Kuttyjoe

LOL Yep. DrawPlus had the most unpredictable tracing of any software I've ever used. You could use it just to entertain yourself. But sometimes, it actually did work.

100% of what you've said here appears to be pure speculation without the benefit of experience.

...to the best of your limited knowledge about the work that people are doing.

Illustrator's implementation has been excellent for years now. One click and a few seconds worth of adjustments and I'm done. Coreldraw 2020 now has a much improved tracing feature though still not quite as good as Illustrator's.

One good reaso to put up wit it is because the work you do relies on it and there aren't other viable options. I think they're already mature considering the cost. And that last update is indicative of what should be expected in the future if we base our expectations on current and past reality.

Corel has been changing it's purchasing policies steadily ever since Adobe went subscription. They are quickly moving in the same direction. First, they made the subscription merely optional. Next, they changed the upgrade cycle from 2 years to 1 year for perpetual licensing. That was a big change because at this point, the cost of subscribing was 1 dollar cheaper than perpetual licensing. Next and critically, they have change the upgrade policy to where your software is only eligible for upgrade for 1 year. If you miss 1 year/1 upgrade cycle, you will need to pay the full price for the software after that if you want to "upgrade". So you can either subscribe and pay $200.00 a year, or upgrade every year and pay $200.00 a year. This is how companies that criticized Adobe and used Adobe to create more sales of their own software are following in Adobe's footsteps.

The implementation is Coreldraw is terrible though. It doesn't work when you have group objects! So, you have to choose between keeping your grouped object grouped, or ungrouping each and every single object, just to be able to do a selection of similar objects. Plus, every time you want to use it, you have to answer 6 thousand questions across 3 or 4 tabs. It's so bad it's almost comical. And Corel also has almost no hope of resolving it. It's been like that for decades already. There are some macros though that do a decent job of filling in this gaping hole in Corel's $500.00 software.

Oh Wow, Canvas X is also now subscription, and it costs as much as Illustrator. Like Adobe and Corel, they have user bases that really need what they offer, and can not simply switch to another tool that doesn't have all of the same tools. They are taking advantage of that. Eventually, the cheap software will go the same route, as soon as they can figure out how to make it work.

I looked this plugin up and tried to see if I could buy it, but the link was broken. But yeah, there are a lot of great scripts and plugins for Illustrator.

I actually bought two copies from a company called Bonanza. $15.00 each.

Coreldraw added this specific feature in one of the last 2 releases, but Illustrator does not yet have it. You need to use object blending to get this effect in Illustrator. It's a workaround. But yes, it would be cool if this feature ever came to Affinity Designer. The more features, the merrier.

Too small, and also not visible at all times like it was in DrawPlus. It's a chore to use this one.

The solution is like Adobe Illustrator. A regular layer is like a parent layer. All the objects you draw will fall on that layer until you decide to make a new one. You can tip the layer down and see all of the sub layers, one for each object. After hours of work, I have maybe 3 or 5 layers. No scrolling unless I decide to tip a layer and see all of the sub layers. Having it expand constantly with no control over it must suit some kind of work flow that I don't know about.

Yeah. And the other items I mentioned also have some quality problems, but for the current price it could be worth it. Affinity Designer has problems too but people are using it.

In the meantime, you can still buy a copy of Serif's discontinued DrawPlus which actually has two items on your list there. Shapebuilder, and live paint tool. I just bought a couple extra copies myself for $15.99 each from Bonanza. I can see DrawPlus on ebay for 2 dollars! LOL You can't go wrong even if you use it once and throw it away. DrawPlus also has a true vector eraser and vector tracing of raster images, although it's very much hit and miss with some of this stuff.

Maybe you could just let Serif police their own forums and stop trying to tell other people what they can or can't say. How about that?

That explains it perfectly. According to that definition, we'd have a harder time proving that a piece of software is NOT pro than proving that one is pro. The bar for being considered pro is pretty low. If as a professional I pick up a stick and use in the pursuit of money, then this stick is the tool of a professional. It's a pro tool. It's pro. That's why pro is useful as a marketing term. People will use their imaginations to flesh it out. Some will say that Photoshop is professional software, and it is according to this definition. But if we're using freeware in exactly the same way, then the freeware must also be professional software since it is used by a professional in the pursuit of money. Those are things that can be proven or disproved. Everything else is in our imaginations and opinions.

I agree with this, except the part about neophyte Adobe users. The neophyte users are not an Adobe phenomena. People go on about application integration and ascribe more meaning to it than it should have. What matters in terms of getting work done is whether or not it's difficult to get something done. I hear that the way Illustrator does something, is different than how the same thing is done in Photoshop. It's not meaningful unless it is difficult to do in one application. I would ask the question, would it still be bad in one application or the other, if only one application existed? Would it be bad if one of the two applications was owned by another company? In other words, what matters is how well the feature is implemented to make it easy as possible to achieve the task. I don't care that things are different. They're not even the same kind of programs. Layers in Photoshop are very different than layers in Illustrator but I've no problem navigating either. That last part is what matters. Of course, if I see a great feature in one, I do wish to have it in another program. I just want access to it if it's good. This is incorrect. There are two different kinds of envelopes available in Illustrator. One is made with warp and the other is made with mesh. You're describing warp here only. Mesh based envelopes do not have a preset shape. It simply applies a box envelope with user determined control handles/points around the object. It's completely up to the user to shape it how they want. No. Illustrator is a good enough goal for Designer to shoot for. Illustrator has the features that most people seem to want so who are you to say that it's not a good enough goal, for everybody else?

