psiclone

Wow! Such a huge benefit to all to draw upon (no pun intended) your experience. Thanks!

I know this wasn't necessarily intended for the latest update, but I'm still seeing a need for this.

I've already gotten past this problem in InkScape, but wanted to know how one goes about doing a selection by color (E.g. say you have an image with a white background) and making an image that has a blend of colors and gradient transparency be a solid color, while retaining the transparency. MY PROCESS: I had a heck of a time trying to figure out how to do this in both Affinity Designer and Photo, so that implies to me it could be more intuitive. In Photoshop, I simply go to the menu and select by color, but instead of being limited to RGB (as in Affinity), or tonal selections, I could use a color picker to choose what I wanted on the image. This would then select all of that color in the image and I could either mask or delete that. I found the Transparency tool, but couldn't get it to work on the image and tried tonal selection which worked in general, but was much more difficult to figure out than simply picking the color I wanted (white). I know part of this is simply figuring it out the first time, as I would make quicker work of that process the next time, but it's not always that easy messing with various settings instead of having a color picker. THE POINT: So, while a color picker on the selection menu would be a feature request, my question goes back to, OK, so I've selected the color I wanted as described above and now want to mask that. I clicked on a mask layer and it worked, but now I want to invert the part of the layer that's not masked...which happened to be a blend of colors and transparency. It was at this point I got stuck, as I couldn't figure out how to recolor the rest of the image to be one color, but still retain the gradient transparency it had.

One could also see this as an evolution on both sides. First, we had beta available for us to test and help Serif identify and work out bugs to get a functional program out to the public. Now that it's released, choose whether or not you want to pay for it. I, for one, am happy to jump at the chance to ditch Adobe and go for a good contender that offers a perpetual license for a one-time cost. If by "premium," you mean to say that it can't hold a candle to Photoshop, I can't really address this, as I've not gotten familiar enough with Affinity to say. That said, if by Serif asking us for feature requests means that we get their product to evolve into something we feel really is a true contender to Photoshop or some other Adobe product, and they act on those requests, then both sides win. Even if they add features and call it Affinity <insert product name here> 2.0 and sell it at the same price again or at an increased price, then we still win. It sure beats the heck out of a subscription. That said, as it stands for me, Photoshop is still on top (time will tell as I get more familiar with Affinity), but I've already found free alternatives to Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Acrobat that I find more capable. Photoshop and InDesign are really the only products left that I find are worth keeping, until something better comes along. I also only use my CS3 for now, as I don't and won't bother with subscriptions and skipped the later versions. As soon as I can ditch Adobe I will and it won't matter if they go back to perpetual licenses (which I know they won't). I would gladly pay a little more (or in this case, a little less) not to have to deal with Adobe again. The notion that people don't want to pay for premium is rather off. Sure, some won't pay more than they can afford or would otherwise pay and, for that matter, some would even steal it if they can. Most of us who pay and work professionally with programs like this would actually consider paying more, but we didn't set the price and are likely glad to see we're not getting shafted by paying a lot for a program that's likely to evolve greatly in the coming months/years.

This seemed like a bug at first, but I'm realizing it's more likely a candidate for a feature request. I opened Affinity Photo (Windows beta 1.5.038) and slid it to the right of my screen to get it out of the way of something I was looking at and then realized I couldn't move it back. 1) Please consider adding "grabbable" space above the menu that would allow the window to be moved back into position. 2) There likely also needs to be an option in the preferences that allows for the window to remember it's last position when closed for each file or at least for the app as a whole. 3) A hotkey for loading temporary default behavior (like a "safe mode") would also be helpful here. I managed to fix my problem by resizing the top left corner of the app wider until I got past the words in the menu where I could grab the titlebar, but not everyone is going to realize they can do that.

Another thing I thought of is allowing us to drag adjustments as in where we would increase or decrease font sizes. Instead of having to just do dropdowns for font sizes, I would like to also have the option to left click (hold) and drag right to increase font size or left to decrease font size and let go of the mouse button to set.

Never mind. I see it's already in there.

Please consider adding a HEX color input box for the color pallete. Sometimes it's just as important to be able to input a color into the pallete as to extract one and this would be very useful for web design.

