Granddaddy

Just to put your export destination folder problem in perspective, users have been requesting a fix for this export location dysfunction for about 9 years. So far Affinity has never acknowledged that it even recognizes that a problem exists for those users that see it as a problem. I last commented on this problem last July in one of the many threads about this problem. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/189565-export-location-option-to-source-file/#comment-1108795 It is just one of the many poorly thought out features of Affinity that we either find a compelling reason to put up with or a compelling reason to use another product. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201189-each-document-should-remember-export-location/&do=findComment&comment=1190038

There are many tutorials about selecting/replacing/adjusting skies and other backgrounds. For links to some tutorials, see my posts at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/143743-remove-background/&do=findComment&comment=798313 https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/143743-remove-background/&do=findComment&comment=798819

What's your limit on cost? I consider 1 TB of storage to be the minimum that anyone should have on any kind of computer. But 1 TB of storage would be totally inadequate for my own use. My last two desktops have had both a 1 TB SSD plus a 2 TB HDD. Also a dedicated graphics card and 16 GB of RAM are minimal. But it all comes down to cost. In the past decade I have kept my purchases between $1600 and $1800 (U. S. dollars). The IBM PCjr I bought nearly 40 years ago in the mid-1980s cost me more than $2500, back when $2500 was a considerable sum of money. Today's computers are bargain-basement cheap in my mind. It all depends on how much you are willing and able to spend and how much pain you are willing to endure if you choose to run a barely adequate machine that might be suitable for no more than e-mail, a little word processing, and simple web browsing. If you want to do graphics editing and run multiple higher function applications, then treat yourself to a fully functional machine that will be useful for the next decade to run whatever software you may get involved with in the future. My wife is still using the computer I bought for about $1400 to do photo and video editing in 2013. When deciding how much to spend on an item, I sometimes convert its cost to pizza equivalents. How many pizzas could I buy for that price? Smart-phone-equivalents are another useful benchmark. How many iPhones could one buy for the cost of the computer one is considering? How much more useful is that computer than a cell phone?

I'm disappointed that my simple question about the future of these Affinity forums has not been answered by any forum moderators, Affinity staff, or Canva/Serif principals who might actually know whether Affinity technical support will remain free under Canva ownership. Sadly, this lack of response is likely to stimulate even more uncertainty and speculation about Affinity's future. Will there be free user forums for Affinity users? Will Canva/Affinity staff participate in any free forums that might exist? How many of those now paid by Serif to participate in these free forums will still be employed in six months? How much will Canva charge Affinity users for technical support? Responses from knowledgeable people in Canva/Serif would be most helpful.

Here's one example: https://www.on1.com/plus/forums/ https://www.on1.com/products/plus/ Subscription is regularly $55/year, but on sale at a discount at the moment. That's equal to the full price I paid for ON1 Photo Raw 2024 last month on a special promotional offer. They had sucked me in at the end of January when they were giving away ON1 Photo Effects for free, a fact I was alerted to in these Affinity forums. It was worth the money as I'm learning a lot about a whole different approach to editing, including AI functions. But community support seems poor. They have some free community forums, but they are pretty empty of content and would give the impression that no one is using their products. https://on1help.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics When you participate in the free forums, your actual name gets posted with your question or comments. I told the company I thought this was a deterrent to using those free forums. I don't know how the paid forums work, but why would they be any different.

Will Affinity forums remain free or will Canva charge a subscription fee for user forums? Some Affinity competitors charge a substantial subscription fee to participate in community forums, to access user resources, and to view tutorials. Annual fees for what they call "user support" can equal the cost of the software itself. Affinity's free forums provide one compelling reason to continue using Affinity. In these Affinity forums there is extensive support for all users--both casual and professional, both new and experienced, both amateur and professional. These free forums constitute a fellowship of users. Here users from all over the world come to understand and benefit from their affinity for one another. I hope this free community of users will continue under Canva. Edited 4/4/2024 I'm happy to say that @Leigh responded below saying: "things will remain the same i.e the forums and Technical Support will remain free."

