Richard Liu

Hi, Regarding those older tutorials: Could you please provide a link to those older tutorials? I find myself searching for particular ones, e.g. making rock "glow", or selecting the sky behind the branches and leaves of a tree, etc. I notice that, in contrast to the older ones, the new tutorials seem to take a "here's a feature of Affinity Photo and here's what you might want to use it for" (as opposed to "here's what you might want to do with programs like Affinity Photo and here's how you can do it") approach. It's quite aggravating to remember some key frames of the video in question, but for lack of knowledge about the adjustment layers or (live) filters involved, not know where one might find the technique described in the new videos. I understand that new users might find the organization of the new tutorials better for learning Affinity Photo, and that the older tutorials will contain details that have to be adapted to newer versions of the product, but surely there must be a middle ground, e.g., cross-referencing the titles of both sorts of tutorials.

@Boldlinedesign Why not keep the old Mac just for running things that don't have updates to Big Sur/M1, and get an M1-Mac for running everything else?

Here is what Thom Hogan (ByThom.com) had to say:

@Patrick Connor Are there any new features or bug fixes in AFP 1.8.6 compared to the previous release for macOS? I miss the usual list.

Aren't there also only very few NIK plugins, even in version 2, that support 32-bit processing?

It seems that the Mac App Store is offering the 1.8.2 update. I assume that the usual blurbs describing the changes since the last update will appear here shortly.

Is 2.31 by any chance this: https://nikcollection.dxo.com/what-s-new/ ? I don't know why DXO is so coy about revealing version numbers.

@Patrick Connor, When can we expect a 1.8 Beta for macOS?

Walt, Interesting. I'll have to try this. Do you know whether this works with live filters? I sometimes feel that I don't want to sharpen the background as much as the foreground.

Seriously, I hope none. I do not have Affinity Publisher, but I do rely heavily on Affinity Photo. I am dismayed at how long some features remain broken, while others seem trapped in a cycle of breaking, being fixed, then regressing. A long thread about compatibility with Apple Photos is an example of the former. And it is still not possible to print directly (i. e., without merging layers or exporting to another format ... except PDF) an .afphoto that uses live filters. In my experience as a software developer for a major Swiss bank and a large Swiss pharmaceutical company, it is sometimes necessary to put new software and new features on the back burner in order to fix the foundations of existing products. This would be a good time to do so.

Just taking a really, really wild guess here, because I use Affinity Photo but not Affinity Publisher. In Affinity Photo there is a really bad bug that affects printing and exporting to PDF. Live filter layers -- I don't even know whether such things exist in Affinity Publisher -- are not being rendered. So, depending on what live filter layers I use and the blend modes that I use with them, the first thing that I will notice, say, in a print, is a difference between the colors displayed on the monitor and those of the print. Exporting to JPEG and TIFF are not affected, but exporting to PDF is.

If I recall correctly, the cloning tool operates differently. Even though one could argue that, by its very nature, a source must be selected, it does not just select, say, the upper right or left corner of the image, depending on the side of the road on which drivers of the locale configured in the OS drive. If one attempts to click somewhere on the image without having used Option-Click to set a source, a very prominent warning from the Cloning Brush appears in the top right corner of the screen in addition to the still visible discrete prompt in the lower left corner. There is nothing inherently "right" about selecting white; it would be "righter" to select the color of the color picker if one must be selected by default. I wouldn't be making such a mountain out of this mole hill if it weren't for the fact that the behavior and even the wording in the Select drop down are so misleading that I spent lots of time trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. After all, although the "..." in "Select Sampled Color..." indicates that I might have to do something after clicking the item, a selection immediately appeared, the Deselect did not work, and "Sampled" is, after all, past tense, so, I thought, perhaps I must first sample the color.