Be careful to not get caught up in marketing speak. There is no useful definition for the term "pro" that you can base an argument on. The beauty of it for marketing is that the consumer will use his own imagination to fill in the details, which is what you're doing. You have an idea of what Pro means, and you believe it to the point that you would try to refute my comment based on it. But what I've done is to compare products based on price and features without using useless words like "pro" or "pro-end". The fact is that Affinity Designer, or any of Serif's software does not have the same stuff that is available in expensive, similar products. And if people adore it as much as they say they do, then they can't simultaneously be missing or needing all of the stuff that is in the expensive product. I would have to guess that the bulk of Serif's customers are people who don't need full blown Illustrator, or Photoshop, or Indesign. They're saying that they hate Adobe in the strongest terms. They're saying that they love Serif in the strongest terms. You say that "Serif is targeting "pro-end" customers." This is also likely incorrect. Serif, like Adobe should be targeting anybody with enough money to pay for the product. Meanwhile, they are actually not providing the tools that a certain group of users would actually need to get their work done, and that directly contradicts the marketing quote that you posted above. I can think of another product that fits that description, stripped back/pro-end, perfectly. Apple iPad Pro. Depending on who you ask, it is either a toy, or a tool for professionals. Now you can see why Pro is a wonderfully flexible term for marketing.

Clip Studio does rotation even better than Photoshop. It doesn't have a rotation "tool" which must be used. Screen rotation is done by key modifier and mouse or stylus drag, and no giant compass appears in the middle of the screen. In Photoshop, I had to waste a precious button on my Wacom EK remote just for the screen rotation tool. If Serif is going to do a proper rotation function, I hope they take notes from Clip Studio Paint and not Photoshop. Also, if you hold the same key modifier and double tap the screen, it resets the screen rotation to default. It's perfection.

The problem with people endlessly comparing Serif's products with those from Adobe, or Quark Express is that it suggests that they are actually comparable with the exception being that some companies are greedy, and others are not. It's extremely misleading. Serif has never in it's history made a product that compares to Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, or Indesign. Or Quark Express. 5 years after Affinity Designer, there's still no reason to think that this has changed. And really, there's really nothing wrong with that. Serif makes a low cost product for people who don't actually need what the expensive stuff offers. This is generally the case no matter what kind of product you're buying. The more money you spend, the more "stuff" you get. But with software, for some reason it's easy for people to suspend this reality and begin to believe that software companies aren't playing by the same rules as everyone else. But they are.

MacOS desktop has the same problems. The contrast is so low that you can't tell which window is in focus. There's a lot of pointless transparency being used but thank god it's not the way it was a decade ago. I've been noticing this change in UI design for the past 20 years or so. Form and function used to be joined at the hip. Now, they are disconnected and competing with each other. Form is winning.

Wow. I saw this bug a looooooonnnnng time ago and haven't used Affinity Designer's brushes since then. So long ago, that I forgot about it. Today I decided to try AD again and IMMEDIATELY I came upon this bug. Like, I made a single brush stroke, erased, and there was the problem. How in the world is this bug still not fixed? I can understand that the problem is wet edges, but there's no visible change in the settings when the bug happens. Use a brush that has wet edges. Erase once, then make a new stroke and the new stroke will be different. That difference is wet edges, even though in the settings nothing has changed. To "fix" it, you can change any setting. increase the size of the brush by 1 pixel or move any adjustment by any amount and it resolves the problem, until you erase again of course. So essentially, any brush that uses wet edges is almost unusable, or at least you can't erase while using those brushes.

I don't see anything wrong with pointing to another software as reference. I suppose it feels weird since Illustrator is where most of the ideas are coming from, while most people are running away from Illustrator. LOL That may feel a little odd. But when one software company copies from another, consumers win. It gives us choice.

That's true. Brush tracking is difficult I suppose for raster based programs. Corel Painter tracks and shows the last handful of brushes used so that's helpful, but there's no reason why a vector based program can't do it. Serif's discontinued DrawPlus certainly did it and did it very, very well. If you clicked on a brush stroke in DrawPlus, not only did it select that brush in the panel, but it also would go on to paint/draw with all the characteristics of the strok you clicked on. Additionally, it had an option in the brush panel to show only the brushes used in the document. That stuff was brilliant. On the surface, the brush tools in DrawPlus and AD look almost identical, but there is a lot of differences in how they work. DrawPlus was a lot better in this dept.