Were Affinity Photo to adopt subscription pricing, that would be a compelling reason for me to switch to other software. As an amateur hobbyist, my use of Affinity Photo is episodic, not continuous. During the current tax season and garden planting season, I will most likely go a couple of months without editing a single photo. Even old retired guys have only so much free time for photo editing. Fortunately, we amateur photographers have many choices when it comes to photo editors, as emphasized by a recent review at https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-adobe-photoshop-alternatives Sadly, Affinity Photo is not an editor's choice in any of the nine "Best For" categories. APhoto is mentioned only in passing as if the writer just wanted to assure us he is not ignorant of alternatives. He writes: "Another popular budget pick for Photoshop alternatives is Serif Affinity Photo though we find it's less polished than Corel PaintShop Pro." His link is to a July 2023 review where APhoto is described as "Affordable but basic photo editing." Were that all APhoto was I would not have started using it seven years ago, nor would I still be using it today. I myself have grown restless after seven years using APhoto, so I bought one of the alternatives about a month ago to see what I might be missing with AI non-destructive editing. The alternative is powerful and eye-opening, but it doesn't provide me with a compelling reason to abandon APhoto. Still, neither have I any compelling reason to continue using APhoto other than familiarity and some features I use only occasionally that are missing in alternative software. In any case, I am enjoying exploring other software where I am learning how far behind APhoto has fallen in some areas. Perhaps the purchase by Canva will lead to renewed energy in Nottingham.

Almost 70 years ago, when American government schools still taught English literature, I read the following lines by a famous English poet: The old order changeth, yielding place to new,| And God fulfills Himself in many ways lest one good custom should corrupt the world. In the 1980s and 1990s, change on my university campus was rapid and anxiety inducing. As soon as you learned how to do your job well with one piece of software on one platform, you were expected to learn to do your job in quite a different way with different software on a different platform. So we evolved from IBM/GML Script on the mainframe to PC-Write to Word Perfect to Word and perhaps beyond. We changed from mainframe computers managed by others to desktop appliances with floppy disks to desktop computer systems with hard drives that we were expected to manage ourselves. We went from printing on a giant laser printer two miles away in the computing center with a one-day turnaround time to printing on dot-matrix printers on our desktop to printing to networked laser printers in our offices. I found it invigorating. I loved the wonderful complexity of it all. Many did not. I encouraged my staff to think: "What joy to awake each morning in a world so filled with things to learn." It turns out that even on university campuses, learning new things is not something people look forward to. During those times we fought many wars of ideology and practicality over competing products: YTerm/Kermit, Word/Wordperfect, Mac/Windows, Token Ring/Ethernet, Gopher/Web. My experience in those wars led me to formulate: Granddaddy's Principles of the Compelling Reason 1.) When a person is satisfied using software that is good enough, only a compelling reason will persuade that person to change to different software 2.) When a person is dissatisfied using particular software, then only a compelling reason will persuade that person to continue using that software I asked recently in these forums if disgruntled users of Affinity had a compelling reason to continue using Affinity. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201189-each-document-should-remember-export-location/&do=findComment&comment=1190038 Apparently Serif company owners found a compelling reason to sell the company to a larger competitor. Perhaps they thought that Affinity does not provide a compelling reason for its users to continue using the software. Comments in these forums following the surprise announcement that Serif had been sold suggests that many Affinity users will find compelling reasons to change to a different product. How many will find a compelling reason to continue using Affinity is unknown.

In last summer's discussion of export folder location at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/189565-export-location-option-to-source-file/ I commented that the lack of this export option is another of the many reasons Affinity users need a high tolerance for seemingly unmodifiable design decisions that cause workflow and usability problems. Many people, including myself, came to Affinity because they believed they had a compelling reason to do so. The big question for Affinity's future is: Do disgruntled users have a compelling reason to continue with Affinity? That's a question I ask myself regularly. For example, Affinity has fallen well behind its competitors in applying AI methods even for such simple things as selection. Many people have commented on this lack. Their comments finally gave me a compelling reason to try another product this year. At the moment I continue to use Affinity only because it is familiar. Meanwhile I'm learning the alternative software because it appears it may be better for my purposes and it does not have some of the annoyances I find in Affinity. The more one is told that one's preferences for certain software features imply that one is ignorant, incompetent, or contrary to the majority of Affinity users, the more one begins to see compelling reasons to move elsewhere.

