kirk23

If am perfectly happy with free open source RAW therapy for RAW processing even if it's a bit slower comparing to Lightroom and iMatch, kind of a "true" DAM instead of those small bits of it Lightroom has. If Affinity would manage to make a quicker RAW therapy alternative able to export non clipped floating point exr out of camera DNGs and some AI based automatic keywording working at least same brainless Lightroom does . Or maybe just one of those two things, I would buy it. Still rather prefer they would focus on making APhoto same non-destructive Photoshop is. A true replacement . Lost my hope on Designer already. And then would improve beyond it . Access to to other layers in procedural filter with node based interface maybe.

and "update all" for every embedded image/doc

I I just think that would be pretty tight market with so many Lightroom alternatives. Especially with free rivals that are actually good. I just don't want them spreading resources beyond APhoto that still misses a lot even from Photoshop. We need something better and beyond Photoshop actually . Designer is so basic it's almost a toy too.

t those open source ones also work with series, Lightroom does it a bit quicker although. I am paying the subscription and even don't have it installed on my main pc. Prefer Darktable just because it does few things I need that Lightroom can't. Like exporting straight to HDR formats

Have you tried Darktable and Raw Therapy ? Both open source free. Have lots of features absent in Lightroom like turning you RAWs into floating point 32 bit exr files . They might be missing Lightroom AI neural network things but they have always seemed to me kind of toyish and pretty useless so far

For realistic style it should have "impasto" depth channel like in corel Painter. Would love to see it Affinity Photo someday. Anyway why bothering to do it when all those AI "neural networks" could do it automatically

Why not, I totally agree. Sad thing is that even open source free Xara extreme for Linux even being severely cut of features was in few aspects still more convenient and easy . Another cool soft I'd like Affinity borrow something from is what formerly was free Creative House Expression. It had same snake like "skeletal" brushes but the repeating part in the middle could be up to 10 randomly alternating parts. Would love Affinity bring it back too. Expression had so many cool features I still think it was best vector soft ever created , A Illustrator has never been even close. Then Microsoft bought it, made a castrated version and finally buried it altogether, I can't find download page anymore.

Xara is old and lacking many necessary things. Its devs went some weird "cloud" toyish way still I continue to use my ancient Xara 5 rather than freshly new Affinity Designer. The sad truth is I have to make 10 clicks in Designer where Xara request me only one. It's still so much more convenient in so many small tiny features. Few of them: 1. Any bitmap you place in your doc is a bitmap fill of a vector shape. you could scale ,tile, rotate , skew , tint, color edit with levels, refresh and replace to another file individually or for evry piece of same bitmap in a document. At the same time you can edit , crop, cut etc its vector borders like any vector shape and make a feathered edge just with a slider. 2. All objects in a document vector or bitmap could be tagged with "name" and than easily selectable as having same tag. You could select evrything tagged " blue" and switch them off effectively recreating Photoshop "layer comps" functionality ( years before Photoshop did it) 4 . Brush scattering selected number of bitmap and vector objects randomly around its vector path 5. Photoshop plugins including Filter Forge working as live effects on objects . Mesh deform staying live on bitmap objects.

In my humble opinion all that dedicated soft is monstrously inconvenient and artist unfriendly. Guess it's because devs who design it and suggest features are "technical" artists at core. Never studying for an art degree or something. Those people think differently and the soft rather reflect it. On the other hand soft like Rebelle or Painter is so focused on recreating traditional medias experience they totally forget there is a bigger market where such techniques could find a good use. Thus Painter even don't let you export depth channel. It's totally crazy thing. I like how simple and elegant Affinity soft is without all those endless puzzles I have to solve in Substance designer spending more time on planning and debugging my node network rather than creative process itself. Procedural filter looks promising indeed but perhaps it might be just Substance sbsar files working as live filters or Filter forge plugin being live on layers.

I can't. It should be dynamically updating blending + dynamically updating mask. If "apply image" would be live effect it might work with a stack of 2-3 of them. Still it would be convoluted and complicated mess to manage. Slightly improved Corel Painter/Artrage style would be much simpler to work with. Another example "Quixel mixer" that recently became free soft. It has probably best depth blending. It's simple math really so why couldn't it be in every image editor .

Working in texture area I could say an image editor that just make rgb pictures is not enough for what I do. Still I mostly hate all those modern texture editors : Substance .Mari etc. and would love something easy, elegant and simple like Affinity photo. Would it just support a height/depth channel in addition to regular RGBA and a depth combining blending method ( basically Max of layerA and B - layerA ) and also would do "inpaint" on RGB and Depth in sync it would be perfectly enough. Like old good Corel PAinter which always had this hidden treasure ( depth channel) even before it became Corel one, but for some weird reason never turned it into something even remotely usable. To extract it from painter files you had to do it with some obscure Blender addon . I don't need any fancy normal map/roughness/whatever extra channels . all of them are easily derivative from depth. BTW, the depth is getting a part of traditional mass photo editing workflow too with all those phone camera novelties , time of flight, parallax cam etc. I think Affinity Photo could be ahead of Adobe in that regard with depth channel support if would catch the trend in time. Besides the depth channel would allow to make some fancy "impasto" strokes like Rebelle and Artrage. The later even allows to export depth but only as 8 bit picture , pretty unusable too.

Substance Designer is cheap (on Steam) and in fact an industry standard for texture creation for a while. Probably one of the best node based image editors ever created but still lacking a lot of simplicity and convenience of regular image editing tool like Affinity Photo or Designer. Would be super cool if we could use Substance Designer exported sbsar files as live effects for both APhoto and Designer . Using layers pixel values as input . I am not sure if it's possible at all now after Allegorythmic had been bought by Adobe and how hard it would be to do. Still many 3d soft could read sbsar files just fine. So I dream of Affinity doing same too maybe. Would be super cool indeed. Same idea for Filter Forge . Would be nice having it working as live effects. It once worked that way in some old version of Xara as many other psd plugins too

I agree it's weird and pretty inconvenient. My workaround is to use pixel or embedded layer and "mask to bellow" it. Then you could edit it with it's own levels layer or turn blacks to alpha with "blend option/ranges" gear

You could record a macro for destructive crop and save it in library. I wish I could set Ctrl/Shift + F keys for macros although like I could in Photoshop

I tried it when it did work, not sure what build exactly. The problem is it didn't work for the purpose I described because on a next layer the inpainting worked in totally different way clonning patches from different areas in different order. So result on Height layer was totally not in sync with Color layer. Macro recorded or not. ps. Just tried it in current 1.8 beta. Inpainting seems capable to be recorded in macro but does it totally different way when you execute it on another layer. Did it work Artomatix way in 1.6?