Kuttyjoe

I posted these same problems earlier today as bugs. So, yeah I'm having the same problem(s)

Having only 2 Gigs of ram wouldn't disqualify it. The iPad Pro 9.7" only has 2 gigs of ram. On the other hand, having only 2 gigs of ram probably SHOULD disqualify both of them. At any rate, Serif, like a lot of developers are probably not too interested in Android. But I will say this. Apps like Infinite Painter on Android have a ton of features and functions and it abolutely flies on my Galaxy Note 8 phone. But then, my Note 8 has 6 gigs of ram. It's way better on my phone than on my old Android tablet with 3 Gigs of ram. So the idea of using Designer on a non-iPad tablet is not a bad thing at all. Android does have some better functions. There's a cursor that is always visible which is one big advantage. And the Samsung S Pen has a user customizable button on the stylus. With a fast, newish Android tablet like the Tab S3/4, it would probably be a very good experience.

I’ve been a Mac user since 1993, and I remember some applications having this exploded layout and still do, but frankly none of the programs I’ve used were like this. Adobe had this mode as an option, but always alllowed to have a background. That would have driven me crazy if I had to work with programs while looking at my desktop and folders, windows, etc in the background.

#2. It’s actually the same on the desktop version. So, it’s not a problem with the iPad but more a problem with how the app is coded. Everytime you try to move a node, there’s a short delay, then the node “pops” to new position, likely overshooting the desired area, then you have to bring it back to where you intended it to move to.

It sounds like you're trying to vectorize some raster art. Affinity Designer also does not have this feature, but Serif's older DrawPlus program does. Also, most other vector software has vector tracing. You wouldn't need to use any kind of selection. Just open the file in DrawPlus, or other program that features vector tracing, and use the tracing option. It will convert your image to a vector. There are also some online vector tracing apps. Some may or may not be free to use.

I would say that Illustrator is better usability if you're working fast and appreciate key commands and and modifiers. Ease of use is also better in Illustrator, if you were expert in both programs because Illustrator will still allow you to work a lot faster. Illustrator is not better at everything though. But the difference between these two programs is as big as the price.

Before iOS 11, I felt that the iPad Pro represented a huge lost opportunity. The iPad could be so much more than it is. iOS 11 signals that Apple has suddenly began to see what I was saying. The iPad Pro has been ANTI productivity for all of it's existence. The Apple Pencil was the first sign that Apple needed to make this device much more useful. iOS 11 really seems to be about productivity. Apple basically robbed Samsung's Note series blind. I have the Note Pro 12 and an iPad Pro. I had imagined that maybe the iPad Pro could actually replace the Note Pro but that didn't happen at all. The only productive thing I did with the iPad Pro was use Procreate. For everything else, I continued to use the Note Pro 12 because it had all these wonderful productivity functions. Now Apple has copied a good chunk of them. The iPad Pro is finally looking like it's on a path to general productivity. It already has a lot of power. It's super smooth. All that was missing was the scope of what it was "allowed" to do. Apple may be removing the artificial barriers to productivity. They risk greater loss of sales if they don't.

I've gotten some of those calls and I actually thought they were always pleasant to talk to. Not anything I could call bullying, or even troublesome. They're not Americans who hang up in your face if you don't buy what they're selling. But I agree with the rest of what you're saying. At some point it became clear that they had no intention of further developing the Plus line, or even fixing the myriad of bugs in them, that remain in those products to this day. I don't think it's realistic that Affinity Photo/Designer will ever challenge Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator. Adobe is just too impossibly far ahead, and also developing faster than Serif. Affinity software will grab consumers who don't need the kind of power that Adobe brings to the table. Or people like myself who will buy a product if it has a few really unique features and the cost is cheap enough.

Weird. The buttons are the main attraction for me. I have a Wacom Cintiq and with some apps the buttons allow for amazing functionality. I still use Serif DrawPlus and the buttons work well. I use one for panning, and the other for erasing. It lets me work faster. That combined with the buttons on the Cintiq I have great functionality without a keyboard.

