Scott Prock

Me personally, I won't stop using Affinity. My struggle is convincing a retouching lab to switch. A lab that is still using Adobe CS5 in production. When mentioning Affinity, there are specific workflows that are entrenched with using CS5 for so many years. There are still parts of Affinity products that are proving deal killers if I want any real chance of presenting a viable roadmap to switch to Affinity. The ability to assign keys to a macro is an essential part of creating macros so it just doesn't make sense in my head regardless. For me, I can deal with the work around, as placing the library window next to the window of template assets I pull in to each file doesn't slow me down. However, I just came across the nail that will seal the fate of using Affinity at my job. You will NEVER get the company I'm working for to switch until you allow editable text on a PSD export. That one is a HUGE one, one that really made me look like an asshat, well to be fair I should have checked the text layers prior to submitting for final approval. I had hoped after all these years of Affinity, they would have crossed off all the reasons for Adobe users to avoid switching. Hopefully the recent merger with Canva will help bridge the remaining gaps. ... Scott

I solved a major issue keeping me from removing Photoshop completely, only to have another come up regarding macros? When I saw a video by James Ritson showing the changes he has done in AP 2.6 beta and he showed the use of macros I thought that was the final nail .... except ... I can't figure out how to assign a shortcut to macros. A search on the forums suggests this is a feature that may not be a thing at all. I can't for the life of me understand why macros would even be a thing without the ability to assign a shortcut key to it. What am I missing?? You guys are making it increasingly difficult for me to make the case to my employer on switching our lab to Affinity products. (ugh!, I hate Adobe soooo much especially when watching the RAM increasing the longer I work on a file until it has sucked up all the ram and crashes, I WANT TO BE WORKING IN AFFINITY ) can't do it without shortcuts on the macros ... Scott

Thank you both so much. I was having a difficult time finding out what was going on. This is something I have been meaning to learn more about. I really appreciate the detailed reply. I have used Affinity since the their beginning and remembered the masking ability around complicated hair to be far superior. My current workflow involves removing the background on high school sports team photos. Often times there are students with wild hair and I hate how much haloing I have to work through using Photoshop. The problem stems from needing to return the final result in .psd with an editable mask. So I had no idea this was an issue until I went to check the deliverables prior to submitting them and the masks were all trashed. It makes sense now, as in I understand what the artifacts I see are and the why. I’ll have to adjust my workflow, and hoped I can have something that allows me to push through these type of edits faster using AP vs Ps

Images are the results of using a selection brush to select the subject, then clicked refine and brushed over the edges of the hair. (simple basic masking refinement) Then chose new layer with mask as the output and got what you see. When you turn the mask off you can see all the junk, and where did all that come from and why? Masks are supposed to be non destructive, and this is most certainly destructive. I don't know what has changed, or if its something I'm doing wrong but about 6 months ago I started seeing issues with using mask refinements. I never had the time to trouble shoot and just brushed it off as something I was doing wrong. The zoomed in image shows the edge I didn't even touch with the refinement brush. I've actually had to switch back to PHotoshop in order to get production work finished. I have tested this on both a Macbook Pro 1st gen M1 and an 11'' M2 iPad Pro and get the same results. The original file as from Pexels ...

I've been trying to copy an image from AD v2 to AP v2 I take a group of layers (9"x11" 300dpi image and two adjustment layers) and rasterize them into a single pixel layer. I then copy that layer to the clipboard, and when trying to create a new document from the clipboard, I get the following error. "Cannot Create Document" "The current contents of the clipboard cannot be used to create a new document" I wouldn't think copying a rasterized layer from Designer would be met with an error like this. Shouldn't we be able to move content from AD to AP???? Am I correct in that AD does not have all the raster tools, such as dodge/burn ... I would assume AP still has tools that AD does not otherwise what would be the point of two different softwares. Is this a bug or intended behavior? ...Thank you

Awwwww man, the link is broken. Anyone have these brushes, or know where they can be downloaded? ... Scott

WOW! That worked perfectly, now I won't have to spend 10 hours creating vector based pixels HAHAHAHA! Oh, just in case someone else see this later and tries to follow the instructions in AD, it's actually in AP (Affinity Photo) I was familiar enough with the software to realize it wasn't in designer but some may not. THANKS AGAIN!!

LOL, true ... I would have turned those off. Here's the original 64px file

I'll give that a shot, thank you.

If this makes it easier to see what I'm trying to do, here's an example of a minecraft skin. This is a screen capture of it in AD. So you can see how a 64px image like this could be a challenge. I'm impressed with how AD renders the raster image clearly. It was almost a false sense until I exported it and realized I should have known better than try to "stretch" a raster image that far. I wonder if the screen capture would work better for vector tracing.

The upscale will still be square, sorry for the confusion. I just mentioned the file size as that's what I had open. The template I have to print to is that size. The upscaled skin will still remain square and needs to be bigger than the largest piece on the template. It's just a matter of semantics as far as the actual dimensions. My point was it's so much bigger than the original file I have to work with. I hadn't thought of looking for an upscale app, thanks Oval :-)

This is true, I don't need to be exactly 6000x8000, that just happens to be the final dimensions on the file I'm creating. I'm re-working the skin onto a fabric template so we can make the skin wearable.

I need to be able to print the minecraft skin (gift my daughter). Therefore the 64px image needs to scale up to the 6000x8000. Obviously there's no way to print something that small onto that size of canvas so I wanted to vectorize the skin so it could be scaled as large as I need it. The problem is all the vectorizing software will smooth out the pixels which defeats the look of the blocky nature of the skin. I have actually completed the vectorization of the skin manually. The final layer count came out to 1699 but it took me FOREVER as I had to create the pixel grid and re-color every single pixel to match the skin. I have ten kids, and if I have to do this to every single one it will take me until 2025 before I'm finished LOL

Not sure I understand completely ... I'm having to take a 64x64px png and stretch it over 6000x8000px. I don't know of any other way to upscale a raster image that small other then converting it to vector. If I could get the raster image to have enough detail at a larger size I think the vector tracing could work, but that's where I'm at a loss as to how.

Will any of the software mentioned be able to vectorize down to the pixel level? I'm attempting to convert a minecraft skin to vector, each individual pixel needs to be vectorized. All the tools I have tried turn the whole thing to smooth lines and all the pixel detail is lost. I know this isn't normally what someone would want to do but I need to retain the pixilation of the minecraft skin in vector format. The skin file is only 64x64 pixels. Perhaps there's a way to convert the pixels to a larger grid that can be picked up by the vectorization algorithms.