mark-h

Apps: Designer
Platforms: All
A new vector flood tool has been added to Affinity Designer. This is denoted by a paint bucket icon in the Tools Panel (on iPad you can find it nested with the gradient fill tool, on Windows it will currently need to be manually added via Customising the Tools Panel).
This tool allows you to automatically fill areas created by overlapping / intersecting shapes and open curves in your document. This tool requires you to make a selection first of the curves / shapes you want the tool to consider. You can then choose a colour from the colour or swatches panel, and tap within any enclosed area to create a new shape with that fill colour. While in the tool you can also drag swatches from the swatches panel onto any area.

There are two insertion modes to this tool you can select from the context toolbar:
Inside. This will attempt to create the new shapes / fills and place them inside existing shapes where possible. In-between. This will break fills and strokes apart in existing shapes, and insert the new fills in-between.  The difference between the two is shown below. 


While using the tool you can hold Cmd (macOS / iPad) or Ctrl (Windows) to make new selections (also combining with Shift to add / remove items from your selection). You can also click-drag the tool to quickly fill many areas all at once, a simple example is shown below with some text:

The tool works with any type of fill - solid colour, gradient or bitmap. The options in the context toolbar for min, max and stretch to fit are relevant only to gradient and bitmap fills, and refers to the method used to scale the fill to the new shape.
For bitmap fills you can select a bitmap fill swatch to use, alternatively you can create bitmap fills on the fly by dragging a texture file or asset directly into the active colour in the toolbar. Below is a video showing that in action with using assets to create bitmap fills:
Texture Fills.mov
For bitmap fills if the texture has any transparency then the fill will be added as an additional fill to the shape. This allows for overlay style textures to be easily added on top of an existing colour fill. We will look at a way to make this behaviour optional.
Finally it's also worth pointing out that when you are in the tool you can also drag swatch from your swatches panel directly into any area in your selection, to quickly add multiple different colours to areas without having to select them first.
We would love you to try this new tool out and let us know what you think or if you encounter any bugs or unexpected results.

Hi,

When I use Designer V2 - it works fine for sometime (may be an hour or so - can't be exact on this) but then it starts slowing down and everything becomes really laggy. For example, the selection of any object, selection of a new tool from the toolbar by click or by keyboard shortcut, selection of a context menu button takes 3-5 sec or more!

The files I am working on are not that heavy, in fact most of them are under 1MB (it uses many gradients and vector brush) but still it lags severely. It seems like the lag is slowly creeping in before becoming noticeable. I reminds me of some earlier version of Designer V1 that had similar lag (which version resolved it I don't remember now) . 

I am using Designer V2 on Windows 10 V 21H2. (19044.2251) and face no such issue with Designer V1.
I have turned off hardware acceleration / Open CL after seeing some other threads on similar (but not exactly same) lag issue - however it hasn't helped. 

Please let me know if there's a solution that I can try or if it's a known bug when it would be fixed. 

Thank you. 



 

Keep getting rained off laying a brick path in my garden so thought I’d make a few spirals in Inkscape and import them into Affinity Designer, these are linear spirals and start at 1 turn up to 40 turns in 5 turn increments after 5 turns.

Linear Spirals.afdesign

This is normal, but maybe not always expected.
Sometimes this seems to happen ‘randomly’ but is, up to a point, how the software is supposed to work. (The software uses the ‘settings from the last layer’ when you create new layers but it sometimes seems to do it for strange reasons.)
Select one of the text layers and press the Revert Defaults button (cog with little red line inside it) on the Toolbar to make the whole layer go back to the default settings for that sort of layer.

Hi @mark-h,
Thanks for your report.  We are aware the blending to white background (object) does lead to different output. This is already logged to be looked at. I've bumped the report to bring it up to devs attention again.

Ah, dang. This is exactly what already I did for the project I'm working on just now 😅. Well hopefully a simpler solution will present itself soon. 

Great, thanks.
If anyone else is suffering from this issue, my work-around was to go to File > Export, set up the PDF options there and then save those as a present. You can then apply that present in the Export persona.
M

In addition to what has said if you prefer to work with your strokes in document units then you can go into Preferences > User Interface and turn off 'Show Lines in Points' - it will then ensure the Strokes use whatever document unit you are using - so you're free to use any DPI should you need!

If everything is vector then not really, there are no dots/pixels to be concerned about. The only time you might want to consider DPI is if you're exporting to a PDF file where unsupported features might get rasterized.

Hi mark-h, JRS6,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
This is a known issue that's already being looked at. I'm sorry for the inconvenience this is causing you.
Thanks for getting in touch and report it.

Since updating to 1.8 I've been having problems with the add/subtract geometry options. Sometimes it adds a lot more nodes in areas that weren't even overlapping and at other times when adding shapes some nodes get lost entirely and gives weird results. Needless to say this is a bit frustrating when building vector shapes.
I've a attached screenshots of a few examples that have cropped up over the last few days when trying to add geometry. You can see shapes changing and seemingly pointless node changes.

