Kuttyjoe

That was among the first things I noticed about the Affinity programs. I'm so accustomed to hitting that Esc key. It's so automatic. But it doesn't work in Affinity programs. Things like that give me a clue to what else I might expect from the rest of the program, and it's commitment to good workflow.

I think the answer to this question was already explained very well: ..."but for digital illustration which assumes an artists mindset, there should be direct intuitive drawing and painting tools. Natural, direct, efficient, intuitive." That makes perfect sense. Artist learn to draw with pens and brushes. They bring those skills over to the digital world. They would like to keep working the way they've learned. Artists are results driven. They are not counting how many unnecessary points are created on a shape when they draw it. It's not like the extra points cost money. You're agonizing over excessive points on a path, (Illustrator resolves that example you posted literally with just a single click on the line), but Illustrators are not. The question this is, what is the focus on these programs. If you look at how Serif is promoting this software the answer to this is very clear. It's a tool for Illustrators. People like you and me, trying to bend it to do other things are just out of luck. You will need to stick with your beloved Freehand, and I will have to continue to rely on Illustrator, but when I do Illustratations, I can still find some uses for apps like Affinity Designer and others. But, I'm being realistic about it. Vector based programs and also raster programs have long since outgrown their original basic concepts and tool sets, and have become something greater. I read all the time from random people who say, "Photoshop is not a painting program because it's primarily a photo editor". I'm pretty sure that by the time Photoshop had reached version 2 or 3, it was already growing beyond simply being used to edit photos. By version 4 you could have a caree with Photoshop without ever editing a photo. Now we have software that combines the both vector and raster into a single program and it's very useful and I would say, amazing. Beauty is still in the eye of the beholder, is it not? If you find something displeasing, the next person disagrees and loves it. Also, there's plenty to be said of "instant gratification", or I would say, instant results. Instant results equal bigger paycheck. Time is money. As a freelance artist, most of my work dried up during the coronavirus lockdowns, but I gained a lot of new work in vectorizing art and preparing for print with limited colors. I have to make a certain amount of money per hour and that would be impossible without a high quality vector tracing feature. I'm absolutely relying on it. The value of vector tracing in my opinion can not be overstated. You just need a broader understanding of how people are actually using it. You only understand it's use as a creative tool, which is fine. But some of us are using it as a production tool. No, that is more accurately a primary advantage of vector based drawings. The primary intent of vector drawing is whatever the artist primarily intends to create with the software. You're putting constraints on artists and telling them what they must use to create art? and....painting with vectors. It has it's own aesthetic too, right? If I were make an argument in favor of painting in vector software, that would be the strongest argument that I could come up with. That is a question that doesn't really need an answer. A better question is probably, why not? You make strong arguments against things that are not causing problems so why argue against painting with vectors, or using vector tracing features? None of it is hurting anybody. People are making great use of it. Creating great art, and improving their productivity. What exactly is the reason why these things are troubling you? Vs a pen tool, or brush tool, the main attraction is probably workflow. You could achieve the same result with all 3 tools but you pick the one with the best workflow. It's not more complicated than that. If you suggest some features for the brush tool which gives it a similar workflow to the blob brush, then that is fine too. Either way, artists should pick the tool that gives them the best workflow for what they are doing. I may move a single piece of art through Serif's DrawPlus, over to Photoshop or Clip Studio, and possibly into Illustrator as well. I'm using the best tool for specific tasks to achieve a result as quickly as possible. Speed is among my primary goals.

This is a good point. Different users would have very different perspectives and needs for the same software. Jet may be coming from an engineer's perspective, you have an Illustrator's perspective, and I would personally have a production artist's perspective. Jet is looking at precision. You are looking at free form drawing, while I'm looking at the clock and asking, how efficient the tool and workflow would be. I think though that Affinity Designer is absolutely being promoted for Illustration work so the blob brush makes sense.

I misunderstood what you were saying there.

The Blob works better and faster than the way he did it, but even better would be to use a vector paint bucket (It was called Flood Fill in Serif's old DrawPlus) to just click once and fill the enclosed area with color.

Illustrator also allows you to select an object and paste behind the selected object. You can select an object inside a mask, then paste in front of it, or behind it, inside the mask. You can also paste to same coordinates, or you can copy an object from one location, zoom to another and paste it to that coordinate. Lots of great copy/past features in Illustrator. So, as long as you're asking, might as well ask for all of it.

Why? Is it because people have absolutely no reason whatsoever to be frustrated?

Basically, you are willing to ignore the 5 years of begging, (12 if you count DrawPlus begging), then ignore the 5 years of waiting for the other highly requested features. I'm not particularly prone to wishful thinking even when reality is harsh. Instead of saying, "any wonder why people are so upset", you instead say, "any wonder why Serif stopped responding. It's kind of ridiculous, but that is the nature of the beast so I don't blame you.

Maybe they require 10 years so, the glass is half full.

