Raymond Larabie

That works really smoothly. Thanks for the tips.

Excellent. The spare channel thing is kind of handy. There doesn't seem to be a way to bring in a channel from elsewhere. But I can work around it. Cheers!

In Affinity Photo how can I copy a channel over another one? For example: I have color photo and I want to copy the red channel over the green channel. In other words, red and green channels should be identical. I tried making the layers editable, selecting all and copy/paste but it doesn't work. Or can that only be done through channel mixer? Can I copy a channel from another image that way? The reason I'd want to do this: I have a bracketed color photo and I'm trying to maximize detail by grabbing a single channel from one photo and pasting into another.

Can anyone recommend a good 3rd party image scaler for Windows. I find the raster image output from Designer to be not so great. There's a problem with thin lines appearing on overlapping shapes. There's no lossy dithering, dithering control, lossy png or gif controls and no sharp reduction option. I already use A Sharper Scaling for upscaling so that's not a feature I need.

When customizing the top toolbar, I'd like to have horizontal mirror, vertical mirror and 90° rotation buttons available—the same ones that are in Designer.

If you just want to create prepared nut fractions, I think the simplest way is to make them directly in font software like Font Creator. There's less learning curve that way. Copy the numerals to a new font. Scale the target size. Copy the numerals to empty glyph locations. Offset vertically. Make a bar. Copy and paste to make your nut fractions and put them in the A-Z, A-z locations for easy access. Even if you can get all that OpenType stuff working, it's hard to get a nice visual balance for nut fractions without aligning each one by eye. And this way you can change the bar width as needed. I don't recommend importing from vector applications into font applications unless it absolutely can't be avoided. The way vectors work in fonts isn't the same as how they work in drawing apps. With fonts, you're usually dealing with a coarse grid of about 700 units tall for a capital letter and fonts require extrema points on each curve. The points and handles are forced to snap to the coarser grid, causing all kinds of distortion. I'm not saying it's impossible to import from a drawing application but I find it takes more time to clean up the mess that it would have taken to redraw it in the font application.

This isn't a bug but a change that could improve workflow. In Affinity Photo, I can open the channels tab, click Composite red and see the red channel represented in monochrome. If I hit ctrl-M to open the curves dialog or ctrl-L for levels, it's set to edit Master (RGB). But since I already clicked the red channel, it means I want to edit the red channel. I can manually switch from master to composite red. But it's an extra step I need to do every time I want to tweak curves on a channel. Part of the workflow I'm used to involves hopping from channel to channel, making tweaks to the curves, clicking reset to see how it looks. I suspect that it's a rare case that someone would select a composite channel and want to edit Master (RGB). You can't clearly see the effects of what you're doing except on the other channels anyway. The ideal situation would be to have all those things synced: click on a composite channel and that channel gets automatically selected in curves and levels. It would also be handy if clicking reset on the channels tab switched curves and levels to Master. I think this behavior would make the channels, curves and levels easier for beginners to grasp. It would certainly make my workflow quite a bit faster.

More of a request than a bug perhaps? When I import a PSD with a white background into Designer, the white layer is interpreted as blank. That's a wonderful feature and prevents wasteful, blank white bitmap layers. But when a blank layer is a different color, it's kept as a pixel layer. The ideal situation would be to detect solid rectangular layers and replace them with colored rectangles. I don't think you need to go as far as detecting all blank rectangles but if it's the bottom layer and it's a solid color, then it could be replaced with a rectangle of the same color.

Hi everybody. I'm Raymond Larabie, a Canadian typeface designer living in Japan. I run Typodermic Fonts and have been in the font business over 20 years. I use Affinity Designer primarily for creating font specimens. I also use it for testing OpenType features while developing new typefaces. I use Affinity Photo mostly for fun, and projects for friends. I use a combination of Affinity Photo and Exposure X for my Instagram photos of Nagoya shops and street scenes. The reason I tried Affinity Designer in the first place is that it's one of the only drawing applications with good OpenType feature support.

DXF import/export is very important in my work.