Bartelmy

A thumbnail manager is, in effect, a digital photograph album. It collects all the available images into one place and presents them tidily and visibly using thumbnails of a size chosen by the user: this is much better than the miserable, slow, clunky options available through the Windows Explorer. The thumbnail viewer will often offer a window in which to preview images and some basic image manipulation routines - eg colour temperature, rotation and simple effects such as 'oil paint'.This facility is very useful to obtain a sense of what needs to be done before passing an image to Photo to be adjusted in detail. It is essential for such a program to work efficiently with both dng and webp formats - so many programs struggle with one or both of these. I have used FastStone for years to accomplish these tasks but it struggles with webp; it would be good to have this facility within the Affinity suite so as to have a simplified work flow in which the different parts speak natively to each other. Bart

Many thanks - this works fine. Bart

I currently use two external thumbnail managers (one is better with dng format and the other is better with webp format) but it would be very helpful if Affinity could build a thumbnail manager to work with Photo 2. One of my current thumbnail managers uses an intermediate Windows facility to get hold of webp files: this is slow and bumpy so, ideally, any Affinity thumbnail manager would work natively with webp format as well as dng format. Thanks. Bart.

Thanks. Unfortunately (as others have noted) this path is flagged as inaccessible when I attempt to locate it in my thumbnail viewer. I have to say that this does seem to be a strange limitation in what I have purchased as an upgrade from version 1...I hope that the path to the various exe files can be made available in a future maintenance release.

My thumbnail manager for images (FastStone) will automatically send an image to Photo provided that I know the path to the exe file. For Photo 1, this was easy enough. However, I am struggling to find a usable path for Photo 2 (and Publisher 2 for that matter). When I track through the file system from the User folder on the C: drive, I eventually hit a dead end because an accessible path appears to be unavailable. Can someone enlighted me on this - otherwise I have to keep using copy and paste to get images into Photo 2 - or use File, Open. I agree that this is not a huge problem but it is an inconvenience. Thanks. Chris Smith

I agree - I can think of no other plausible explanation. However, it still leaves me with the problem of matching screen white to media white! That said, the soft proofing is close enough that I can live with the differences.

I no longer use the profile and do not have a record of the precise values I was using. However, I always use normal sRGB settings as the device profile (generally sRGB IEC61996-2.1 with the WCS profile for sRGB conditions). I use Relative Colorimetric as my default rendering intent and set all proofing choices to paper/media colour. The difference here was small but significant: I used sRGB with with display hardware configuration and used the Windows calibration tool to tweak one value: I reduced slightly the setting for the weakest grey value shown in the colour chart. This was an attempt to get screen white closer to paper white since I am finding that the white of the card I use is slightly different from the white of the screen, and this is affecting perceptual output when I invoke soft proofing: the screen value is just sufficiently different from the output to create frustration. When I ditched the screen calibration and went back to the simple values outlined above, the crawling stopped immediately in both Photo and Publisher - all loading times are normal again. This might be a peculiarity of my rather elderly and strange graphics card - supposedly a Radeon RX 580 but, in fact, the AMD drivers are hopeless for this card and Windows has automatically loaded the drivers for the Radeon RX 480, with a manufacturer update for this card (the update has worked). If RX 580 drivers are used, the mouse jumps around with a life of its own - the computer becomes unusable. Sorry if this is not very helpful but it is the best I can do - and I assure you that the problem emerged only with calibration and disappeared when calibration was ditched (I have not tried again since changing to the 480 drivers). Bart

Updates: 1 - I inadvertently posted my original observation in the Designer forum - I meant to put it in the Publisher forum (sorry). 2 - I seem to have fixed the issue in both Photo and Publisher: I had calibrated my screen using the normal Windows 10 tool and, in the process, had made small changes by weakening the lightest grey value shown on the screen. This improved what I was seeing (to my eyes) but I think that the Affinity programs were struggling to process the calibration settings because, having reverted to standard SRGB settings as my screen default (as opposed to SRGB with calibration), everything has re-normalised - load times have improved considerably. I am relieved to have removed the crawl when opening files but it is a pity that using screen calibration seems to have unwanted effects - it makes it harder for me to get soft proof settings to generate reliable output simulations for my printers since screen white and paper/card white are more different than they were with the calibration. Bart