I could see this feature being very useful, especially since some game engines (E.g. Unreal Development Kit) require textures in power of two sets.

I downloaded the Affinity Photo beta and just to see what it can do for me in this particular project and while it does offer absolute dimensions without resizing, I'm realizing that also being able to resize it with those dimensions should also be added...as in a checkbox that says "crop and resize." Thus, when I crop with dimensions, I can also have it resize the item affected to adjust size automatically. Here's what I'm after. I have a photo and I want it to be 129px by 194px, but the photo is of a different size and aspect. So, I go to crop, tell it I want a 129px by 194px crop, but the subject of the photo is still just out of range of that size. So if I then could check "crop and resize," I would expect the crop box to keep it's 129 by 194 aspect ratio, but allow me to size it up to encompass the whole subject of the photo I'm after. Then it would crop the photo and adjust it to fit the subject in question. I realize that there could be many cases where this just simply wouldn't work, but could work very well for a photo of a person who has a lot of background imagery that just isn't important. If the box ends up cropping outside the photo, then the crop could simply add in background to make the thing fit. That might also be another checkbox or perhaps a prompt, "The image cannot be cropped and resized. Would you like to add background to fit?" If yes, then let the user choose the background color, use an image or to make it transparent. If not, then they simply need to figure out another path ahead. Thoughts?

I find the UI in Affinity needs work. For instance, when pull up the "Soft Proof" dialogue and can flip through previews of the various settings, but I have to click each one, instead of being able to up and down arrow through them. That's very time-consuming and unnecessary. The same thing applies to the crop tool in Photo, where you can see a preview of the cut, but you cannot fine-tune adjust it's placement with the keyboard. I would like to be able to "nudge" the box where I need to.

No problem. It's all just growing pains. No big deal. I love the fact that someone is finally actually taking a serious stab at Adobe's offerings. I can't stand the subscription model, and I don't appreciate constantly being forced to buy a new product even though the file doesn't use any new features (E.g. not being able to open a CS5 or CS6 file in CS3).

I downloaded the Affinity Photo beta and just to see what it can do for me in this particular project and while it does offer absolute dimensions without resizing, I'm realizing that also being able to resize it with those dimensions should also be added...as in a checkbox that says "crop and resize." Should I request that in a different part of the forum?

I understand what you're saying. I still think adding that feature in Affinity Designer would be useful. It can be beneficial to have pixel-level adjustment in that tool, as it can be used for digital media, and not just print media.

Mine is also Windows full version.

Thank you. It sounds like that capability is in there, but I don't see the Mode dropdown you're referencing. It seems I've already found a bug in that the context toolbar doesn't show the right stuff when clicking on the crop tool.

Hey. I just bought the newly released version and I'm excited to get going with it. I'm already trying to use it with photos I've been given at work that need to be cropped and resized, but it's very difficult to crop and then resize them without them being distorted, so it basically becomes guesswork. How Photoshop makes that process easier is to allow the user to crop with dimensions, so that the crop is already at the dimension that you're seeking. No resizing becomes necessary. Can we add that functionality in, please?

Not the same. I have DrawPlus, Illustrator, Inkscape, Mischief, Affinity and a few others. None compare to Affinity...but hey...if they don't want to make money catering to both types of users, it's their business. It's not really worth me spending any more money on Affinity to upgrade, if I'm stuck on my Mac only. To get a Mac that's as powerful as the PC I built, I would have to spend at least $3000 - $4000. For Photo Work, I haven't found anything that compares to Photoshop, regrettably. I have Photomatix, Krita, Paint Shop Pro and quite a few others.

No offense, but Linux users have been saying Linux is the future for decades and it still hasn't gone mainstream. There's a reason for that. It caters to "nerds" who want to fiddle with command lines and things that are simply too out of touch with the common consumer. Again, no offense, but while I would like to see a Linux version of Affinity, the Linux is the future thing is just not happening.

You just answered this question very easily for those of us who want a Windows version. The answer is stop bothering with the Mac side, if you only want to work on one version. Do a Windows version and you can run it on both a PC and Mac. Job done.