cadobir

Hi :)
 
So Im playing around with the new macros feature. Loving it but I have a few things I'd like to request
 
1. Being able to group layers together - and adjust the fill layer of the folder and individual layers
2. Be able to add gradient fill layers that align to the image
3. Add a comment/description/instructions for adjustments somewhere - preferably on a modal popup
 
Thats it so far. Thanks :)

REORDER MACRO STEPS I'm recording a lot of macros, and if I realized I missed a step at the end I have to restart ALL the recording of the macro, instead of doing that step at the end and simply dragging it into its place. Right now I'm having to get things exact on 1 go, if I miss a step, restart the recording....
RECORD MULTIPLE LAYER SELECTIONS I want to record a macro where all the layers of the process are in a single folder, I would like to be able to select all the layers at the end and group them. I know I can do this from the beginning, but (See previous) Dealing with a lot of steps, settings, there is no flexibility on the recording.

1 bit color mode is absolutely essential for line art and certain printing applications.

I work a lot with calligraphy, which I scan from original on paper. The printers will not accept ANYTHING except pdf in bitmap (1-bit) mode. I really want to use Affinity Photo instead of Photoshop, but this is a very important missing piece for me.

Please implement Bitmap colour format (2 Colors) selectable in Dokument-Menue.
One of the few reasons why we still need to use Photoshop.  ;)
Thank you.
 
 

I too have a need for a 1-bit mode, in order to prepare images for letterpress, silkscreen etc. Also, the addition of duotone, tritone and quadtone would be fantastic.

It happens that I work in comics (for an editor).
  And images "lines" are usually in Tiff 1 bit Bitmap. These images must retain that resolution and transparency is managed by the postscript fashion "overprint" ... which is much faster and more respectful of the original color that we place below.   We also have the problem of the Manga that comes Bitmap Tiff 1 bit and that should not change under penalty method to obtain moiré.   Today we are working with Photoshop but I'd like to propose an alternative.

Ok here it is as request :-)
 
1-bit bitmaps are used as line art (printed cartoons, illustrations), in silk screen printing and copydot printing systems. They also can (should) be used in coloured comics, where colour plates are overprinted with 1-bit black key colour. Possibly there are other technical purposes also (please list them in this thread!) There is not many apps that support 1-bit but for these uses 1-bit is crucial. 1-bit ensures that black image is NOT rasterized, resulting fuzzy outlines.
 
Technically 1-bit colour space should be easy feat. You can convert greyscale image to 2 tones (b & w) by thresholding image where light areas convert to white and darker to black.
 
Threshold should be adjustable so you can select how black or how white image is. (Scanners can scan directly to 1-bit but I think it is much better scan to greyscale and set the threshold manually.)
 
Alternative to thresholding is dithered image – that is, using something like grain mask or stochastic raster or Atkinson dithering to build the greytones. I am not sure that is so much needed as it is just a special effect (imho). Besides, there is excellent HyperDither app available.
 
There are some angles that are worth considering. Colour images are best at about 300 dpi when printed. 1-bit images display jaggies in that low resolution, optimum res is 1200-2400 dpi. Ideally 1-bit pixels would map 1-1 to device pixels but above 1200 dpi that is academic.
 
Details are not needed in that high resolution range, meaning that true 1 pixel resolution is not needed. Resolution is needed for avoiding jaggies, making lines and shapes smooth and clean. That also means that you can upsample image to smooth jaggies out. It is perfectly ok (even when not really hi-fi) to take 300 dpi greyscale image upsample it to 1200 and convert to 1-bit. In photoshop you can upsample in convert dialog (doing 300>1200 AND 8-bit to 1-bit) but I think Photoshop did it wrong and resulted jaggies. I do not know if they have corrected that bug (I use PS CS5). I hope AP would upsample and convert at one go and do it right.
 
There are some massage you can do to makes 1-bit appearance better. You can play with local contrast to make darker parts lighter so there will be more meaningful black and white areas in image. You can do it manually, or you can use filter (I think high-pass filter is used here?) I am hoping Affinity team would find some quick and easy slider here to apply in convert dialog to reveal more detail in final 1-bit image.
 
Tools: there is not much need for any special tools. (Or is there?) You can paint pixels black or white and that is it.
 
One simple effect/usage mentioned also in Affinity forum is that 1-bit image is placed in page layout app and coloured with front and back colour tools.
 
