Alfred

Indeed.
 
I was basically speculating on the apparent delay in the 1.5 beta for OS X (although it may not be delayed at all). If the beta for both platforms are released at the same time and have the same versioning, then it suggests to me a conscious effort to align the feature set (which only makes sense).
 
I work professionally on the Windows platform (using the Adobe CC design products), but my home machine is an iMac. Having seen many products over the years get released for the Windows platform, the sheer number of users who would potentially want to try the Windows beta will most likely have a lot to say regarding how they feel about the app. If I were in the marketing team, I would certainly be aware of the potential backlash for any differences if the users felt it was somehow not inline with the 'other' platform's version. Especially if in an environment where users want to test the cross-platform functionality.
 
No real concerns here, as these are new to the market and have shown a great (in my opinion) use of the current modern OS architecture. The performance is pretty much unparalleled at the moment. I hope to see some improvements in the current tools and some additional tools, but no worries if it takes a little time.  :P

Replicate/Blend is still on the roadmap.

It would be useful to introduce more advanced features, like Discretionary Ligatures that could be useful with fonts like Chartwell.
 
https://www.fontfont.com/how-to-use-ff-chartwell

Cheers guys!
 
Wow this is definitely my fav new brush. The "Jekyll and Hyde" brush. Gentle and refined by day, brash and bold by night...
 
Here's a few minutes tinkering. You know a sign that you're having fun, when you have to make yourself stop.  :)
 
This sort of feels like acrylic on canvas.
 
Nice work Paolo!

Try this:
 
Create a new layer.
Enter your text on that layer.
Change the all of your text from black to white (it is the background colour).
Then using the blend mode as mentioned by Alfred, keep your white text selected then use Contrast Negate.
 
Job done. B)
 
HTH 
 
peter

You haven't said whether you're using Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo, but I suggest that you investigate the 'exclusion' and 'difference' blend modes.

What/Who is Adobe?

Deja vu...   I'm sure this conversation has been had already.... many times.  And I think Petar made exactly the same point last time... and the time before... and the time before...
 
I don't think we are going to change our strategy.  Get Adobe to give you a single all purpose app, and then come ask us again.

Not all users take advantage of the functionality of all three apps. A photographer will find no use for Publisher tools. So why to pay for them?
Having them as separate apps will help to spread app use, keep prices accessible, fill users specific needs, reduce app complexity/development and learning curve. It also allows widen/deepen the scope of the tools for each area. For example Designer can be used in graphic design, illustration, web design, UI design, typography each of these requiring specific tools/functionality. Publisher also cover several uses/workflows from print to digital publishing which also require a wide spectrum of functionality. Keeping them separate allows to develop advanced tools without bloating the apps too much.
 
Changing between them - if you need to use more than one - is also relatively easy if you use the menu command File ▸ Edit in... to switch between apps. There's no need to save/open the file first to swap the document between them. All edits/history are kept when you do it. We believe this is the best compromise between having the advantage of using all functionality from the three apps without sacrificing price, performance, learning curve, complexity that one integrated app would imply.

I see your point marsofearth, mainly the convergence between different computer graphic technics.
 
But I have to say Serif's choice suits me better.
About mixing vector and raster technics, I didn't have time to use AD enough but it seems that you have some nice pixel mode tools.
 
And aitte is right about different things like having different cheaper apps to let people choose one or two (and three in the near future) apps depending on their needs.
 
For me, the essential in that choice is to keep those applications as light and powerful as possible in their respective domains but still, having an efficient bridge between the two if you need it. I don't want an app doing 3 millions different things if the price to pay (beside $/€) is to have a 5Go application taking ages to load and do something.
And of course being competitive with Adobe equivalent but without the subscription.

It makes zero business sense to merge them. Buying both Designer and Photo is still a lot cheaper than buying ONE of Photoshop or Illustrator.
 