There are two points to be remembered when considering lack of contrast in the Affinity UI. Both points imply there is no reason to hope for changes that might help those of us struggling with the Affinity UI. 1.) Lack of contrast is not considered a bug by Serif because the code obviously is producing the intended effect. The required UI elements are in place, though some users may find them difficult to read. Thus, lack of contrast is a design feature of the Affinity UI. To request "improved" readability is to request not just a simple bug fix but a redesign of the UI itself. 2.) Affinity users have been requesting a more readable UI for nearly a decade. Sadly, with Affinity 2 the readability issues that trouble some users were made worse. I asked about the principles behind that design shortly after the release of Affinity 2. See, for instance, my post linked below and the many ensuing discussions in numerous other threads. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/173835-what-ergonomic-design-principles-call-for-minimal-contrast-and-reduced-readability-in-user-interfaces/ Given that Affinity now lags significantly behind several competitors in the basics of modern photo editing, it remains to be seen whether users struggling with the UI will continue to find compelling reasons to purchase any future upgrades that might become available.

I've been using APhoto for about 7 years. I'm comfortable with the APhoto way of doing things. But I've grown restless. Last month a competitor with several AI products offered one of its programs for free. I installed it on my computer. It was a revelation. I finally understood why so many people in these forums are requesting AI in APhoto. A few days after I registered my free program, the competitor offered an inexpensive upgrade to their full photo editor, so I bought it. If I never used it to replace APhoto, I could just treat it as an educational expense. It was another revelation. I had never imagined that an editor could automatically select animals in the image even when the animal was barely visible in an old framed photo in the background behind the principal human subject. You don't even point at the animals. You just choose "Animals" from a list of categories of things in the photo that can be selected for further processing and adjustment. The list of categories is unique to the photo you are working on. The list is generated by the AI as it loads the photo. And portrait manipulation is stunning. Whiten teeth, recolor lips, enhance brows, brighten and whiten eyes, resize eyes, smooth skin and remove blemishes--all can be done with sliders without having to make any selections at all. I'm still wallowing around in my ignorance trying to gain an understanding of workflow and where functions are and how to do things this new way after doing them the old way for so long in APhoto. The approach to non-destructive editing is very different from APhoto's approach. So I'm reading manuals and watching videos. Meaning is beginning to emerge. One disappointment is the competitor does not offer a free forum like these Affinity forums that are so valuable and helpful and fun. As an amateur, I consider the cost of the competitor's forums to be prohibitive. Also, I don't see a way to participate anonymously as we do here in the Serif forums. That's a deal breaker for me. I don't want my name broadcast to the Internet every time I post something. Also the concept of clipping masks seems absent from this competitor's product. I use clipping masks all the time when making collages. I saw a request addressed to the company to add clipping masks, but that was dated three years ago when it was labeled as being under consideration. This competing product is no replacement for APhoto as yet, but it sure will be easy to use it to do a lot of very routine snapshot editing and perhaps enhancing images exported from APhoto. I'll be able to avoid some of the tedium of using APhoto for some editing tasks.

Thanks @Dave.Kelly for alerting us to the free On1 Effects 2023 offer. It was a revelation to me, especially the Super Select AI that works on objects and types of objects. It's quite remarkable. Now I understand all the requests for some AI in APhoto. Also, It was helpful to learn that Serif is not the only company with a dysfunctional UI. On1 might even be worse. But I now have several years practice struggling through that. The Super Select AI is far from perfect, frequently leaving out areas that should be selected. On1's tutorials were very amusing when they simply ignore those areas and go on as if nothing is wrong.