Last, you might want to consider comix artists' work flow. Old school draw black&white, scan b&w original (1200 dpi) and hand a copy to colour artist for colouring. Colouring is done to separate layer (well, sometimes physical "layer" with brush and paint). Coloured version is set in place in page layout and higher res lineart version is set in register with it and overprinted. Should colour image be CMYK? Or would it better be CMY, resulting brighter colours and less ink coverage, considering there is still black key 1200 dpi image being overprinted? How do you do CMY separation? Also, there are artists that draw with colours so that final artwork is coloured physical art board, and the either take the easy way out and do normal 300 dpi art production, OR filter out the 1200 dpi black key from full colour scanned original (not easy process..). Possibly Affinity can troubleshoot this process to simple and easy colour sep system for comix artists.

Hi Clyde,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
Affinity Designer doesn't support bitmap mode (1-bit).
I'm moving this thread to the Feature Requests section.

Seems AP cannot handle 1-bit art. I am writing a feature request about it.
 
Meanwhile I guess it is Photoshop or possibly Photoline which can use 1-bit colourspace.
 
Why do you resample copydots? Target device resolution differs from original? I expect there will be problems just like moire.

Hello,
I can not find a Bitmap mode in 1-bit Photo Affinity off I need to process files that keeps strictly their mode and their resolution.
This is copydot files and it is important that it be treated as such.

It is provided a 1-bit Mode?

If that were the case , it might be interesting to have a true improvement over Photoshop that generates moiré patterns when you want the resample .
 
 
 
(This messages was à Google Translate).
 
 
 
 
Clyde

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/23232-1bit-bitmap-mode-colour-format/?p=109296
indeed needed

Has there been discussion/progress on implementing simple 1 Bit color mode for graphics within Photo? For now, pretty much have to stick with PS in order to convert my art to this mode, as of the latest version of Photo, I'm still quite shocked this is still missing, particularly for when Publisher comes out, using these graphics for certain kinds of graphics are smaller (low memory resource) and great for colorizing the graphic within the page-layout app itself as InDesign and Quark have had for years.
 
Thank you

I'm looking for filters in AP that serve the same function as Photoshop's Maximum and Minimum filters. (Photoshop:: Filter : Other : Maximum, e.g.) One way I use these filters is to refine selection masks by expanding the black or white area of the mask. This also works to thin or thicken lines in line art. I see that AP has Minimum Blur and Maximum Blur, but those are not the same thing. Does anyone know what I mean, and where to look for it if it exists in AP? Or perhaps whether it's an upcoming feature?

OK, I just ran a quick test. In AP, if you choose File > Acquire Image, it will apparently invoke Apple's Image Capture by default. I believe that Image Capture will recognize slide scanners, but have not tested it for that. Image Capture is sort of crude, but if you have nothing else, it will do. For any other scanning software, you may have to install a plugin and show Affinity Photo where to find it. I'm sure the AP moderators can comment about this.
 
Based on years of experience scanning, retouching, and so on, I find that there's no particular advantage in scanning "directly into" an image editing program. I just scan images with the scanner software I prefer (currently Image Capture for line art and VueScan for color). When I need to open the files, I either double click them, drag them onto AP (or some other image editor), or right click and choose from "Open With...". It's not hard. 
 
I would suggest scanning conservatively - don't push the contrast, and try not to allow details to get lost in bright or dark areas. You'll adjust everything in your image editor of choice later. Hope this helps!

As there is no way to start a new topic in news and information I am posting this to say congratulations to Affinity for this amazing award, Read about it on the blog as this is a very important award in the UK.
 
"The team at Affinity are delighted that Affinity Photo has won an amazing award, Best Imaging Software in 2016, as recognised by TIPA, the Technical Image Press Association."
 
My feature request is to start a topic to keep us informed of your successes please.

Hi!
 
Today icon fonts are a de-facto in UI design and there are tons of libraries available.
It would be very useful to have a glyph palette or studio to list them all for quick&dirty usage in projects. 
 
Just a simple grid should work.
Pick or double click to insert them in a text object.
 
I know you love to do things "the very Serif way" so candies such as CSS escape code or hex code label for each character should be a well praised feature!  :)
 
Cheers!

Just want to support this idea. Glyphs palette is necessity. Not just because of the icon fonts. Every serious (professional) designer needs full control on all the glyphs in any font.

Hi Darren,
 
Welcome to the forums.
 
In Bridge you can select an image and open in Affinity Photo, however if you use Adobe RAW to make any adjustments first, these won't be carried over on the image that Affinity opens. We're planning to release our own Digital Asset Manager application to work with our apps sometime in the future.
 
