4dimage

This tool is pretty neat. Looking forward to when it supports filling open gaps as well for line art that is built around having them.
Also, once Affinity has a raster-to-vector workflow, we should then be able to vector fill even raster artwork. Tons of potential.

I prefer not to have unrealistic expectations based on new features. However, the ability to manipulate fills in vectors like this one makes me feel ecstatic and reminds me of my childhood. I am already envisioning the endless possibilities that we can achieve using this feature alone!

Hi All,
We are pleased to make available the next update to the 2.1 beta (2.1.0.1736). This will be available for you shortly on auto-update. Below are some of the main changes in this update...
WebP and JPEG XL now available in batch export
As has been commonly requested since adding these new formats to V2, we have now made them available as batch format options in Affinity Photo.

New left swipe options on iPad layers panel
You can now access lock/unlock, rename layer and change compound type (if layer in question is a compound) by swiping left on a layer as shown below:
RPReplay_Final1680080397.mov
 
Brush panel improvements
Texture brushes in Designer persona can now be viewed in thumbnail view (i.e. you now have ability to uncheck "Show as list") Alt-Click on raster brushes now changes brush while keeping your current brush width as well as ignoring associated tool. If you just want to ignore associated tool then use shift-alt-click Auto-select
With auto select turned off you can now hold cmd (Mac/iPad) / ctrl (Windows) to temporarily turn it back on to make another selection on document.
Also note: We have encountered some problems with auto select being off with multi-page documents. For that reason it is currently disabled with a multi-page doc, we are hoping to have a fix for this soon.
Vector flood fill tool
When your bucket is loaded with a colour / fill you can now just click on any object to fill it even if it is not selected. In this case this will just fill the whole object - if you want the fill tool to take into account intersecting shapes and curves they all need to be pre-selected as before. While in the tool you can now just click on an asset or stock item to load your bucket with that bitmap texture (i.e. without having to drag drop as before). This is currently only implemented on desktop, but will be added to iPad in too in the next update. There are new controls for whether you want to add as an additional fill or replace the current fill. To be honest there is still some outstanding work which needs to be done with this, so we will talk more about this / what the expected behaviour is in the next update. A new option to "fill to visible boundaries". This means if any of the objects in your selection are obscuring any line segments from other objects, these can now optionally be ignored by the tool. In the example below - without the new option checked there are 12 possible areas you can fill to, but now you can alternatively choose to just show the 6 areas on the right. 
Crop tool
Cmd / ctrl / shift constrain modifiers are now available when in unconstrained mode as promised.
Dashed lines
We now accept zero as the 2nd and 3rd dash value to give different options, particularly when in combination with balanced lines. This example was discussed on the thread - the left option begins with a dot and when balanced dots are in the rectangle corners. The right option begins with a dash, but the 2nd "dash" can now be set to a dot (zero value) to enable dashes in the corners in this case.

Pencil double tap option for quick menu
If menu is already visible a second double tap will now dismiss it.
Rename Layers
You can now double click / tap on an artboard name to rename it!
 
Plus as usual lots of bug fixes as listed in the fix list thread!
To comment / give feedback on any of these changes please go to the relevant thread for that feature which is linked to in each of the headings above.

Thanks,
Ash

Hi Tishihtzu,
the tool does not work like the bitmap fill tool by just clicking somewhere in your drawing.
You have to select all lines that are relevant for your area of interest first. Then by hovering with the fill tool over the inner areas you will see some preview outline. This gives a hint, which areas will be detected as "fill zone". When clicking there the fill will finally be executed.
Something like this:

2023-03-24-vetor-fill-demo-001.mp4 By the way, if there is a gap in the group of lines, the tool does not fill the area. All lines have to be either closed or form a closed area by overlaping each other somehow. If you have gaps in your drawing (only visible in the wireframe view mode) that prevent correct filling, you might duplicate your drawing and expand all strokes to areas. Then the chance that all inner areas are enclosed is much higher.

A gap tolerance is on our wish list for this feature, but is unlikely to be available in its first release in 2.1. As you've said expanding strokes can help with some use cases, but isn't the ideal solution for sure.

