Granddaddy

Comparing Serif to Adobe is like comparing David to Goliath. David's sling proved more powerful than Goliath's arms and armor. The forum thread from May-June 2019 is relevant to this discussion. See it at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/86147-how-big-is-the-affinity-team/ In that thread there are links to Serif on Google Maps and a few screen shots of their headquarters. You can view Adobe's San Jose headquarters on Google Maps streetview at https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3299571,-121.8944997,3a,75y,14.01h,105.28t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s07oZzcPwOJ1w8M8TaLBUqQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 We know what kinds of cars the Serif team drives. Adobe employees hide their cars underground. And, of course, Adobe has many other offices in many countries. https://www.adobe.com/about-adobe/contact/offices.html

To paraphrase Seinfeld: You know how to log the issue. You just don't know how to fix the issue. And that's really the most important part of logging the issue. The fixing of the issue. Anybody can just log an issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaAeUQrVw4c So after many years of users reporting this issue, nothing at all has been done to cause APhoto to display an image correctly on the monitor. Instead, APhoto randomly inserts a white line border around some sides of an image or along some parts of some sides of an image. Of course we have learned to work around the issue. But Serif's inability to fix the issue makes me wonder what else APhoto is doing incorrectly to the image, something less noticeable that will rise up to bite us later. It is frustrating to report an issue only to be told, "Oh yes. We've known about that internally for years. It's a side effect of how we render images on screen." Over the past 40 years I have used dozens of applications that display images on the screen. Only APhoto inserts white lines around the edges of the image. I am curious as to why Serif has chosen a method of rendering that introduces errors into the image. Are there not industry standard methods that don't produce such a side effect? Is there some advantage to doing it Serif's way that I don't understand?

I'm an amateur/enthusiast/hobbyist who has used APhoto exclusively for the past 3 years. Previously I used Photoshop Elements through several versions since the early 1990s. I restore old photos for family and friends, make collages and other photo gifts, make large format prints for fun. APhoto has been a great learning experience. I chose APhoto because I liked its emphasis on non-destructive editing. That being said, I have the following observations: 1.) When catching up to a superior competitor, you must innovate twice as rapidly as that competitor just to stay the same distance behind. That's what some of this discussion is about. The competition was not standing still while Serif was playing catch up and claiming it is the future of photo editing. 2.) APhoto today is no better than it was three years ago, worse actually since .aphoto files are now 4 to 10 times larger than three years ago with no benefit to photo editors such as myself. 3.) APhoto seems to be positioned as a utility to supplement Serif's main focus, which is desktop publishing on the Mac platform. APhoto is not catering to photography enthusiasts. Indeed, I think many of us photography enthusiasts feel neglected by Serif. 4.) APhoto should be judged against Photoshop Elements, which is sold outright rather than as a subscription. Photoshop Elements includes many of the artificial intelligence features in Photoshop, features that are appearing also in other competitors to APhoto. Look at the Photoshop Elements 2021 web pages and you also might say WTBH. 5.) Given that a Photoshop subscription costs no more than a couple of pizzas per month, I do not understand why professionals in a production environment would consider this an inordinate expense. I agree subscription software is annoying in principle, just as copy protected software was annoying in the 1980s. I didn't use copy protected software then (Lotus 123, e.g.), and I don't use subscription software today. Certainly a Photoshop subscription is prohibitive for someone such as myself who may go for weeks without editing a photo. But for a business professional, so what?

In the first post in this thread, many of the tutorials labeled as being New have a posting date of March 2020 or July 2020 on YouTube , not October, 2020.

@Pšenda is referring to the Windows 10 Settings/System/Display/Scale and Layout slider. This option scales the entire screen. With the Advanced Scaling Settings/Custom Scaling option you can set any scaling between 100% - 500%, but Windows says this custom scaling is not recommended. In this thread, I was referring to the Windows 10 Settings/Ease-of-Access/Display/Make Text Bigger slider introduced in Windows 10 version 1809 sometime late in 2018 to early 2019 depending on when Windows updated your computer. For a description of what font elements in APhoto can be adjusted using the Make Text Bigger slider, see my post at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/74923-changing-affinity-photo-user-interface-font-size-in-windows-10/&do=findComment&comment=430003 There are numerous discussions on the web about the problems associated with scaling the entire display, which is why Win 10 version 1809 introduced Making Text Bigger while leaving the display itself scaled at 100% . Of course, Making Text Bigger cannot help on those elements of the APhoto UI that do not use the system font, nor can it help with bitmapped tool icons. At least some of APhoto's competitors understand the usability issues arising with high definition monitors and users' varying degrees of visual acuity and varying working conditions. Some allow users to choose alternative sizes for bitmapped icons, as APhoto did recently for its layer icons. Applications like the Vivaldi web browser allow independent scaling of both the UI and the working content window. We can hope more developers catch on to these trends that broaden the possible user base for a product.

This could mean the font attributes for some features of the UI are hard coded in the Affinity software. If much of APhoto is hard coded, then it will be difficult to adapt it to changing conditions (such as very high resolution monitors and use of multiple monitors). That could explain why so many bugs persist for so many years. Quality and flexibility have to be built into software from the initial design. Software cannot be criticized into quality. It is always dangerous for a company to release software before it is ready for prime time. Hence the battles between developers and marketers. Bad first impressions and bad reputations endure long after a problem is fixed, if it is ever fixed. Once people turn away from a familiar software product to a new software product, it takes a compelling reason to entice them back to the older product, just as it took a compelling reason for users to try the new software product after years of using some older, more established software. These forums are filled with examples of this. I saw smaller, highly successful, software companies disappear virtually overnight when they foolishly gave their users a compelling reason to try a different product. You cannot throw out software as an experiment and see how people react. When released prematurely (a business/marketing decision), software gets a bad reputation faster than programmers can make up for the deficiencies. Living down a bad reputation is very difficult.

