Kuttyjoe

Is it possible to turn off the measurement labels and various guides that appear when drawing and moving things around?

No, you're not wrong about this. This is not something vector experts would simply know. Every program is different, even if they do much of the same things. They go about them in different ways. There's a steep learning curve no matter what program you're learning. Even with decades of experience, I still have to think carefully about what exactly is AD doing, and what kind of results it may yield. For me it's meant a lot of testing. I've imported and exported lots of art, with different content to see how well it can manage this, and what the results look like. This way, I don't end up with surprises.

"Choke on it's own filth". LOL Very good. But, I actually need a lot more of that filth, whether it chokes or not unfortunately. I'm assuming this was a reference to Adobe. It's definitely a problem. Especially with the whole rental thing. If you have a new PC today, maybe 3 or 4 years from now, that PC will still be going strong, but Adobe will have outpaced it with it's software. If you're renting, you're going to be paying for software that your PC is struggling to run, or you're going to keep the version that runs well, but still paying for the latest edition which you're not using. Or, you're going to buy a new PC much sooner than you might have. It's a terrible situation. Recently, I decided to go ahead and rent Adobe Illustrator only. The latest version is more than my 5 year old PC can handle, but my PC is otherwise running amazingly well. It's really aggravating. I can't live with Adobe, and can't live without Adobe.

I don't agree with this at all. I'm having the opposite experience. I'm sure there are some things that Designer can do which are faster and simpler than Illustrator, but the opposite is also true. For my work, I can't get much done in Serif Designer without heading back over to Illustrator.

I realized that one of the things I mentioned above is actually possible in Design...but it's buggy. Select all the art and choose add to swatches. Its buggy because it only added some of the colors in the art. I had a piece of art that I imported from Illustrator. A giant Number with a bunch of text masked inside it. Just two colors. Red and Gray. The red was successfully added to the palette, but the gray was not. Ironically they are both Pantone colors. Which brings me to another flaw or oversight. When you hover over the swatch in the palette, the little pop up says something like "Document 2, 3, 4" or "Global Color 2, 3, 4" etc. Rather, it should say Pantone 423 C or Pantone 485 C etc. If I switch to the "Colour" palette, it reads the proper name of the Pantone color as it should. On a brighter note, it opens the art accurately. Which is a big deal considering that most other programs really don't do a good job of opening Illustrator files, or even pdf documents. Still, exporting a usable file out of Design is hit and miss.

Key modifiers, are great. Adobe makes excellent use of them. Affinity apps would greatly benefit in speed by allowing key modifiers similar to Adobe. For example, if you select the eye dropper tool, you can use key modifiers to select objects, duplicate objects, move and maybe even rotate or enlarge an object, all while still holding the eye dropper tool. And it's this way with all of their tools. The option, is to make a whole lot of trips back to the toolbox. Clip Studio Paint takes key modifiers to a whole new level by allowing not just regular key commands to be customized, but even key modifiers. For example, if you find that you use two tools together often, you can decide that when one particular tool is selected (brush tool for example), f you press Control, it toggles a blending tool while you're holding Control. This makes for an incredibly powerful and fast experience. Maybe I'm asking too much, but I'm on the verge of pulling the trigger on Adobe Creative Cloud. I've been avoiding the subscription model but I can't find another software that can give me enough of what Adobe does to make it easier to not go with Adobe. Mostly it's Illustrator that's hard to replace.

In Illustrator and some other apps, if you click the eye, then drag down, it turns all of the eyes/layers on, or off. Also if you Control click the eye, or shift click, alt click or whatever, you get a range of results such as turning all others off, and back on, viewing certain layers as wireframe, etc. I know, Illustrator is a very hard act to follow, but these are the things that make it such a fast environment to work in.