I reported this the other day - it applies equally to Publisher - and has been occurring only for the last few days. Loading of a photo from Faststone (my default image management program) has slowed to a crawl: the container window for Photo opens soon enough but then everything goes to sleep. After a while, the title bar shows the message that Photo has crashed as in the image below. If I click in the empty window, Photo eventually loads up - though very slowly. This is weird - but, more to the point, both Photo and Publisher have become a real pain to get started. As usual, I point the finger at some recent 'improvement' supplied by Microsoft - but freely admit that I really don't know. I should emphasise that both programs have been running well on my Windows 10 setup until the last few days. Bart

I am running Windows 10 Home, version 1909, patched up to date (OS build 18363.1139). Over the last couple of days, the open times for both Photo and Publisher have slowed to a crawl. Other programs are opening at their normal speed. I have run the fixing option from the instal exe file but this has made no difference. I have 16 GB RAM and an 8-core AMD Ryzen cpu + a rather mediocre AMD graphics card - but this combination has run both Photo and Publisher well until very recently. For reasons that escape me, Windows has recently stabilised my graphics card by loading a Radeon RX480 driver even though I have a Radeon RX580 graphics card - any attempt to load AMD's own signed driver is doomed to disaster since, inter alia, it messes up the mouse - I have to stick with whatever Microsoft decides is right for my system. I don't know if Photo and Publisher have a problem but I thought that I should report the issue. Any thoughts received gratefully.

Thanks for this - weirdly, I had forgotten about it. I am making the adjustments you suggest - and am working on rgb-cmyk background conversions of my images to see how this helps.

Thanks - but the colour profile for the document was the same as the program default - that is, the same as in the screenshot I supplied. I did some test prints yesterday, and they are as disappointing as I feared: sharp and well saturated screen images printed dull and rather washed out. Interestingly, the output improves (though not to the level I require) if I set the printer to manage colour output (as opposed to leaving this to Publisher). It's almost as if Publisher is using the wrong lookup table to populate the parameters for colour values (I am betraying my background in relational databasing where tying functions to the wrong lookup table necessarily results in wrong values being passed to a parameter). If I set the rgb colour parameter to the correct paper type (Epson Presentation matte), the screen colours become very dark and, as I mentioned, I cannot edit them...In PagePlus the effect of setting this value is much gentler (and more accurate) - and the image can be tweaked from within the program. In brief, in PagePlus what I see is what I get. Crucially, the printed image is almost indistinguishable from the screen image - setting the paper type to determine screen representation of the colour model is the best solution (for me). Like many PagePlus users, I am waiting for the day when a Windows 'upgrade' renders the program finally unusable but, until that day happens, PagePlus is more useful than Affinity Publisher in certain respects (though I freely admit that I know PagePlus much better than I know Publisher - my ignorance could well be the real problem - please correct me!). I will persevere with Affinity Publisher because I know that I must - but it is rather dispiriting when hard work will not print accurately and when in-program image-tweaking is imossible. Bart

Apologies - I have placed this in the Beta forum - but it is probably still valid. I have set Publisher and Photo to identical values for colour management; as in this screenshot: This is the same as my default monitor profile. However, when I place a photo in Publisher (making cards) the image is much duller than the same image when it opens in Photo: the images have been pre-edited in Photo and then saved - so it is the Photo version of the image that I am placing in Publisher. I cannot pass the placed image back to Photo for tweaking (the facility is offered but does not yet work) - and if I simply use copy and paste, the same problem occurs (essentially, colour temperature, saturation and sharpening level are not the same when viewing the same image in the two programs). I have managed to tweak output colour profiles so that the screen image is close to the printer image but I would like Publisher and Photo to display the same image identically. As you can see, I am no expert on colour management - I feel that I am rather blundering around. Any help gratefully received. Bart

Publisher is not saving my assigned colour profiles unless I change the default from within 'Preferences'; that is, if I assign a colour profile from the Document Setup tab, it holds it only while the document is open in the current session: if I save and close then, next time, it reassigns the default colour profile. It would be easier if it simply held on to assigned profiles. Bart

Thanks I posted this as a bug only on the grounds that it might be: I have had a few incidents after Microsoft's upgrades to Windows 10 (perhaps 'upgrades' belongs in inverted commas) - drivers breaking, folders going missing, programs not saving etc. So it may be that this unpredictable crashing is related to Windows rather than to Affinity Photo. If it happens again, I will try and rescue as much info as possible and report back. It would not surprise me in the least to find that the real culprit is my graphics driver - AMD are pretty good with driver updates but do tend to release them rather slowly. I will report the crash to Microsoft as part of my normal feedback to them. Bart