But to make matters worse:
* If they merge Designer and Photo then they will have to raise the price from $49 to something like $79, but that means a *lot* less of the casual users buy it. And it's still less than they would have made from 2 separate sales. So less income means they may have to fire employees and cripple product development.
* If the products merge, the GUIs become more cluttered and confusing.
* If the products merge, they will have to delete one of them from the app store, and only half of their users would get the merged upgrade - the ones from the deleted product would have to re-purchase the other one. The app store does not support license migration.
* If they had released the product "merged from day one", then they would have given a free "Photo" upgrade to every Designer user and would not have received any reward for their 5 years of hard work creating Affinity Photo. Alternatively, they could have made it a paid "Designer 2.0" update and piss off all the designer users who have been promised that their purchase includes free updates for 1-2 years to come.
* An alternative solution would have been to sell Designer and then have a $49 in-app purchases to unlock Photo, but that makes no sense either. People who only want pixel work would have to buy Designer which they don't even want. And Designers may feel cheated paying $49 for extended pixel editing power. So that option would just piss off both userbases.
* A merge would constrain all features and keyboard shortcuts in a way that makes sense for both vectors and pixels, instead of allowing each app to develop its own workflows.
 
It's horrible for business in 100% of the areas that matter. And it's not even an issue; people have happily worked with Adobe's separate software suite for decades.
 
A merge will not happen until *all* users are willing to pay $100, and to buy the software in the exact same sales volume as today.
 
The lack of a merge is not Affinity's fault. It's your fault. It's my fault. It's all of the users who would not pay a fair price if they're merged. So let's never talk about this again, and let's instead celebrate that we're getting awesome Adobe-killing software at $49 each for *perpetual* licenses and none of Adobe's monthly subscription fee bullshit. We're already getting a mindblowing deal, and we're used to working with individually specialized apps. Everything is perfect.

Hi marsofearth,
Usually applications that tend to do all at once never manage to do anything particularly well. Affinity Photo and Designer serve very different goals. This should become more evident as we move forward. Neither of them are feature complete yet. There will be more Personas / new features / tools, not to mention a third application for desktop publishing. If all this were included in a single app it would become much more complex and heavy, harder to test and maintain and also harder to learn. Keeping them separate allow us to broaden the scope of each one in their particular area while still offering great flexibility since all Affinity apps share the same file format. This allows you to switch from one to another seamlessly without any type of conversions. We believe this is the best compromise between having a limited all-in-on app or a suite of powerful but disconnected/unrelated apps.

I am posting another set of custom Textured intensity brushes for Affinity Designer:
Textured pack E3 water - Intensity brushes (zip file - 9+mb)
 
These are recreations of an original default set of water (Sumi ink) style brushes that came with the application Expression3 from the early 2000’s.
These are more for fun than practical brushes.
The default set sold me on E3 way back in the day - a HUGE shift from the very solid vector look of other vector applications of the time. Having a bitmap texture mapped to a vector skeleton = magic!
These were originally meant I am sure as emulation of wet (and dryish) ink/brush strokes - but tended to be a little too limited to that look. Nevertheless they do make for some nice smokey brush strokes and have quite a bit of texture.
 
Example images of the strokes are attached here.
Hope the user base here finds this third set interesting.
 

Hi folks!
 
In another topic a user was asking about how to create a maker that works with some dynamic features, in particular Tilt.
So I'm going to move that tutorial here in order to share it with anybody wants to create such a tool.
 
What is Tilt
 
Tilt is usually the angle between your pen and tablet surface (or its complementary).
The one that allows you this
 

 
 
To be more precise there are three angles dealing with pen/paper interaction, using Serif's notation:
 

 
 
All Wacom pens support Tilt (that Affinity splits correctly into Tilt and Angle )
Only Wacom Art Pen support Rotation (which is basically pen's barrel rotation, so the rotation of your brush shape).
 
  If your pen tablet supports those AP or AD allow to bind them to the different Jitters available in Dynamics Tab.
 
 
How to make this brush
 
A chisel shaped marker is a very complex tool, so complex that in the past Wacom produced it as a true accessory for its Intuos 3 series, with double nib sensors.
I think it is no more compatible with modern tablets...
 

(source Amazon)
 
There are lots of implications in this dynamic, not only the shape variation, but also a distribution of pressure along the chisel.
 