Apologies if this feature already exists - I couldn't find it.
It would be great if you could select a maximum value for a slider in a macro. Case in point, I've made a macro to add film grain, and one of the steps is a gaussian blur filter (called 'softness' in my macro - see attached). For this effect you're only going to want values like 0.1px, 0.2px... nothing over 1px. So it would be really good if the slider only went from 0px to 1px, rather than 0px to 1024px which just doesn't give the precision control needed... instead you have to type in values manually.

This would be especially handy when offering macros to other people as it would save additional instructions on how to use them if you can just set a fixed range.
Cheers,
Mark
 

Apologies if this feature already exists - I couldn't find it.
It would be great if you could select a maximum value for a slider in a macro. Case in point, I've made a macro to add film grain, and one of the steps is a gaussian blur filter (called 'softness' in my macro - see attached). For this effect you're only going to want values like 0.1px, 0.2px... nothing over 1px. So it would be really good if the slider only went from 0px to 1px, rather than 0px to 1024px which just doesn't give the precision control needed... instead you have to type in values manually.

This would be especially handy when offering macros to other people as it would save additional instructions on how to use them if you can just set a fixed range.
Cheers,
Mark
 

Hi,
I would really like the ability to merge different objects (embedded images, curves, etc) together without them being cropped to the document/artboard size. Currently the only option is to rasterize and this cuts off anything outside the document. I can see the benefits of having it this way but it doesn't even leave enough to fill the bleed area set in the document setup.
I know ideally all images should be prepared to include any extra size you need but often a lot of experimentation happens when preparing the image in the space you plan to use it in and it would be nice to be able to rasterize trimming.
Kind regards,
Mark

Hi RPCarruth,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
Yes, this will be fixed. We are permanently improving the program but some features/bug fixes may take more time than others. Bear with us while we work on a fix.

Hi.
 
As a new user of Affinity Photo I'm very impressed with it. Coming from Adobe CC and having to end my subscription there, I'm happy you're creating such a great program.
 
Now, I'm fiddling with some anaglyph images, creating depth maps in Affinity Photo and want to displace a 2D image with the depth map. Problem for me is that the displace filter displaces evenly on both the X and Y axis and I need only to displace on the X axis for the anaglyph image to work. I would love to have the opportunity to select on which axis I want to displace and the amount instead of just one setting for all. 
 
Would that be possible to add in a future update?
 
Thank you!
 
Michael Englyst

My next question is: do you think it will it ever be able to export to an InDesign format like it can a PSD? Unless industry standards change I need to be able to deliver editable layouts in a commonly-accepted format. PDFs won't always suffice, sadly.

My next question is: do you think it will it ever be able to export to an InDesign format like it can a PSD? Unless industry standards change I need to be able to deliver editable layouts in a commonly-accepted format. PDFs won't always suffice, sadly.

I would say IDML export is equally important to import for those who have to collaborate with other designers to some extent. Affinity Designer & Photo have some ability to export documents which are editable in the Adobe counterparts. Though I don't expect a full feature set to be maintained in a collaborative document format, it's important to have this capability to  have a capacity to transition from Adobe product. I can't expect every client who want's original artwork supplied to adopt Affinity Publisher, they'll just go somewhere else.

My next question is: do you think it will it ever be able to export to an InDesign format like it can a PSD? Unless industry standards change I need to be able to deliver editable layouts in a commonly-accepted format. PDFs won't always suffice, sadly.

This is definitely a desirable feature. As a freelancer the ability for Photo and Designer to open PSD and AI files is very useful, and they can export the kind of files I need when working with clients. However if Publisher can't open (and more importantly, export InDesign files) then I don't know if this will be of any use to be for anything other than personal work. Clients often want editable (industry-standard) layout files - PDFs won't suffice.

This is definitely a desirable feature. As a freelancer the ability for Photo and Designer to open PSD and AI files is very useful, and they can export the kind of files I need when working with clients. However if Publisher can't open (and more importantly, export InDesign files) then I don't know if this will be of any use to be for anything other than personal work. Clients often want editable (industry-standard) layout files - PDFs won't suffice.

This is definitely a desirable feature. As a freelancer the ability for Photo and Designer to open PSD and AI files is very useful, and they can export the kind of files I need when working with clients. However if Publisher can't open (and more importantly, export InDesign files) then I don't know if this will be of any use to be for anything other than personal work. Clients often want editable (industry-standard) layout files - PDFs won't suffice.

Have you tried FILTERS > COLOURS > ERASE WHITE PAPER Or SELECT > SELECT SAMPLED COLOUR  in Photo?
 
Again it will depend on the image and how complex it is and if the BG is pure white, I have tried both of these options on various logos and have achieved the desired effect for me.

When working on file that is read-only, it would be really useful if hitting CTRL+S (or going to File > Save) would either present an alert saying the file is read only and cannot be saved, or opening the 'Save As...' dialogue box like Photoshop does.
 
I was working on a file the other day for several hours, not realising that it was read-only and that pressing CTRL+S was not saving my work (as there was no feedback to suggest a problem). Then when the app froze and had to be restarted, I was dismayed to see all the changes I had done were lost.