I gave in and joined the beta to test out the Vector Fill Tool (but also very happy to see Brushes finally have their names displayed underneath AND don't get deselected when I modify them on the go)
So the drawing on the left was made in 2.0 with filled in shapes. For the drawing on the right I started off with vector lineart and then used the Vector Fill Tool with a couple of adjustments.
 

 
 
However, I had to convert the lineart into shapes for the Vector Fill tool to properly work. I later figured out it was because most lines didn't overlap so it didn't identify any space to fill in.
 
Would it be possible to include a tolerance slider for cases where the lines are very close but not quite overlapping? Or is that not possible?

Hi,
i tested the improvements in beta 2.1.0.1730. This tool is getting better and better and now works more like expected👍👍👍👍👍 Thanks 🥰

2023-03-17_beta-2.1.0.1730_vector-fill-test.mp4 Even editable text and shapes and groups are respected. I guess it works best if the area of interest has no shapes in the background, so the flood will be stopped only by the enclosing (open) lines. Otherwise you have to fill the inner areas one by one and combine them at the end with boolean add to get a single shape.
One option i guess will be added in the future would be that the tool also takes in account the thickness of the vector lines. At the moment one has to convert the contours to get an even more complex fill. Would be nice to get this in a single shot without losing the editable bezier lines.
But so far this is really impressive.
By the way 😏 While testing with the grouped lines i thought it would be nice to have some kind of additional boolean montage mode that maintains all open lines (boolean add) but dynamically converts the contours to areas. This would have had the wanted effect in the lower example. But the beziers would still be editable.
At the moment in a montage all open lines are dynamically converted to closed shapes to have only areas in the boolean operations:

Hi All - I'm pleased to say we have now added the ability to create balanced dashed lines and this is available to test in the latest beta. There are more details in the post below and it would be great if you wanted to try it out in the beta and let us know what you think - you can sign up to the beta program here.
 
 

Hi - I'm pleased to say we have now added the ability to create balanced dashed lines and this is available to test in the latest beta. There are more details in the post below and it would be great if you wanted to try it out in the beta and let us know what you think - you can sign up to the beta program here.
 
 

We are pleased to make available the next update to the 2.1 beta (2.1.0.1730) This should now be available for you on auto-update.
Below are some of the main changes:
Dashed line / stroke panel improvements
The big new feature here is that you can now choose to set dashed lines to be "balanced", meaning spacing is automatically adjusted so cusps (e.g. corners of a rectangle) look correct. Additionally available dash lined patterns have been extended to 3 dashes and 3 gaps and there is a new "Clear arrow heads" button.
Running headers
You can now add running headers to your document in Publisher using the new running header field.
Adjusted mask behaviour
From customer feedback the drop down menu when hitting the mask button in layers panel has been removed, and logic for how the assistant determines if a mask should be added as a new layer or a child altered.
Some file management changes to iPad versions
New option to "Find in files" added to document burger menu iPadOS default Photos browser now used when opening a photo. Redesigned Edit menu on iPad
Taking on board various feedback regarding readability and loss of icons for Isometric options
Crop tool 
Problem with the hit area when dragging a corner has been fixed
Auto clean in paint mixer
Setting is now remembered
Special characters view in Designer and Photo
This has now now been added to the iPad versions of Designer and Photo
Additional select options added to iPad shortcuts / quick menu
Select next, previous, top and bottom now available in iPad shortcuts and quick menu
Brush Panel improvements
You can now optionally decide to turn the new auto scroll / switch category functionality when you change brush tool on or off
Auto-select
Auto-select is now it's own checkable toggle separate to the drop down options of selecting group or objects. Position of auto select options has moved to be after any context options based on selection Guides
Mouse wheel / arrow keys can now be used to nudge values that have focus in guides manager. Option to lock margin and spread original values added to guides manager dialog. Vector flood tool
Various changes to behind the scenes logic to try to do a better job at combining fills together.  A new scaling option of "None" when tool has a bitmap or gradient fill. Migrate your release version content to beta
A new option has been added to preferences in the desktop versions where you can transfer any content you have in your retail versions over to the beta versions at anytime.
 