I'm familiar with both of those brush issues because they were both problems in the Plus programs.

Having a quick mess around with Freehand again, they're actually very similar. The regular selection tool in Freehand can do some node editing but I never actually reach for the direct select tool. When I edit nodes, I use the pen tool, and access the direct select functionality via key control key. It's not quite useful to say that Illustrator needs two tools, as if people are constantly picking one for some tasks, then the other for other tasks. In Freehand, you can start with the direct select tool, but then you don't have the functions of the pen tool. So that's not all that useful. If you start with the pen tool, then double click, you will switch tools and end up with a direct select tool that can rotate, scale, etc, but at this point, it doesn't deal with nodes. Double click again and now it can move nodes and bend paths, but it can no longer scale or rotate the object. Double click again and go back and forth between the "versions" of this single tool, but it's switching tools and you're not getting all of the functionality in a single smooth operation. Illustrator is similarly capable. You start with the pen tool and toggle the direct select tool, without ever switching tools. Alternatively, you can start with the pen tool and toggle the regular select tool which can scale and rotate, etc. See the similarities. Neither gives it all to you without some amount of tool switching. The difference is just in how you switch the tools. Freehand does it by double clicking. Illustrator does it by toggling with the control key. But in Illustrator you have to choose the secondary tool ahead of time. Choose A, then P to make direct select the toggle tool of the Pen tool. Or V, P for access to the regular selection tool. Similarly, you can pair different tools that you routinely use together to avoid making trips to the toolbox. Lastly, From the pen tool, Freehand doesn't give you access to one important path editing tool. The ability to smooth out a cusped node. It can cusp a node but not smooth it. Illustrator does both directly from the pen tool. Illustrator lacks the skew feature. For that, Illustrator has a separate tool. With path tools, Freehand is very close to the capability of Illustrator and I don't think I could conclude that one is actually better than the other. Both give you a lot of access to tools without a trip back to the toolbox. That is the most important thing and both are at the top of the heap.

I have an old copy of freehand. I never thought it was nearly as fluid with editing nodes as Illustrator. I think I'm going to reinstall it and do a comparison.

Adobe Illustrator's editing is great for making it possible to access many functions without a trip back to the toolbox. It's better about this than any software I've ever used, other than Photoshop which is the same as Illustrator. Designer is not really approaching this kind of speed and flexibility for editing anchor points. I've certainly tried to see how flexible it is. It's ok. Illustrator has this nice feature where it lets you choose two tools to use together. One is toggled by the Control. It's a very useful function.

I think it's really the kind of work being done where one programs shows itself to be more useful than another. If you're working in sign making, t-shirt graphics, web, interface design, you'll find that one program does something better than another. Overall, major software like Illustrator or Coreldraw will of course take you farther than prosumer software like DrawPlus or Designer, even if it's not the best at every single thing. You can certainly pick out a handful of things that the prosumer stuff can do over the major programs. I personally use DrawPlus a lot alongside Illustrator. It is not a replacement for Illustrator, for the work I do, but I really enjoy the brush tools in DrawPlus and the way they work.

I got this idea while using DrawPlus so I don't know if it's already a feature in Affinity Designer. I'll check when I get back to my mac at work. The feature is simple. Create a brush profile. Lock it, and the next strokes will use that profile. Tweaks to the profile curve get used automatically in the next strokes. I got this idea because for some reason, DrawPlus was doing exactly this earlier. This is not the normal behavior but it did this for a few minutes before reverting back to the normal behavior where each stroke creates a new profile. If the profile can be locked this way, stuff like hand drawn lettering become easier because less tweaks are needed per stroke.