This needs some work in Affinity Design to be useful. For example, if I select a piece of art in Illustrator, it hi lights the swatch in the palette. This doesn't happen in Design. Also, In Illustrator, I can open a piece of clipart, then create a color palette from it with just a quick key command. From there, I can convert each of the colors in that palette to Pantones with ease. I can't find any way to replicate a similar workflow in Affinity Design. It's hard to assign every color as Pantones in the art. And it's hard to know if I got everything or not. In order for this to work well, a set of features have to be available. Select same. Hide Selection. And the palette needs to highlight the swatch when you select a color that uses it. Also the Pantone Palette swatches should have a little indicator showing that you are indeed looking at a Pantone color palette.

Just like in Illustrator. Select an object. Do key command to select objects with the same color or outline or appearance. The way Illustrator has this implemented is brilliant and simple. The way Corel did it is god awful. Don't do it like Corel which makes you click through pages of questions and forces you to first ungroup the art

Photoshop has a range of options for selecting and adjusting color. Like Selective Color and Replace Color. These things are missing from Affinity apps. Even Color Range is missing a bunch of options. Photoshop allows you to select Reds, greens, blues, cyans, Yellow etc, plus the tones. Plus all the other options for dealing with color. Affinity Allows only Red, Yellow I think, and then the high lights, shadows, and midtones. I don't know how you're supposed to pull out the other hues accurately. And the way it makes the selections makes it hard to know what you've selected. Looking at the marching ants I have no idea what I've got selected. It also requires multiple pop up windows and more clicking to close them. I don't know why these things are implemented this way when some of the other features are impressively clever. Like the layer effects. That's a pretty smooth process other than that the palettes can't dock in two columns and can't minimize in the clever way that Adobe palettes do. I guess it's fair to compare to Photoshop since Serif does plenty of comparing to Photoshop. In some areas, Serif is really reinventing the wheel. Why is it necessary for the ordinary fill tool to be so complicated. The first time I tried to use it, I couldn't figure out why it just didn't seem to work. Of course, I could have read the manual before attempting to use the app but with over 2 decades of using that paint bucket in a whole range of programs, I can be forgiven for thinking that I know exactly what it is. Well, it's not as simple in Affinity apps and requires more clicking to achieve simply filling an area. One last thing while I'm complaining. In CorelDraw, if I open a pdf document with missing fonts, it allows me to choose to convert the font's vector information to curves. This way I get the art. Which is what I'm afer most of the time. It would be great if Affinity apps could do the same. Photoshop does it. Illustrator does not. Neither Affinity apps can do this.

Trim. The truth is, this feature only works properly in Adobe Illustrator. Every other program either doesn't have it, or the feature is buggy and creates a mess. Serif programs just don't have it. I fear that this might be a feature that is just incredibly hard to make work properly because I can't understand why only 1 program can actually achieve it. CorelDraw has both Trim, and Simplify which should both achieve the same results. Take a stack of overlapping objects with various sizes and shapes colors. Select them all. Press trim and the result should be that it looks visibly the same but that all the overlapping parts have been removed. For example, if you put a circle on top of a square then trim, remove the circle and the square will have a hole the size of the circle. Features like "minus front" are not the answer because I need to retain all the parts. This is a function that I do all day long in Illustrator for print work. It's a necessity that it works for quality vector separations.

This option is strangely missing from Affinity Design and also from Serif DrawPlus yet it's such a critical feature. In order to simply a piece of art, you have to be able to select the art, convert the outlines to solid objects, then trim it so there are no shapes behind other shapes. Simplified art. These are critical features, and they must work properly...unlike in CorelDraw where none of this stuff ever works properly. This is some of the stuff that Illustrator is so good about because it is perfection. I suppose, I shouldn't expect Illustrator features and power for $49.00, but if Affinity is to be compared regularly to Adobe, then I suppose it's fair to request the kind of features found in Illustrator.

This is a critical feature in Illustrator. Select an object, then do a key command to select other objects that match this object. Optionally, select same fill color, select same fill/outline color, Select same appearance, etc. It's extremely quick and it's critical for a fast work flow. I have a workflow where I go, F5 for select same, then F6, to hide. I do that over and over and extremely quickly identify what colors are involved in the art on my screen. I don't remember if Affinity Design has the ability to hide objects, but that is also a critical feature.