That's just a single feature request, still unrealized, and there are many others also not realized. As I said, Serif has their own plans and it doesn't necessarily line up with what users are asking for. Serif has not "messed up" just because they're doing what is profitable for their company. I suspect that the majority of people don't care about the higher profiles 5 year old feature requests of people trying to switch from Illustrator and that could be why Serif does not need to prioritize any of those feature requests.

I don't believe they've messed up. I believe they're executing their own plan which doesn't necessarily match up with the wishes of some of it's userbase. Meanwhile, tons of people declare their love for Affinity Designer and hatred of the program that actually has the features that people are begging for.

Because people are getting the point that constructive ideas are just wasting time. Ranting is what's left when you ask for something for 5 years, and get nowhere. Sooner or later people will understand that the feature is not going to happen. The advantage of Illustrator's implementation is speed. Plain and simple. Just one tap and it finds exactly what you're looking for. You can bind it into an action and work even faster. Coreldraw has a similar implementation as Freehand. Longwinded, tabbed pages of questions. After using that just once, you never want to use it again. That's why people created macros in Coreldraw to immitate how Illustrator works as closely as possible. Although the macros are good, it's probably just not really possible to truly reach the level of speed and simplicity that you find with Illustrator. And I have yet to see Illustrator's simple and fast implementation in any 2D drawing program. Both have merits. I personally wouldn't be able to work with how Freehand does it, or Coreldraw.

My first impression of VectorStyler is that it is not good enough to release to the public as a beta. It's currently overflowing with problems, and also problems with Select "Similar".

What does this mean exactly? Text on paths. With vertical strokes. As a long time user of both of those programs, I feel like it must be something I've used all the time, but I don't recognize it from the description. I wonder if you are describing text on a path with the "arched" effect vs the "arc" effect. The arch is vertical, while the arc causes the vertical part of the letters to follows the angle of the path.

Well, the brushes in the raster persona are different than in the vector persona. In the vector persona the brushes are raster, but they flow along a vector path which allows you to change the characteristics of the brush stroke after you've drawn it in ways that aren't possible in the raster persona, such as actually changing the brush stroke to a different brush type after the fact. But I agree that purely vector brushes would be great, if Serif could get it right. The one thing I would say about the type of brushes in AD/DrawPlus vs purely vector brushes is that the raster brush with vector path is much more efficient. So if you were to take an Illustrator brush set and convert it to a brush for Affinity Designer, you could draw far more brush strokes before performance begins to degrade. For that reason, I converted a lot of my Illustrator brushes for use in DrawPlus.

The best thing about Windows is it's backwards compatibility. Other than that, I really dislike Windows 10. When you talk about Windows being flexible, I find MacOS to be much more flexible. For example, you can customize the keyboard shortcuts for the OS itself. I know you're not a fan of keyboard shortcuts, but it's still an example of flexibility. With regard to "print screen", it's the most limited screen capture imaginable. Almost nothing there. MacOS has every possibile kind of screen capture built right in, with keyboard shortcuts, which you can customize to your own personal taste. That's flexibility. Then there's Quick Look which is one of the most amazing features for anyone working with images or graphics. Still, to each his own. I just spend much of my time fighting with Microsoft over control of my own PC. Many things have no "off" button. You have no choice. You can't choose about updates. You can't refuse them. You can't decide to keep a PC at a certain level and not upgrade it. If an update breaks compatibility, then you are out of luck. That happened to my older PC. Windows 10 would update, crash, revert. It took an hour to update, crash, and revert every time. I had no way to stop it from attempting the update so I reinstalled Windows 7 for a couple years. Then I went back to Windows 10 and I found out what was the problem. It was the wifi card, the one that came witht the PC originally. So, in order to get Windows 10 to survive the update attempt, I had to first shut down the PC, remove the wi fi card, boot it back up, then try to update again. In 25 years, I've NEVER experienced such nonsense on my Macs. As of now, my brand new PC has a proble where it's being kept awake, plus when it does sleep, it wakes up at random times. So I can't allow it to just sleep. I have to power it down completely. Windows is a mess.

No conversion is reliable so if the projects are important then you need to be working in the same software. You can't trust that one program faithfully export a file to another format.

If you're on Windows you should check out old Serif DrawPlus X8, the last version before it was discontinued. You can buy it today on Ebay for 2 dollars. I've used it to create my own custom toolbar which combines items from the toolbox with items from the toolbar and also items from within menus. You can place the undo/redo wherever you like. I think that Serif PagePlus X9 can also do it but you might have to splurge 10 dollars to get that one. It's discontinued software so you can use it for as long as Windows supports it. After that, it'll be gone forever unless you are willing to try and maintain an old PC, but that is challenging.

Yeah. And also you can do it by using the pencil tool and just drawing over two open ends, and it'll just kind of connect those two lines. It's good when you're already the pencil tool and want to organically connect lines.