Yeah I was kind of alluding to the fact that the brush stroke is kinda sorta selected, but not in a way that is actually useful. If you hold the option key, you can see the path and nodes on the brush stroke. That would seem to indicate that it is indeed selected. But in order to act on that selection, like change the brush type on that line, you have to keep holding the option key. Which is weird. Regarding synchronizing defaults, I don't really see how that relates to what I've said. It's not something you can do on the fly while drawing or painting. With Serif DrawPlus, it's like dipping a brush in ink and immediately acquiring that ink color and making the next stroke. Designer doesn't appear to be made to do anything like this. DrawPlus is such a unique program and it's just unfortunate to see Designer lose some of it's strongest and most unique features. This stuff is where it truly had an advantage over Illustrator and other programs.

In DrawPlus, if you have the brush tool selected, and you've made a bunch of different strokes, different sizes, colors, characteristics, etc, you can click on one of the existing strokes in the document, then the brush acquires all those characteristics and new strokes are immediately painted with those characteristics. It's a killer feature that lets you work very quickly. This seems to be completely missing from Affinity Designer. Not only does it acquire characteristics of other strokes, it also struggles to just change the brush stroke. If you have the brush tool selected, you can hold the option key (I think it's the option key) select a brush stroke, which high lights that stroke, but if you take your finger off the option key, the high light goes away. If you put your finger back on the option key, the high light comes back. It seems that the stroke is still selected. Here's where it gets more weird. If you click on a different brush stroke, nothing happens. If the stroke is still selected, it should change to the new brush stroke, but it doesn't. However, if you keep holding that option key while clicking on a new brush stroke, it will indeed change to the new brush stroke! So, is the brush stroke remaining selected, or is it not? Whatever is happening there, it makes for a much less user friendly way of dealing with brush strokes. DrawPlus seems to have really nailed working with brush strokes. It's one of quite a few reasons I prefer it over Adobe Illustrator for brush work. I've converted some Illustrator vector brushes to DrawPlus raster brushes so I can do work that looks like vector. If it needs to be vector, I can vectorize it (Also missing from Designer), but the workflow is a far better experience than in Illustrator. But not with Affinity DrawPlus. Other killer features are also missing from Affinity Designer. The option to keep the brush stroke selected immediately after drawing it, and to use the smoothing slider right on the toolbar. This was great stuff. And I'm sure there's plenty more missing, including the hyper custom interface which makes it better for drawing on small screens. Even the option to show just the brushes used in the document in the brush panel is missing from Designer. It's really unfortunate.

That's interesting. But we see the inconsistency even in the file attached above. A bunch of grayscale images is not correct. You've found a way to "make it work", but that is not right. I'm pleasantly surprised to find that something has changed and the same files that didn't work for me a year ago, are suddenly working and I thank you for drawing my attention to this. I'm using X7. My guess is that this has been resolved in a recent update. At this point, I'm going to begin some testing to see what does or doesn't break it. I can tell you this though. Some of the files had been chopped into separate images which makes it difficult to edit. I tested 1 file with 3 bitmap squares, with 3 pantone colors. I exported this as eps, then opened in Illustrator. The result was something that was chopped up into a million pieces. I made some changes in the CorelDraw file, exported again, and that resulted in an error when trying to open in Illustrator. Yet other existing complex files on my server from a year ago opened...not just fine mind you, but certainly useable. Layers are always lost. When importing vector eps files into CorelDraw, combined vectors get broken apart. Layers are lost. And when there are a lot of nodes, CorelDraw simply has errors whether eps or not. It's far from just fine, as you described it.

Something is definitely weird, because I just opened a series of our typical files in CorelDraw and exported some of them to eps, and it's making useable files for the first time ever. It has always produced garbled files both importing and exporting. Now it's not. The file that you're using was imported into CorelDraw incorrectly, just a bunch of grayscale images but not pantones. But my own files seem to be working as expected, both vector and raster and a combination of the two. I can't explain it. I haven't changed anything, nor am I doing anything new. Just opening files, or exporting existing separations as eps and seeing what I get. Maybe Corel has very recently decided to fix their program.