Thanks. I had tried that initially, but noticed that, even before I had clicked on anything in the selected layer, a selection was already being displayed ("marching ants"). Clicking the Deselect icon didn't clear it; on the contrary, the program seemed to be cycling through selections. I decided then that I was doing something wrong. Now I see that, if I click anyway, it clears the selection and selects areas of the same color as the point on which I clicked. Why is it displaying a selection even before I click anywhere on the image? I spent most of my energy trying to clear that stupid selection. Why do I not have full functionality of the color picker when selecting the color? Surely this isn't the point of having a color picker. The "Select Sampled Color ..." dialog should preselect the color picker, just as other dialogs (in Develop) select the gradient tool or the paint brush. A prompt to drag it over a point of the desired color and click would also be helpful.

Here's a Quicktime screen recording using the beta: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1B_KnZ6GP5HroqGMpWR_FxAuS1Hjzsj-N Doesn't crash, just doesn't do what I expected. I use the color picker to pick one pixel of a bluish color, as evidenced by the color picker in the Color panel. When I Select Sampled Color Affinity Photo Beta selects what looks like shades of white or grey, but nothing around the selection point. Even with a tolerance of zero I would have expected that at least the point at which the color picker was clicked appear in the selection. Let me digress here for a moment. In the past few days I've been under pressure to develop and edit some photos. In my opinion, I'm not doing anything that should challenge Affinity Photo's capabilities, and I don't think I'm using any features that weren't already present in version 1.6. Yet time and again operations have failed to work in, or even crashed, 1.7.1. And I waste a lot of time ... using the production version. If something fails to work that I have never tried before -- Affinity Photo is the first such program that I have ever used, and I've been using it for less than one year -- I initially assume that I am to blame, i. e., that the feature does not work the way I expect. I waste a lot of time trying to get something to work that, finally I conclude, is broken, or at least worth posting in the Affinity forums. In more obvious cases I don't waste a lot of time concluding that something is broken. I waste it instead finding a solution, preferable a work around in 1.7.1, but as a last resort using the current beta. I don't mind contributing my time to testing betas when have the time. But I have the impression that things are broken in 1.7.1 that were not broken in 1.6, meaning that there isn't really a reliable fallback when I'm under pressure. I understand the special challenges that the Affinity products face, particular on Apple platforms. Apple, it seems, is always diddling with the graphics in their devices, and things that used to work in one version of macOS don't in another, or, sometimes do, only differently. So, whereas a developer might decide only support the latest major version of macOS, a user, for the same reason, might decide to delay adopting it. Metal, though supported in macOS 10.13 and 10.14, seems to be the cause of some problems in 1.7. And then there are the usual requests for improving how some layers work. Even assuming you agree, how should that be done while retaining compatibility with previous versions of the layer? Nobody is going to thank you when he/she opens a favorite .afphoto file to find that the document look quite different, and then has to hunt down the layers responsible for the new look and tinker with their controls. Nevertheless, I would urge you to consider not implementing any new features in 1.8 but instead increasing stability, speed, and generally getting things like printing to work as well as they should. I believe Apple did something similar with Snow Leopard.

Yes, 2018 MacBook Pro 15“.

I was just going to send this: "No, sorry, I just tried on a document that I happen to have open. I could not reproduce the crash." Then I decided to sample a 17 x 17 px patch, and it promptly crashed when Select Sampled Color... . Then I opened a document that I had previously saved (i. e., it isn't new) consisting of a single Background pixel layer and performed the same experiment. Affinity Photo did not crash.

Simple question, but very difficult to find a thread devoted to this topic, given the various versions of the Nik plugins in use and the various versions of Affinity Photo in use. Does the current version of the Nik plugins available from DxO (Nik Collection 2) work on the current production version of Affinity Photo or on the current beta.?

Thanks. That works. Pity having to jump through hoops just to find out whether one's question has already been answered before posting a new topic.

The point I'm trying to make is slightly different. I'm used to looking in the forums for answers to my problems before posting. The searching facilities are ... extremely modest, so that pretty much defeats my search strategy of beginning very specifically and dropping terms as necessary until I find something pertinent. So the alternative would be a more general search in more specific forums.