Those are features that I also depend on in screen printing work. Illustrator does it very nicely.

There are some things that make Photoshop fast to work in. If I hold shift while panning or zooming, I can sync the panning and zooming of two windows. This is brilliant. I duplicate a document, then perform a color separation on one, while comparing to the original. When I zoom into the eye of one, the other zooms to the eye in sync. Same for panning. In Photo Plus, just getting two windows side by side requires some effort. I'd like to have the application background there to hide it from the desktop, but also have free floating windows. In PhotoPlus, you either have tabbed windows, or the whole interface sort of exploded and you have the distraction of the desktop visible while working. Photoshop allows you to have the application background, and also have free floating windows at the same time. Why not allow to double click on a layer to access the layer effects? Control click a layer to load a selection, etc like Photoshop. This one might be a bug. In Selective Color, if you go to the black channel in the selective color dialog and slide the black all the way down, it has no effect on the black. Instead, it leaves the black as is, and begins to remove everything else, except the black. It has the opposite behavior in Photoshop and other programs. I'm looking forward to when I can replace Adobe with these Affinity apps.

If Spot channels is coming, then this workaround for doing color separations is probably not really necessary. Otherwise, I can do some psuedo separations using layers, but I would have to slowly export one layer at a time.

I bought this app yesterday. Not blindly. I've been looking at it for a long time and passing on it. But I bought it yesterday. I used it a lot at work yesterday to see how much of what I normally would do in Photoshop could be done with this app and how easily. I think that if there's anything that has any possibility, or even intention of making inroads on Photoshop domination, this is probably it. But, using this app does leave me kind of amazed at how many of the details Adobe has managed to notice and cater to in Photoshop. So many things that are just done right, only in Photoshop and nowhere else. Affinity Photo manages to do somethings better than Photoshop. Seems like the HSL filter achieves a better result when doing exactly the same thing, but it's really quirky. Photoshop has that simple preview checkbox that you take for granted. AF doesn't have it. It's nice to click it over and over to see before/after/before/after. I found that I could simulate this by going over to the layer and turning the checkbox on and off but it's not as smooth or smart. Speaking of that layer checkbox. Why put it on the far right of the layer? Is the eye symbol used by many other programs not better than a checkbox. The checkbox says to me that it's selected, not on or off. After using it for a couple days, I still find that I don't know if a layer is on or off and suddenly realize, Oh, it's the checkbox that determines on or off. And there's that blank space to the left of the layer that your mind tells you, something is supposed to be there. LOL. I'm sure that it's just a matter of time, but the current way really does seem to be unintuitive. Pop up boxes and dialog boxes. They pup up in the bottom right corner...and I don't even notice when they do. Very strange. And when I reposition it to where my eyes actually are, they continue to pop up in the bottom right corner later. It would be good if they remembered where they were positioned. Custom key commands is on the roadmap. I remember now, that's one of the reasons I initially totally disregarded this app. Without that, it's difficult to think it's for professionals. The Select Color range tool is lacking some important options. Photoshop and also Serif PhotoPlus I believe allows for selection of Yellow, Red, Green, Cyan, in addition to Sampled Color. For whatever reason, Affinity Photo only Reds, Greens, Blues. I tried to use this app today for a complex color separation job and I needed that option. So I ended up going back to Photoshop to do it. Also, it's not possible to hold shift and select additional colors. No right click options. Right clicking on the document offers nothing. Copy/Paste in Photoshop is a lot better. If I copy art from Illustrator for example that has vectors, and a 300ppi image, I can flip over to Photoshop, create a new document. Photoshop will notice the dimensions of the document, then allow me to decide all about the rest of the details. In this example, I would make it 300ppi. I could choose rgb or CMYK, etc. Afinity Photo just grabs whatever is on the clipboard and makes it into a 96ppi image. There are no options for printing color separations or halftones. I see that "halftone filter" or something is on the roadmap, but I don't think that will suffice for print work. Pantone and spot color support is also on the roadmap. Hopefully that means spot color and pantone channel separations. It's a good program so far. There's plenty missing that would be needed for print work but the roadmap is encouraging. Oh, and it crashed yesterday within an hour of first running it. Actually, it crashed in the background while I wasn't using it.