Plus various bug fixes as listed in the fix list thread.
 

I observed a similar behaviour but with Publisher after working some hours on the same open document. In my case it was mostly obvious when open/close the glyph palette multiple times. The app freezed for 5+ seconds then opened the glyph dialog and somehow recovered.
I decided to reduce the undo protocol limit significantly down e.g. to 128. The initial value in all three apps after install is 1024 which (imho) seems to be far to high and may consume a lot of resources over time. But meanwhile could not reproduce the same long running usecase. Maybe (hope) that setting will help in the future...

 

beta 2.1.0.1706
Good so far! Any reason why only the distance tool is available ? Can't find the area tool in Publisher or Photo (as with Designer).

In fact, you could actually convert those Pixels to Embedded documents, and then use 'Make Linked' inside the Resource Manager. That way you won't lose any edits you would have made and then can resample them as you wish. 

I did that to the image on Page 15 (01314.jpg) and the resulting size was a 32.9mb JPG image so that would explain the large size of the document.

To do this
Select the Pixel Layer you want to do Go to Layer > Convert To Image Resource Go to Window > Resource Manager Find the image in the Resource Manager - should be the only one marked as Embedded Click on 'Make Linked' Select the folder you want to save the file into You should now be able to edit, resize or resample this file externally and it will go back to being linked and should bring your file size down.

Contour Tool is your friend…  

Hi, a very welcome feature for sure.

Here is an example of what I was trying to do to get a expected result,

This is a function that we use a lot to fill areas like coloring book.

One of the things that I wish to do, it that the app could generate a shape based on the area selected.

The result that we got on Raster Flood fill in Raster is what it should do I think, but creating a vector shape based on the area selected.

I made a video to test and see the result,



Here is attached the Skull coloring example.
Where I tried to paint the White areas, but it's kind of generating a fill color over the same shape.




 
 
2023-02-15 10-22-42.mp4

Hi, I'll attach a video to show the result,

it doesn't seem to apply correctly, considering the colors of connected shapes.

But I see when the Shape is Empty it works nice,
but when having color actually the Color tolerance doesn't seem to be used.

Is a bug, or am I doing something wrong? 😅
2023-02-17 07-23-43.mp4    

Below is the list of all new features and improvements included in the 2.1 beta. This new functionality is in addition to the many bug fixes and stability improvements in this version (currently 2.1.0.1790).
Depending on how the beta goes / how many issues there are to fix it's possible some more items will be added to this list before 2.1 is officially released - follow this topic if you want to be notified if that happens.

To learn more about these features please click on the link to go to each feature's dedicated post. To give feedback or report bugs against any of these features please reply to that same post (also check out bug reporting and feedback tips).
Features and improvements affecting all platforms
Balanced dashed lines and other stroke improvements (new in build 1730) Running headers in Affinity Publisher (new in build 1730) Show special characters added to Designer and Photo (added to iPad too in 1730) Adjusted Mask Behaviour (new in build 1730) Auto-select options in move tool (new in build 1713/1714) Square bracket stroke width adjustment expanded functionality Blend mode keyboard shortcuts Alt / Option - drag to duplicate in Layers panel Alt / Option click to expand / collapse all in Layers panel Crop tool improvements Auto clean added to paint mixer brush Paste inside picture frame Vector Flood Fill Guides improvements Vector warp nodes now obey snapping Brush panel improvements Raster perspective and mesh warp live filters added to Designer Search bar added to your add-ons (new in build 1713/1714) Analytics Windows and macOS features and improvements
WebP and JPEG XL now available in batch export (new in build 1736) Migrate retail version content and settings to beta version (new in build 1730) Cross references available in Affinity Publisher (this has now been pushed back to 2.2 as announced here) "Close All" added to File menu Asset panel reordering improvements Rename... added to Layer menu & tab behaviour Mask to below... added to Layer menu Measure tool now available in Photo and Publisher Place tool now available in Affinity Photo Drag / Drop bitmap fill to colour and swatch panel Zoom tool context options in Develop persona iPad features and improvements
New left swipe options on iPad layers panel (new in build 1736) Redesigned edit menu (new in build 1730) Some file management changes to iPad (new in build 1730) Style picker added to iPad apps (new in build 1713/1714) Drop down menus with checkable options no longer auto close New keyboard shortcut options added Reset rotation in navigator with double tap Pencil double tap option to open quick menu Long press geometry operation to create compound Tapping warp group thumbnail now selects node tool PDF options now exposed when opening Modifiers now available for Select Object Hide Layer type icon now available Main view rulers added  
If you have not enrolled into the beta program yet and would like to take part, you can do so here. This will immediately give you access to the latest 2.1 beta builds to try for yourself.