Regards
 
L

I'm pretty sure, based on years of experience, that spotting dust and scratches remains a largely manual task. Filters such as "Dust and Scratches" introduce artifacts. Some times you can select dust by color range and run a filter; sometimes you can lift an area of the image to a new layer, set it to Darken or Lighten and move it to cover dust and scratches.
 
Now for the other aspects of restoration, you want to find and correct your black, white and gamma points; fine-tune color and contrast; retouch damaged or missing image areas; introduce clarity, and sharpen. Shadow-Highlight is very useful.

I have no experience with this but I would think using a camera instead of a good film scanner would be undesirable, at least for color negatives (or slides) because:
 
1) The camera could introduce parallax/perspective errors unless a long lens was used & care was taken so that the film & camera sensor planes were normal to each other (no relative tilt) & 
2) The color source illuminating the negative could introduce color shifts if it was not a full spectrum (black body radiator) white light.
 
Of course, whatever image capture method used, safely removing as much dust from the negatives prior to capture is always helpful, so the old school white cotton gloves, blower brush or canned air routine can't hurt, right?

I started with Pagemaker years ago and switched to Quark XPress.  I've published three books in Quark XPress and more newsletters and booklets, etc than I can count.  I presently have two Website and act as a consultant on two more.  I have books published in hard copy, e-pub, and pdf.
 
What I would like to have is a page layout program that I can teach to other people that do the same sort of things.  Right now Quark XPress is way too complicated and InDesign is way too expensive.  Mac killed off Pages when they went to the IOS version.  
 
I'll look forward to Affinity Publisher and will participate in the beta version.  I have done a lot of beta testing of Mac programs in the past and used to be a certified Mac developer years ago.

Just to set the scene. I am an academic publisher.
 
I have a dream... As a starting point assume that each project will be based on 4 or more crappy word files from author who do not have the faintest idea of how to properly use styles or formatting, with documents which have been copied and reused since the days of Word Perfect containing tens upon tens of unused or duplicate styles. If you can import all files and easily format the body text and the footnotes/endnotes to your own specifications you'll have a winner. Currently this is way too complicated and buggy in InDesign and Quark with multiple nested styles. I am currently working on a book built up of 8 Word files, written by someone who is no good with computers (if authors knew how to properly format and publish a book then there would be no need for publishers) containing about 1000 footnotes. It seems to me that Adobe and Quark assume that each book is created by importing flawless and properly formatted Word documents which leads me to think that none of the people who are responsible for creating the applications actually use it in real world publishing.
 
I would gladly be an alfa/beta tester if it means having any say in the way Publisher handles importing Word files (which like it or not is what 99% of all authors use).
 
I'd throw away Adobe and Quark in a heartbeat. I already have Designer and Photo and would be happy to include Publisher on that list.
 
Best regards
 
Geir Rosset
Novus Press
Oslo
Norway

If you make the inner and outer radii 0 then you will essentially just have lines. And trying to boolean with lines isn't supported yet. (you may get some result, but most likely a weird one)
Technically, you will have two lines right on top of each other for each arm.....still, boolean can't handle it. There is no real volume for boolean to work. That's my theory anyway.
 
 
The star method will work though if you type in a super small value.
I used .0001. (When I hit return the value in the window said zero but there really is some thickness there .... try it).
 
So I put in a value of .0001% for both inner and outer. Used boolean subtract, and then boolean divide.
The one caveat is that there will be a teeny tiny separation between sections. (...that can be compensated for with a stroke.)
 
Edit 1: Oh yeah.... I think it's also important to have the star points end beyond the outer rim of the donut. Just to make sure the cut is complete. If you snap to the exact donut size, you might get some ugly artifacts.
 
Edit 2: Oh yeah again.... there's also a Donut tool is the shapes list, so you don't have to make your own. :)

OK, I just ran a quick test. In AP, if you choose File > Acquire Image, it will apparently invoke Apple's Image Capture by default. I believe that Image Capture will recognize slide scanners, but have not tested it for that. Image Capture is sort of crude, but if you have nothing else, it will do. For any other scanning software, you may have to install a plugin and show Affinity Photo where to find it. I'm sure the AP moderators can comment about this.
 
Based on years of experience scanning, retouching, and so on, I find that there's no particular advantage in scanning "directly into" an image editing program. I just scan images with the scanner software I prefer (currently Image Capture for line art and VueScan for color). When I need to open the files, I either double click them, drag them onto AP (or some other image editor), or right click and choose from "Open With...". It's not hard. 
 
I would suggest scanning conservatively - don't push the contrast, and try not to allow details to get lost in bright or dark areas. You'll adjust everything in your image editor of choice later. Hope this helps!