In addition to https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/123596-ui-font-and-icon-size-is-really-very-very-tooooooooooo-~~-small/ See also https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/116061-fon-size-in-the-gui/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/74923-changing-affinity-photo-user-interface-font-size-in-windows-10/ We wait impatiently through the years for APhoto to catch up to its competition in so many ways, yet we put up with it for a variety of reasons.

Enlarging on this point, as an aging dinosaur I am still proudly and happily and regularly using Microsoft Office 2000. Microsoft provides the free Office Compatibility Pack that enables older versions of Office (like my 20-year-old version) to open documents created by any later version of Office. I have no problem opening Office files created by my grandchildren with their most recent version of Office. Granted not all features of the later Office versions can be translated into the older software, but that has never been a problem even with complex Excel worksheets. I do not participate in Affinity beta testing because Serif warns us the file format may change at any time and any work created with the beta may become unusable in the official release. Affinity's platform and goals seem to stand on shifting foundations, so I heed their warnings. They have admitted to changing the APhoto format at the last moment before release of a new version to accommodate unexpected changes in the APub format. Just using the commercial version of APhoto is enough of a beta experience for me.

For basic tricky panoramas see also: Tricky Panoramas (Official Affinity Photo tutorial from 2017) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvB4fwmlEGw How to Align, Mask and Edit a Multi-Photo Panorama in Affinity Photo from InAffinity in 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFo_6zKOL6w When all else fails, you can, without too much difficulty, use Affinity Photo's very robust stacking functions and masking to manually create your panorama non-destructively to allow great flexibility with all layers preserved in your afphoto file. Then if you discover a problem later you can return to the stack for additional adjustments. How to Make Panoramas Non-Destructively in Affinity Photo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eSLyZA0Zao APhoto's Stack functions are much more robust than is usually mentioned in tutorials, as I pointed out at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/114815-create-an-action-sequence-by-stacking-panned-photos/

Five years of requests for exporting to the folder with the original photo has resulted in nothing, as discussed most recently at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/124612-save-data-directory/

This discussion is developing in a familiar direction. Given how difficult (either in time or expertise or manpower) Serif finds it to fix simple bugs or provide simple features, why should anyone believe that Serif will eventually develop something as complex as the DAM that has been speculated about in these forums for years? Meanwhile, the competition, which had a DAM when I first began digital editing eighteen years ago, is moving well beyond anything dreamed of by APhoto users. They are applying artificial intelligence (whatever that means) to provide features such as automated object selection, automated colorization of black & white photos, automated background removal, and automated sky replacement. I have been using APhoto for three years. It's been fun and I learned a lot about photo editing in these forums and through the several people dedicated to creating free tutorials and inexpensive training courses for APhoto. But during that time Serif has directed ever more resources into desktop publishing on the Mac platform while APhoto has been largely neglected. I often fear I have gone down a blind alley with APhoto.

People have been requesting this simple, very useful option for 5 years. Many have agreed that Export should default to the folder containing the original file. Others have attacked the idea vigorously. Some seem to think their particular, idiosyncratic workflow is the "correct" (therefore "moral") workflow, and that's how everyone else "ought" to be doing it. Many apparently simple feature requests have languished, just as many annoying bugs have persisted. Sometimes it is admitted that the Serif team is far too small to fix that which we would like to see fixed or to develop features now common in the competition. Recognizing that despair is a sin, I have adopted my mother's philosophy in relation to Affinity Photo: "Oh well. What can you do? You just have to put up with it I guess." I am still putting up with APhoto for reasons peculiar to me. I stopped recommending it to my photo enthusiast friends a year or so ago for several reasons, all of which are discussed from time to time by contributors to these forums.

You might find helpful the discussion from December 2018 that describes Windows settings in Settings/Ease-of-Access/Display/Make-text-bigger slider that was introduced in Win 10 1809. It affects some but not all text elements in the APhoto user interface. As I wrote in March 2019: What I see in Windows 10 version 1809 using the Windows 10 Settings/Ease-of-Access/Display/Make-text-bigger slider is that text labels in the Studio Panels are NOT affected. They all are stuck with the Affinity Miniscule [sic] font (as I call it). But many other text elements in Affinity Photo can be enlarged using the Win10 slider that enlarges Windows system fonts. You will get larger fonts in Affinity Photo's Menu Bar, Toolbar, Context Toolbar, Tools Panel, and Status Bar. In addition, menu items in the dialog boxes or panels that control individual Adjustments (for instance Levels) are affected by the Windows text slider. The pop-up menus such as the list of Adjustments or Live Filters that appear when you click the icons at the bottom of the Layers Panel also respond to the Win10 system font slider. Also, the text Hints that pop up when you hover the mouse pointer over tool icons on the Toolbar and the Tools Panel are affected by the slider. I have my Win10 text slider set for 120%. If I set it to 200% and maximize the Affinity window, then the Status Bar text gets slightly clipped at the bottom.

Search the Web for ghost image computer monitor and you will find many articles and discussions about ghosting on LCD monitors. Wading through them you should find some that describe your problem. For example https://themonitormonitor.com/how-to-fix-monitor-ghosting/ but only you can decide whether any particular article describes your specific problem. Persistent images are another problem as explained in a much older article at https://www.cnet.com/news/addressing-common-problems-with-lcd-displays/ As for the political signatures, I do wonder why Serif allows them in the forums. They are a distraction and a disservice to participants, if it's not too political to say so.

Updated from version 1.83 to version 1.84 flawlessly for both APhoto and APublisher The Hand pointer behavior now works as it should after you release the spacebar. Thanks.