Apps: Designer and Photo
Platforms: Windows, macOS and iPad
Both Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo now have the option to "Show Special Characters" if required. This is available from the top Text menu on desktop, and via the preview mode drop down on iPad.

Apps: Photo
Platforms: Windows and macOS
As has been requested you can now find the Place tool (previously only available in Designer and Publisher) as a customisation option in Affinity Photo (View -> Customise Tools) if you wish to add it to your main set of tools, making it more easily accessible than going to File -> Place.

Apps: All
Platforms: Windows, macOS and iPad
A number of suggestions have been taken on with guides...

1. When you move a guide by dragging it on a document you will now see both the position of the guide relative to the ruler origin (as before) as well as the distance from the guide's previous position. So this means if, for example, you just want to move a guide 10mm you can achieve that easily without having to change the ruler origin.


2.When dragging a guide, holding Shift will now snap the guide to ruler marks. As this is based on ruler marks this also means the further you are zoomed the granularity of the Shift-constrained snap increases. Shift will snap based on the distance from origin, Shift-Alt will snap to the delta distance.
3. If you hold Alt or Command (Ctrl on windows) before dragging a guide that will now create a copy of the guide.
4. If you drag a new guide from rulers then guide visibility will automatically be toggled on (if it was set to off).
5. Alt-clicking on any guide will delete the guide.
6. Double clicking on an existing guide will now open the guide manager dialog (with the guide you had double clicked having focus in that dialog.
 
Please note: on iPad you will need to use an attached keyboard or use the command controller (if not visible you can toggle it on from the document menu) to access the modifiers. Also worth bearing in mind that Alt is the global modifier for ignore snapping, so if you create a copy of a guide using Alt while you still hold Alt snapping will be disabled.
Please let us know what you think or if you spot any problems with this new functionality.

Apps: All
Platforms: Windows, macOS and iPad
With any layer(s) selected in the Layers panel, you can now hold alt (Windows) or Option (Mac / iPad) and drag to create a copy of the selected layers. The duplicated layers will be inserted into the layer stack in the position you have dragged to.
Note: on iPad you will need a keyboard attached, or use the command controller to access the option modifier for this operation.

Apps: Designer
Platforms: All
A new vector flood tool has been added to Affinity Designer. This is denoted by a paint bucket icon in the Tools Panel (on iPad you can find it nested with the gradient fill tool, on Windows it will currently need to be manually added via Customising the Tools Panel).
This tool allows you to automatically fill areas created by overlapping / intersecting shapes and open curves in your document. This tool requires you to make a selection first of the curves / shapes you want the tool to consider. You can then choose a colour from the colour or swatches panel, and tap within any enclosed area to create a new shape with that fill colour. While in the tool you can also drag swatches from the swatches panel onto any area.

There are two insertion modes to this tool you can select from the context toolbar:
Inside. This will attempt to create the new shapes / fills and place them inside existing shapes where possible. In-between. This will break fills and strokes apart in existing shapes, and insert the new fills in-between.  The difference between the two is shown below. 