Thanks. I suspected as much. My enthusiasm for Affinity Photo is waning and deeper I wade into it. It's these kinds of inconsistencies that should not exist when a product is new (as opposed to the Adobe stuff) and has the benefit of having recently been designed from the ground up.

I have created a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer and painted over the layer with the gradient tool. Sometime later I want to adjust the gradient. I can find no way to do so. Clicking on the layer in question and then on the gradient tool displays no handles, and clicking with the gradient tool in the document (image) lays down a new gradient. I have tried doing the same thing by creating a mask as a child layer of the Brightness/Contrast layer, then clicking the mask and creating a gradient in it with the gradient tool. I find no way to adjust the gradient on the mask, only to lay down a new one. I just cannot believe that this is not possible and/or not straight forward. Although quite satisfied with @James Ritson's tutorials, https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/tutorials/photo/desktop/video/296616219/ , second use of gradient tool, begs the question, how one edits the gradient on the blur filter when one later wants to change it, especially since, in the first example (atmospheric haze), James makes a point of extolling the advantage of being able to go back and adjust the gradient.

The category "Affinity on Desktop Questions (Mac and Windows) is frustratingly broad. Consequently, I neither search in it nor tend to post on it. There should be a sub-forum for each combination of OS and Affinity product.

I used the color picker to sample a small patch (17 x 17) of grass, then did a Select Sampled Color..., then clicked Cancel. Here are the crash reports. Affinity Photo_2019-08-08-125016_RRL-MacBookPro15.crash Affinity Photo_2019-08-08-125120_RRL-MacBookPro15.crash Affinity Photo_2019-08-08-125933_RRL-MacBookPro15.crash I canceled because the selected stuff was not the color I had sampled.

Thanks. I'm trying real hard to give public access to the .afphoto's of original and cropped versions of both these images in order to allow people to "play around" with them, but I'm running into the problem of limited space. They are 420.5, 417.8, 315.3 and 314.9 MB. I can upload them to Dropbox, but I seem unable to share just a plain link to them. Dropbox insists on sending an email invitation. When I send one to myself, then click the "View file" button, Dropbox tries to display the file. This is getting to be a real pain. It seems that I can only share links in Dropbox Professional, and I am disinclined to upgrade. Where can I upload these files? >>> Here's a link to a .zip file on Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bOasvxCDbrza4_hNk6XffJb7-RJXqhXd/view?usp=sharing The files in it are name as follows: _DSCnnnn_AFP32.afphoto and _DSCnnn_AFP32_cropped.afphoto, where nnnn = 2082 or 2093. Before cropping _DSCnnnn_AFP32.afphoto, I made a snapshot and saved the file. Then I cropped (fixed ratio 1:1 from upper left corner) and saved it as _DSCnnn_AFP32_cropped.afphoto. When I open the cropped file and immediately restore the snapshot, the image is much, much darker. So I undo the restore and attempt to restore the uncrossed image with Document | Unclip canvas. For nnnn = 2082 this results in the original image displayed with what seems to be a border, 168 px wide. For nnnn = 2093, the border is only 1 px wide. The original image is 5600 px x 3728 px. I have no idea why the two crops unclip canvas so differently. I am using Affinity Photo 1.7.1 on a 2018 MacBook Pro 15" running macOS 10.13.6 with all the latest Apple updates.

I even tried saving a snapshot before cropping -- I usually do that last in my workflow -- and saving the cropped image as an .afphoto, but restoring the snapshot immediately after opening that .afphoto does not restore the document as it was before cropping. For one thing, it's much too dark. I think I'll report this as a bug, seeing as how doing the same thing with a variant of the RAW image processed in the workflow described above, i. e., snapshot - crop - unclip canvas, seemed at first glance to reproduced the original uncropped image. Actually, each dimension had 2 px too many, i. e., 1 px on each of four sides, as opposed to this RAW file, which, when I unclip canvas, has 168 px too many on each side.