I agree with others in this Export Preview thread that off-topic comments about the UI are best posted to the many earlier threads about the Affinity UI. Let us note that @bbrother joined these forums only in July 2023 and may be unaware of the extensive discussions concerning the dysfunctional Affinity UI that erupted during the Big Debacle when Affinity Version 2 was released in November 2022. I myself started one of those threads concerning minimal contrast and lack of readability at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/173835-what-ergonomic-design-principles-call-for-minimal-contrast-and-reduced-readability-in-user-interfaces/ Many other threads at that time are full of examples provided by many other Affinity users. Just last month a new thread about the size of UI elements was started, and I commented there with reference to earlier discussions in other threads. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/195678-affinity-photo-v2-interface-question/#comment-1151830 As I said there The user interface is unpleasant to use and even dysfunctional in many ways. Still, some of us continue to put up with it for reasons of our own. Eight years of begging Serif to make the UI readable have fallen on deaf ears. The upgrade to Affinity 2 actually made the interface worse and doubled down on reducing contrast. Returning to the topic of this thread, in nearly seven years of using APhoto I have never seen any need for an Export Preview. I would welcome an option to turn it off.

The obvious refutation of this ancient argument is that the first response to many posts is: What Affinity application are you using? What operating system are you using? So one must read the first three or four posts on every thread before reaching a point where one can begin to answer the question being asked by the OP. This issue has been argued for years. It is always decided in favor of ever more consolidation into a single forum regardless of application, operating system, and goal. Perhaps that is why so few participate in answering questions. It is just too tedious to weed through so many ambiguous questions to find a place where one might contribute a solution. The situation is worsened by the inability of so many to write an informative subject for a new thread.

When editing an image in a floating window using APhoto 2.3.1 , clicking on any adjustment will display the adjustment dialog for only an instant before the dialog disappears behind the active window. In APhoto 1.10.6, the dialog opens on top of the active floating window and stays there as I expect it should. I couldn't find this reported previously, yet it is such an obvious bug that I can't believe it hasn't been reported before. Then again, this is the first time I have used floating windows for editing multiple photos in the 6 years I've been using APhoto. Perhaps others don't use floating windows much either.

When I first purchased Affinity Photo six years ago, I remember it being heralded by some as the future of photographic editing. Users of APhoto were said to be part of a revolution in photo editing. It was quite exciting. Whatever your opinion on that claim may be now, it does seem that Serif has a major problem. Every one of its competitors now touts AI functionality, including those products held by many to be beneath consideration even by serious amateurs, . Because it lacks any AI functions at all, APhoto on first glance now presents to the public as being a few years behind its competition. It reminds me of my predicament when trying to sell my house 15 years ago. We had lived in the house for 25 years without air conditioning. None of the houses built at the same time were air conditioned. In our mountain climate it was totally unnecessary. We usually slept under blankets even in the summer. Most older houses even lacked duct work because they had baseboard or radiant ceiling heat. Then new housing developments began springing up where all the houses were air-conditioned. Buyers coming to our town would not even look at a house that lacked air-conditioning. So we had the house retro-fitted with duct work and heat pumps in order to attract potential buyers. It seems Serif soon will have to retrofit APhoto with AI features to remain in the market, whether or not any of us actually find those AI features useful.

Sadly @thomB you have discovered the fatal flaw in all Affinity software applications. The user interface is unpleasant to use and even dysfunctional in many ways. Still, some of us continue to put up with it for reasons of our own. Eight years of begging Serif to make the UI readable have fallen on deaf ears. The upgrade to Affinity 2 actually made the interface worse and doubled down on reducing contrast. For more background and some suggestions for partial solutions under Windows, see my post at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/191947-ui-sizing-for-apps/&do=findComment&comment=1125237 It will lead you to other discussions of the usability problem. I'm working on two 24" monitors at 1920x1280 resolution. Windows Accessibility settings let me enlarge text in those UI elements that use the Windows system font. Unfortunately, most text elements and the icons are hard coded into Affinity apps. There is no way to increase their size without scaling all of Windows, a highly undesirable workaround that messes up all other applications. I have several quirky personal reasons for sticking with Affinity for now, but I would never recommend it to anyone else. And I will never be able to upgrade to a high resolution monitor if I want to continue with Affinity products.

I did not find this reported previously in a quick search. Given that the misnaming also occurs in APub 1.10, if it had been reported earlier I assume it would have been fixed by now. The Tools Panel is referred to as the Toolbar in the prompt for View/Customize Tools... Perhaps this helps explain why so many people misname the toolbar and tools panel when posting in these forums. The Help system appears to use the correct terminology.

