Stokestack

It's used interchangeably with "skew." No reason to belabor it. I've seen "skew" far more often in graphics applications, and the lack of a reference to it in Designer has clearly caused aggravation. Affinity will at least fix the documentation or they won't.

As it turns out, yes. "Force pixel alignment" appears to be on by default; or at least it is on my system for all new documents. Even if it hadn't started out that way, after a merge it would be aligned with the pixel grid, would it not? Therefore, further down-merges (without moving the underlying layer) would not continue to degrade it. But they do. I've provided a document that demonstrates the problem, created in a very simple and commonplace sequence of steps. I don't see any point in nancing around creating a document just-so, in order to see if the problem doesn't happen then. That doesn't help anyway, because this application would still be degrading our work with no warning in an unknown variety of use cases. Thanks for your reply.

You have to be kidding.

Thanks for the reply. Your hypothesis doesn't turn out to be true. I deleted one layer, leaving a single-layer document. I then copied a small rectangular region of that layer, pasted it, and merged down. The entire document blurred. People are unknowingly degrading their images further and further in the process of doing operations that should be non-destructive to any pixels outside the domain of definition for them. Things shouldn't even be blurred within the DOD, let alone thousands of pixels away.

Thanks, but that doesn't make sense. The underlying image doesn't move and doesn't change its DPI. Pasting a tiny patch over 100 square pixels in the corner of a 4K image should not blur the entire thing. And it certainly shouldn't blur the entire image more and more with every paste and merge, since (based on your comment) the image will be "pixel-aligned" after the first merge and shouldn't require it again. I don't know where you're seeing the DPI of a layer, but they were both captured from the same screen region and I don't think they were resized. So their DPI should be identical. Also, if this shifting and blurring were necessary, it would occur when you exported a flattened image as well. But it doesn't. And finally: I've never had this problem in Photoshop.

Exactly. A typical use case would be: 1. You want to take a screen shot of a computer UI to use it in an existing composition. But it's too tall to fit on the screen at once, so you have to take one screen shot, scroll down, and take another. 2. You open, copy, and paste (or just place) one of the partial screen shots into your composition. 3. You open the other partial screen shot, paste it into your composition and align it with the first to complete the UI, and merge it down onto the first. Now you have a complete image of the UI as one layer, to be moved and resized freely in your composition. There are many, many other situations where I want to paste some small image fragment over a layer and then merge it down onto that layer once it's positioned correctly. I'm surprised that people have been laboring without realizing they could do this with Merge Down.

I don't feel like rasterizing the numerous text layers I typically have, so no... it's not. Not having "merge down" also means you can't incrementally build areas (of pasted-together patches, for example) and then consolidate them when you're happy with them, before moving on to the next area.

I don't know; didn't try that. That wouldn't really be a workaround though.

Interestingly, if you never merge anything in Photo and then export directly, the exported file does not appear to be blurred. But if you merge any layers while working, even a little pasted-in patch, you permanently degrade the entire composition. So... I would still say Photo is unusable at the moment.

I was copying & pasting some patches onto an image and noticed that it had gotten very blurry. So I started undoing each paste and merge-down, and watched the document gradually become un-blurred. There's something very wrong with Photo's layer-merge operation. I had cropped sections from two screen shots and pasted them side-by-side into a document. Merging these two non-overlapping layers blurred both of them. Thus I don't see how Photo is currently usable, since any export to a standard format requires merging layers. I have attached the original document, before/after stills of the blurring, and a screen grab of it happening in Photo 1.9.3 under Mac OS 11.2.3. mergeDegrades.mov MergeDegrades.afphoto

Which would be the same place that I would chuck them if a woodchuck could chuck wood. SOOO HELPFUL! There's no "manual download" option offered. Meanwhile, the UI incorrectly shows that the entire category of items is installed. Obscurity FTW!

I installed the free brushes and whatnot that come with the new versions of Photo and Designer, but I can't find where they went on the computer (Mac). Where is this stuff stored? I also found that "download all" doesn't work. If you expand each item, you'll find that numerous things weren't downloaded. If you click on the cryptic triangle on the right of one of them, it takes you to a Web page to manually download things.

Two years later and still not fixed. To say "disappointing" would imply that we expected a better outcome...

Three years later, and this common function is still not available. The logic to implement it obviously exists, since the paste-to-new-document workaround apparently does. Incredible.

This "rule" is opaque to the user. I didn't define it, and every other piece of software seems to be able to perform the operation as expected.

Both Draw and Sound Forge, two of my favorite Windows apps, have had a few attempts at Mac versions over a long, long period. They were disastrous in both products' cases and quickly abandoned.

Not surprised. I'm downloading the trial Mac version of Corel Draw right now. Their attempts at a Mac version have historically been rendered unusable by bugs, but we'll see about this 2020 one...

Thanks. Hopefully Affinity can get this fixed. Pretty sure nobody's holding his breath at this point, though.

Here's an SVG. Works fine in Sketch, not Designer. subtracTest.svg

Not that I know of...

Thanks for that. I'm a big fan of Corel Draw, and hater of Illustrator. Before Designer, I'd run Windows in a VM just to run Draw. Sadly, the more I use Designer, the more disappointed I am in it. It's crippled by defects in so many essential functions, and the UI.

Thanks. I have wondered how apps make the fill decisions when shapes have outlines that that cross themselves... but I think we agree that we shouldn't have to wonder about it when they don't.

Well, thanks for all that elucidation, people! This shape was loaded as an SVG, so the importation guess was right. I still think the dysfunction exhibited here is ridiculous, since I was able to load the same image in Sketch and it somehow managed to do the expected thing instantly.

Thanks a lot for the info. That's disappointing. I don't know what the priorities are for the dev team, when so many fundamental functions don't work. You can't reliably combine shapes or do boolean operations, in addition to baffling UI-design mistakes... I'm pretty fed up with it.

Thanks! That worked. I thought I had the relevant snapping mode turned on, but it turns out I had the next one on (snap to geometry of selected curves). Once again, we see controls for one function scattered through at least two UI areas, one of which isn't always visible...