If I copy something to the clipboard from anywhere else, then go to Photoshop and create a new document, Photoshop will take the dimensions of that image, but allow me to decide the resolution. Therefore, if I copy a vector object to the clipboard from Illustrator, I can bring it into Photoshop at the resolution that I need it to be. The method used by Afinity Photo is that it copies whatever is on the clipboard and brings it in automatically at 96ppi. This is probably useful for something, but I think Photoshop has a better way. Right now I'm copying art from Illustrator, which contains a 300ppi image in addition to vector objects, and I'm bringing this into Photoshop. I can bring them in at 300ppi. To bring them in at 96 is not useful, but with the Photoshop way, I could bring them in at any resolution I need. For print work that's usually at least 300ppi, but sometimes much higher depending on the art. At the very least I think, a program should paste exactly what's on the clipboard. If an image is high resolution then it should not be reduced to 96ppi when pasted into a different program other than as an option.

I just bought a pair of Note Pro 12s. It's an amazing device that begs for great software. I would love to have something like Affinity Designer on my tablet. I don't really have a use for it for desktop work because there's already much more powerful software, including DrawPlus which I've been using for years. It's so frustrating that all the best apps go to iOS where the tools are lacking, and the OS is rigidly unproductive by design. But that's where the money is so I can't blame anybody. It's just unfortunate.

I also agree. For professionals, time is money so we are looking for opportunities to improve speed wherever we can find it. Keyboard shortcuts is a given.

Yeah, Illustrator goes a lot farther than that. You can, pan over to a new location and paste right there regardless of where it came from. Or you can paste right back into the same coordinates. Plus, you can copy objects from 10 layers, create a new document and paste, automatically creating those 10 layers. That feature is incredible. Plus, you can select an object and paste directly behind it, or directly in front of it. When I start asking about new features in any new or small program, I'm generally just hoping that someone will copy all the incredible features from Illustrator to give a real alternative to using Illustrator.

Customization = speed and comfort. Great customization is why I choose to use Serif DrawPlus on my tablet PC over other programs. That and other great features of course, but without the customization, it simply would be much more difficult to do. I'm working in a very small screen and maximizing the drawing area while having access to the tools I need are absolutely critical. DrawPlus allows this so that is why I use DrawPlus. The greater the customization, the more likely I am to use the program.

I've asked for this feature in DrawPlus. Basically, drawing with brushes (bitmap based) in DrawPlus was great, but trying to fill in areas was not great. I end up doing a lot of drawing in DrawPlus, but exporting the whole thing as a high resolution png, and importing into Photoshop or other program to add color. I've also experimented in DrawPlus with converting the drawing to bitmap, then vectorizing it in order to have the ability to add color. This was a major missing feature from DrawPlus. Another major missing feature, related to the above feature is that I could not batch export layers to Photoshop. I had to do it one layer at a time. It's really tedious. Hopefully, there will be a better workflow for filling color in brush tool drawings in Affinity.

Sounds good. I've been messing around with it for awhile now. I think a lot of what makes DrawPlus good for drawing is in how it works. The ability to touch a stroke and acquire all of it's properties, then make new strokes with those properties is a killer feature. It doesn't work that way in Affinity, not yet anyway. I'll wait until Affinity is close to launch to see just what gets implemented and what doesn't.

I haven't used Affinity Designer yet. As a user of DrawPlus on the PC for a few years, strictly for drawing/brushes, does Affinity Designer aim to be all that Drawplus is in terms of it's powerful drawing/brush tools?