An easy workaround to make the highlighting more obvious is to zoom into the document (say 200% or more on my 24" monitors) before double-clicking the entry in Preflight.

Thanks for catching this. I entered this thread from a Duck Duck Go search and never noticed I was in an archived forum. I did post a new request (referring back to this one) in the Affinity 2 forums as you already know because you posted there also. See

Three years ago there was a request in the Affinity 1 forums for more obvious highlighting for Preflight Text Patterns. I'd like to renew @Loquos's request here in the Affinity 2 forums. It would be very helpful to have more obvious highlighting in preflight warnings for Text Patterns. Perhaps most people don't use that feature of Preflight given that Text Patterns options are all turned off by default. I'm surprised how little appears in the forums when you search the phrase "Text Patterns". Surely people are trying to find extra spaces, multiple spaces, and straight quotes when text is pasted from elsewhere. It's especially difficult to find the very thin highlight for straight quotes (especially for apostrophes) in a large text frame. Or have I missed something obvious?

I second this request from three years ago. It would be very helpful to have more obvious highlighting in preflight warnings for Text Patterns. Perhaps most people don't use that feature of Preflight given that Text Patterns options are all turned off by default. I'm surprised this is the only mention I can find of it in the forums. Surely people are trying to find extra spaces, multiple spaces, and straight quotes when text is pasted from elsewhere. It's especially difficult to find the very thin highlight for straight quotes in a large text frame. Or have I missed something obvious?

You mean like Adobe Photoshop Elements (which includes a DAM) that was selling for $59 on Black Friday? It has been sold for decades under what is now referred to as a "perpetual license." It has some features way beyond those of APhoto, but lacks some professional level features.

My experience in extracting people from complex backgrounds is that this always happens. I always have to clean up the mask produced when the selection is output. You must also clean up the portion of the mask that exposes the subject itself. There is always spillage (or whatever the appropriate term might be) onto the subject itself. Just as you clean up the mask by painting on the mask with white outside the subject, so you must clean up the mask by painting on the mask with black over the subject itself to ensure the transparent area is fully transparent. You can alt-click on the mask icon to see it in black and white. Since I am selecting subjects with hair flying around, I can't avoid using Refine Selection so far as I know. That's what all the tutorials show that I've seen. Some suggest just wiping out the loose hair and drawing in your own version with a suitable brush. That's beyond my limited artistic ability. Various solutions have been proposed in tutorials and in these forums for dealing with masking artifacts. I only do a few of these extractions each year, so I haven't studied the solutions in detail. Perhaps others with more experience will add to this thread.

You will find a variety of opinions so you'll have to decide for yourself as your experience grows. After 20 years as an amateur editing photos with a mouse, I read a few years ago that a tablet could replace a mouse completely. Since I sometimes experienced hand stiffness and fatigue with a mouse, I decided to buy a Wacom Intuos tablet as a Christmas present to myself. I put my mouse away in a drawer to force myself to use the tablet for everything. After a week of frustration, I gave up and returned to the mouse, which I can use with either my left or right hand so I can switch hands if I get tired. I do use the Wacom for some selection tasks. Right now I am extracting a half dozen people from a busy, complex background of shrubbery, lawn, house, and sky. This requires a lot of manual editing when the selection tools have difficulty discerning edges when contrast is low. It becomes necessary to create a mask and to manually paint on that mask to get precise edges and to eliminate the usual spillover in both directions across the edges. This involves a lot of click-drag maneuvers that can be hard on the finger holding down the mouse button. I do not like the Wacom stylus. It is far too thin and the small buttons are hard to use. But it is often more relaxing than exerting constant tension on a mouse button. I find a mouse far more stable to use than a stylus on a tablet. This may in part be due to my aging hands and my deteriorating handwriting skills. I think the choice between mouse and tablet will depend on many variables. The issue can be resolved for each person only through trial and error. Thus, I think it is best not to anticipate every possibility for future needs. Solutions will become apparent as you progress. For one example of painting on the mask when making difficult selections, see the latest tutorial from InAffinity at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saCIvqBwNMo