While using the tool you can hold Cmd (macOS / iPad) or Ctrl (Windows) to make new selections (also combining with Shift to add / remove items from your selection). You can also click-drag the tool to quickly fill many areas all at once, a simple example is shown below with some text:

The tool works with any type of fill - solid colour, gradient or bitmap. The options in the context toolbar for min, max and stretch to fit are relevant only to gradient and bitmap fills, and refers to the method used to scale the fill to the new shape.
For bitmap fills you can select a bitmap fill swatch to use, alternatively you can create bitmap fills on the fly by dragging a texture file or asset directly into the active colour in the toolbar. Below is a video showing that in action with using assets to create bitmap fills:
Texture Fills.mov
For bitmap fills if the texture has any transparency then the fill will be added as an additional fill to the shape. This allows for overlay style textures to be easily added on top of an existing colour fill. We will look at a way to make this behaviour optional.
Finally it's also worth pointing out that when you are in the tool you can also drag swatch from your swatches panel directly into any area in your selection, to quickly add multiple different colours to areas without having to select them first.
We would love you to try this new tool out and let us know what you think or if you encounter any bugs or unexpected results.

Pleased to say the above are now in the 2.1 beta. It would be great if you wanted to try it out in the beta and let us know what you think - you can sign up to the beta program here.

Right now I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
I searched the help system for something completely different and found this well documented new tool:

 
And this is the dedicated help page:
https://affinity.help/publisher2/de.lproj/

 
OK - easter eggs might be funny for developers - nothing new...
But i found this "so funny" tool integrated via dedicated keyboard modifier in all three applications. And furthermore they had even the time to add a help page for that. hahaha...
On the other hand the users are left e.g. with the new measurement tool (i like it so far) only added in Designer. But no measurement tool in Publisher or Photo. Place image tool in Designer and Puplisher - not in Photo. There is still no way to show/hide hidden characters in text frames (old topic for years now) in Designer or Photo - only in Publisher. The page resize dialog in publisher has new (anchoring does not work, format icons fail) and old bugs (master page is not anchored). The glyph browser slows significantly down after longer work and does still loose the lock functionality. And so on.
There are still important, "easy to implement" old request and new bugs introduced with v2.
Unfortunately, I've lost some of my laughter during the last two weeks 😶
 

Hi,
i guess the actual common export dialog still needs significant improvements (all three Applications). I use the Affinity suite mainly for web design and web programming. Overall they do a good job in this area of application. But when it comes to export for web and reproduction of layout with HTML/CSS i often have to switch back to Photoshop, to render the final Bitmaps for use in web.
First of all: we finally get a measurement tool !!! I always need to measure the exact pixel values from my design, to finally reproduce/program the exact appearence in CSS. But why only in Designer and not in all three apllications - this is an absolutely basic feature ?!
Designers export persona with it's slices is fine for SVG and uncompressed PNG. It also suites for most small (average) images (JPG).
And even WebP is now availlable in the export persona as well as in the common file export dialog. Thanks for that😍
 
But when you have to optimize e.g. huge hero images to a file size as small as possible neither the export persona nor the common file export offer a really handy preview of the resulting image. For lossy codecs like JPG and WebP this is highly recommend, because no preview means time consuming guesswork.
Yes, the actual axport dialog offers a simple preview for the bitmap file types with some estimated target file size. But you have no direct visual comparison between original and exported image. Especially when you have to tweak the compression rate to as high as possible for huge images you have to carefully check critical areas. But at the moment WebP does not even allow a 1:1 pixel zoom ???

 
A good example of how the export dialog might work is the good old Photoshop CS dialog "save for web". Why Adobe marked it as "legacy" is a mystery to me. I still use this since 20 years...

What are the key features:
1) You have a side by side preview of the original and the compressed bitmap. The preview areas have a synchronized zoom and pan so you can always see the same image area in original and result. There is a 1:1 pixel:display preview. If you check the typical problematic areas with JPG and WebP (red areas in general, soft gradients like in the sky, artefacts around Text and thin lines) you allways have to tweak the compression strength until it's just visually bearable. No algorithm can do this automatically and every image is different. By the way - the Designer pixel preview (view > split) is rather useless because an A|B split/slider does NOT show the same image area in parallel! You only see the vector OR the pixel preview 🤔
2) The estimated filesize is more prominent. At the moment in Affinity this is somewhat hidden in the upper right panel under the export settings.
3) It should be possible to strip all metadata from the exported file.
 
EDIT
OK - This is already integrated for some scenarios: uncheck to strip meta data