing just kept going). Desktop 2020.09.16 - 12.54.06.01.mp4 You can also see the lag when I wrote "Tablet now" on the canvas.

Installed it now. Seems to have fixed the benchmark metrics significantly. Thanks!

Nice! Question. What's a Contour Tool?

Well, as someone who unlocks the UI from the main windows and have them all pretty much floating, it is pretty easy to move things around just the tiniest bit by accident. Being able to lock the UI after it is in place would be a nice quality of life change, especially if you decide to have to have the auto-save feature as an option for those who want it. Just so things remain in place until you want to move everything around.

Well, around the corner it sure was.

I would absolutely love the option to save my workspaces elsewhere through exporting. It has happened a couple of times that Affinity has resetted the workspace I've used without me knowing what triggered the reset, so it would be a very nice feature to be able to safely store your workspace files elsewhere in case of some unfortunate reset happening.