------------
 
Edit: Some more info about this tool.
A Wacom representative during an Adobe Creative Day years ago told me that the reason why they placed two sensors was to detect pressure's delta.
Recently another one told me that this feature wasn't implemented, so the double tip was there only to "hold" the massive nib.
Few days ago a developer told me that there was something available in their drivers, but no software developer decided to use this function, sales were bad so Wacom moved to the Art Pen (single nib, axis rotation).
Where is the truth?  :D 
 
------------
 
Let's go back to our tutorial: we want to replicate this behaviour
 
 

 
The best approximation for such a tool is a Square brush with a Shape jitter that stretches its shape from square to thin rectangle, but this kind of brush is not yet fully functional in AP/AD.
I've decided to use a Round Brush binding Tilt to Size, all should result in a good variant, so:
 
1) Create a new round brush
2) Double click it to make the Brush Editor open
3) In General shrink its shape to 20% and set a low spacing value (2% is the best)
4) Go to Dynamics tab
 
 
Affinity apps track the full 180° Tilt angle in its ramp, but we don't need it and in order to have a correct response we have to shrink the range as shown.

 
So if our chisel shaped "marker" is perpendicular to our canvas it will be thin, then gradually (with a linear ramp) increase its size as we tilt it.
 
This is a basic dynamic marker that works with Tilt, Rotation (Wacom ArtPen needed) and has some colour dynamic too.
Here you can find it.
 
Happy sketching!

Hi andonbray,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
The best/correct way to solve this would be to use a lighter weight of the font. If that's not possible a quick n'dirty way to do it is to subtract an expanded stroke from the letters.
Here's a small clip showing how to do it (no sound).

Hey all,
 
I figured since most of my photography ends up in tutorials, and so is usually unfinished or edited differently, I would share some properly finished images! We visited Derbyshire this bank holiday and fortunately the British weather was kind to us. Here are a few images from the trip (edited in Photo of course):
 
Lumsdale Falls 01 by James Ritson, on Flickr
 
Lumsdale Falls 03 by James Ritson, on Flickr
 
Mam Tor 02 by James Ritson, on Flickr
 
Mam Tor 07 by James Ritson, on Flickr
 
Lumsdale Falls 02 by James Ritson, on Flickr
 
Mam Tor 04 by James Ritson, on Flickr
 
 
You can see all of the images above plus others not shown here on my Flickr album here: https://flic.kr/s/aHskASur94
 
Thanks!
James

Thanks Madame.
 
I wasn't fishing for compliments there just genrally stating how my thoughts and feelings are these days in regards to my creative process. I sometimes feel like I'm wasting the potential that eejits has.
 
But don't worry I'll still be creating characters for everyone to enjoy, least alone for me to have fun with. Just having a moan.....
 
Thanks for the encouragement,
 
George

Please do something about that!
There's no reason you should hold back judging by your eejits. They are fabulous. 

To be honest, I've never tried Affinity Photo for digital painting. I usually work in PS or Manga Studio. But today I was testing some brush settings of Photo and came up with this quick portrait. I've always tried to emulate the traditional mediums when painting digital, so I tend to work my digital paintings with that natural a la prima feel... working in one layer and mixing pencils and 'gouache'.
 
Here's the result:
 

 
I think I'll use Photo for more digital painting. It runs pretty smooth and fluid. It is pretty fun to create brushes too, very fewer settings compared with other painting software, but at the same time those boundaries makes you create some nice brushes more quickly. 
 
Hope you all dig it!

A Transform each would be excellent. Similar to AI function, giving options in scale, rotation, skew, etc.

I'd like to see this too. I hope we don't have to wait twenty years for it, like we did for DrawPlus!

Dots per inch or pixels per inch is irrelevant for the web. Computer screens only know about pixel dimensions, not inches.

Hey all,
 
MBd already found one of them, but here are three new videos for you:
 
Colour grading with shapes Enhancing Camera Phone photography Infrared Emulation  
Enjoy!

Today AD, tomorrow Panini sticker albums! :D  :D  :D

you can save a "sort of symbol" by saving the document,
then use document > place to place that "sort of symbol"
 
you can duplicate the placed document (the "sort of symbol") and scale, rotate, skew it or even use the live perspective distort filter in AP (not available in AD)
 
you can then open the embedded document and make changes, every instance will update
 
i´ve used this in AP to create a non destructive technicolor simulation https://vimeo.com/155520871 by referencing the base image in three groups and applying channel mixer adjustment layers to each group
 
you can delete the document you saved in first place because the placed document is placed (inside the main document), not linked externally
 
hope that helps