Yes, I'd like to know how you make the spot colors appear. And also, what is required to get a usable eps out of it. I have a handful of guys I work with who all work with CorelDraw. They have all resorted to saving a series of individual eps files which is a mess and a waste of time. But even that mess is easy to recompile into a nice Photoshop document which is what I have to do to check their work for errors.

I suppose we define "fine" in different ways. For me, Adobe has all of this stuff implemented and working exactly how it's should work. If you import that eps file into CorelDraw, you get the images, but no spot colors. I wouldn't consider that to be fine but it's still a relative term. But it is a fact that CorelDraw can neither import that file, nor create one like it and export it correctly. Trying to get it to work sends you down a similar rabbit hole to the one with Affinity Designer. Which still might be fine for some because in the end, it can be made to work.

Don't feel guilty about it. Photoshop is apparently an impossible act to follow. And it's not realistic to think that a 50 dollar program would be the one to challenge Photoshop. And I agree that Affinity software is quirky and there are lots of little things that don't do what they should. The Serif Plus line of products never got beyond that level of quality. Hopefully the Affinity stuff will be better.

For t-shirt work, if you're using anything other than Adobe, you're wasting time and effort. Their subscription model is unfortunate, but there's nothing else anywhere near as perfectly suited for all aspects of our work. Next after Adobe is of course Corel, but with Corel, you're still wasting time. Most of the professionals who insist on using Corel, are actually using plugins with it. Adobe needs no plugins for anything. With Adobe CS2 or 3, you don't need Separation Studio either. I've been doing it for many years. I work very closely with someone who uses CorelDraw + Plugins and I can tell you all the issues he deals with at every step of the way. It gets the job done though. Those are your choices for t-shirt work. Adobe alone, or Corel + 3rd party separation plugins, and even with plugins, you'll still have issues with the Corel route. For example, CorelDraw can neither correctly import, nor create that multi-channel eps file attached above Regarding bringing text into Sep Studio, I think you're trying to say that Sep Studio will separate the text using halftones and place it on different screens. And I suspect that you're right. It's all just color to Sep Studio. You want one solid color for the text. Here again, Adobe works perfectly. You can easily isolate whatever parts you want to be a simple solid color. I separate solid areas of color from halftone all the time because they need to be printed through a different mesh. It adds more screens and more press time, but it's a choice you can make if you have with proper software. And the idea of lining up the film later is just a complete waste of time. But it's the way it goes when you're trying to use tools not made for the job. Try to find an old copy of Adobe CS. CS2 or 3 is fine. Absolutely everything you need is in there. From there you can use anything up to CS6 without getting into the whole subscription thing. If you're using a Windows 10 PC you can use CS3 for sure because I'm doing that right now. Finding that old software might be a challenge, but it is definitely the best way to go. You can probably get the whole suite for less than the cost of Separation Studio...which you actually don't even need. Once you learn Photoshop, you'll understand. Think of Affinity Designer as a tool to use alongside your major t-shirt software. But it is not a replacement for it.

Yep, this is a big one. Critically important to me.

None of the tracing options are magic, but sometimes I get amazing results from Illustrator. What I've found though with a lot of testing is that each app is better at some aspect of the art than another. Illustrator is best overall, but has a problem with long narrow spikes, like the rays of a sun. It shortens them. CorelDraw does a better job with these spikes, and also manages to do cornering better, but often produces results that are just crap. Every now and then, Serif DrawPlus manages to give me a better result than both. The problem with DrawPlus is that the adjustents seem to be nearly meaningless. No rhyme and no reason. Tweak enough and maybe you get a useable result but there's no telling. Vector Magic produced results no better than Illustrator for me. Vector tracing though is an invaluable tool for me. Vector files can be edited in ways that are different than raster images. Vectorizing a file also gives it a vector "look" which sometimes is what we're looking for. So it can be used as a creative tool.