I agree with that. If it's as good as an existing solution, for you, then I guess that's fine too. But, we we talk about expectations, there's no way to quantify what our collective expectations are. I was recently talking with some people on here who seemed to think that all vector tracing solutions were the same, and they only had a single use. We did not have similar expectations, or use cases. So for me, it needs to EXCEED my expectations, because my expectations are that it will be a hair better than what that was in DrawPlus. That's what I would call seriously exceeding my personal expectations. I didn't dare dream it but OK, I'll take that.

I think they need to exceed expectations. People need a reason to use one tool vs another. With Affinity Designer, the reason is price, and also because for some people it's enough to do the work they need to do. Vector tracing in Affinity Designer has to be better than whatever it is we're currently using. If not, we'll continue to use what we're using. It's that simple. If I try it, and get a poor result, once, twice, thrice, I'll stop risking wasting time on it and go straight to where I know it will work.

I don't think it's a good comparison. Adobe, Corel and others were innovating without the benefit of what came before them. Essentially, not much came before them. Affinity Designer comes along with the benefit of decades of software development that came before them, not to mention their own 30 year history in software development. It would not be unreasonable to think that any vector software created today would have vector tracing in version 1.0. We're not talking about the newest, latest, most amazing, stuff like Adobe's puppet warp, etc. We're talking about a feature hat is decades old. Adobe integrated vector tracing into Illustrator at version 9, but Adobe Streamline existed for many years before that. I was using it in the late 90's. Shapebuilder was a part of Macromedia's software which Adobe acquired. So they merely integrated it into Illustrator, but it's still very old functionality. The real question is regarding the intended scale and scope of Affinity Designer. These features may never appear in Designer along with a lot of other stuff that people want, simply because it's not what Serif intends for their software.

That comment isn't quite working. There's a difference between saying that vectorizing isn't perfect, and having a laughable implementation of this feature included with the software. To be clear, if Affinity Designer had the exact same vector tracing that DrawPlus had, it would create an endless stream of complaints. I think that many people would give up even attempting to use it and end up using something else anyway. Vectorization isn't perfect, but how close to perfect can it be? If you test all of the popular vector tracing solutions that we know of, you'll find that there's a pretty big range of results you can get when tracing the same image. Eventually, there are some that you will go back to time and again, and some that you wouldn't waste time with, if it's an accurate result you're looking for.

I can best illustrate this with a simple example. Draw 3 brush strokes. Give them each a different color, and use a different brush for each stroke. First brush Red, 2.Purple, and 3. Green. If you decide that you wish to continue drawing, using the Red Brush, how do you do it? The first problem is that there is no way to identify what that brush stroke actually is, even though it's a vector stroke or to recall it's characteristics. The workflow hits a dead end right there. It's also buggy. While holding the Control key, click on the Red brush. The color wheel reflects to red. The stroke palette reflects the stroke size. Great. Now, make a new brush stroke, and it's green! Compare this exercise to DrawPlus. While holding the brush tool, you could tap on the red brush and acquire all of the characteristics of the red brush, and continue drawing with the red brush! Furthermore, while still holding the brush tool, you could select any or all of the brushes and change their characteristics together. Or, you could select one anchor point on Brush 1, another anchor point on brush 3, then drag the point from 3 to 1 and they would snap and become a single brush stroke, with the same characteristics! NONE of that is possible in Affinity Designer. Snapping points together is difficult no matter what tool you're using, or how you attempt to do it. Serif had great ideas in DrawPlus, and abandoned half of them in Affinity Designer. I think the brush workflow is clearly inferior. There's also the ever expanding layer palette. By the time you have 10 brush strokes, the layers are already unmanageable. In DrawPlus the layers had similar issues, but you could turn off the ever expanding thing. Also, texturing vector objects with raster brushes in DrawPlus was done in a single "persona". All brushes, including the spray type brushes are available in the same workspace. You could texture a vector object by painting inside the object with the "draw inside" feature. There are some quirks involved, but the ideas was right. In Affinity Designer, if you want to spray texture inside a vector object, there are more steps. You draw the vector object in the vector persona. Then, switch to the raster persona, create a raster layer, drag it into the vector object in the layers panel, then spray into that raster layer, then return to the vector layer if you want to do something requiring certain tools because these two personas don't have all the same tools. Back and forth.

I agree with what you're saying here. My instinct is to look for the lock directly on the layer I'm working on. When I must travel elsewhere, I've always found that a little bit weird. However, in other software there are up to 5 different options for locking related to each layer. I believe it would be impossible to place them all on each layer so some other way of doing it is necessary. Placing all of the locking functions in a single toolbar is probably the next best solution. Other than that, allowing keyboard shortcuts for each locking type would also be useful. This software only has 1 locking feature for now. If this software grows and becomes like Photoshop or Clip Studio where you can lock things like transparent pixels, image pixels, movement, etc separately, then it would run into the problem of where to locate all of the icons for the various locks. I believe that Serif is just following Adobe's lead on this one and looking ahead to when this software is more developed and has more features.