KipV

Earlier Publisher betas had a problem with opening some of my messed-up inDesign files but this latest beta opens them with aplomb. Great stuff!!!

Status: Beta
Purpose: Features, Improvements, Fixes
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Photo
Mac App Store: Not submitted
Download ZIP: Download
Auto-update: Available.
 
Hello,
We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the second beta of Affinity Photo 1.8 for macOS.
Photo 1.8 is a significant change to the currently shipping 1.7 version, so, as ever, I would strongly urge users to avoid the 1.8 beta for critical work. This is a pre-release build of 1.8 - we will release more builds before 1.8 ships. Things will be broken in this build - please use it to explore the new features and not for real work.
If this is your first time using a customer beta of an Affinity app, it’s worth noting that the beta will install as a separate app - alongside your store version. They will not interfere with each other at all and you can continue to use the store version for critical work without worry.
It’s also worth noting that we aren’t done yet - we are still working through reported bugs from previous releases and hope to fix as many as possible before the final release of 1.8. 
With all that said, we hope that you will enjoy the new capabilities introduced in this release and we look forward to any and all feedback you give to us.
Many thanks (as always),
Affinity Photo Team  
 
Changes This Build
 
- PSD smart object import support (enable in preferences).
- Reference presets for the Pro Display XDR are now supported properly.
- Filter effects now support high intensity colours in 32bit mode.
- Embedded document fixes.
- New stock brushes (your custom brushes will not be lost).
- New document panel tweaks.
- Text field expression improvements.
- Improved RAW support (Serif Labs).
- Improved handling of RAW files when using batch processing.
- Improved channels panel behaviour when disabling alpha.
- Numerous other smaller fixes and improvements.
 
Changes Since 1.7
- Overhauled the “File -> New” dialog - user templates are now supported.
- Implemented unified toolbar for appropriately modern macOS versions.
- Updated PANTONE palettes to include new Solid and Bridge sets.
- Renamed EXIF panel to Metadata and added support for user-editable fields, including IPTC).
- Added ability to read metadata from an XMP sidecar file (enable in Preferences).
- Added native CR3 support to the SerifLabs RAW engine.
- Added a new lens profile selector to Develop.
- Reimplemented the HSL filter's HSV option.
- Improved quality & file size of results when exporting JPEG.
- Switching to a mask node will now automatically switch to the grey colour slider.
- Improved lens correction of RAW files coming from lenses with fixed focal length.
- Improved unsharp mask “threshold” slider.
- Improved selection refinement performance & quality.
- Improved the noise reduction filter result when applied to JPEGs.
- Improved precision of Gaussian algorithm (to reduce banding).
- Improved reporting of file load errors (could previously report file corruption incorrectly).
- Improved performance of operations with large selections.
- Improved memory use with alternate futures and when replacing image layers.
- Improvements to Photoshop plugin support, notably for DxO plugins (but also for many others).
- Fixed Styles to show styles that would normally be invisible.
- Fixed crash when loading some corrupt JPEGs (valid image data, but corrupt following data).
- Fixed deletion of brushes / styles / etc. not reducing disk usage correctly.
- Fixed PSD export of hidden layers.
- Fixed angle cursors when the view has been rotated.
- Fixed “Create Palette” from CMYK images resulting in RGB colours.
- Fixed Pixel Selection appears incorrectly when started near page edge.
- Fixed rasterising a fill layer goes wrong after changing document size.
- Fixed Marquee Selection not constraining to a square if you drag across the right diagonal.
- Fixed mis-identification of some Tamron lenses mounted to Canon bodies.
- Fixed failure to load some PSB files (and failing to report errors).
- Fixed missing EXIF data for CRWs.
- Fixed crash importing PSD files containing embedded colour profiles with unicode characters in their names.
- Assorted other small fixes and improvements.
- Localisation improvements.
To be notified about all future Mac beta updates, please follow this beta notification thread 
To be notified when this update comes out of beta and is fully released to all Affinity Photo customers, please follow this release notification thread

Just checked my 5k iMac and I'm not seeing a significant diff when the windows are overlapped. I do agree that much of the interface is (and has been) a bit too small to comfortably see on a 27" iMac. 

I understand now. I think in a usual set up it will make the most sense to click on tab and see the long list of the tab you clicked on. Having the first row be recents would probably be fine. I don't think the short list of all the sections would work as well.

I was originally going by the mockup you provided in your OP - you show four entries and a "more" button on each tab, and that I would be strongly opposed to.  Clicking the tab should be enough to show all of the options.
Adding a "most recently used" section to the top then showing all of the options underneath it would be fine, maybe something like this:

Having the tabs and the "more" button though is just an extra click to reveal them which would be pointless and you would be wasting all of the remaining space there until the button was clicked.
If the idea was to get rid of the tabs and show the sections as separate headers instead, then I could see that scheme working, but personally I would still prefer the current approach.

Well I haven't particular been running into many bugs in the short time I have been on the new Affinity iPad version. Only one crash I think.
Hey look it's my 666th post and I have 123 favorited posts!! What are the chances?!

For the mean time, you could try the Appearance Panel. Works a little better with closed shapes. 

Happy New Year Publisher Beta!

I pretty much haven't got anything to work between with Affinity on Apple Photos. Frankly I don't want to keep putting more time in to testing it especially since they have three good stand alone apps and two good iPad apps. Other developers have made the Apple Photos extension / round trip thing work so might as well use their products in this area.

Thank you for „re-inventing“ the „Expand Stroke“ command. Seems to work very fine now.
But, what puzzles me: There was so much criticism about this feature and now – no comment, no reaction …  

I would also like to see them put all their time into the three apps they have now. I was mainly trying to say if they haven't made progress with Apple Photos I don't think they should be putting more time into it. Their own DAM was brought up just as a possible solution since part of that program would have similar features to the Apple Photos extension. In other words it is a different way to tackle the same solution they have had with Apple Photos except it would work.

Have you tried Pixelmator Pro? I feel like they got Apple Photos integration down. It even has layers support right from within Apple Photos! Why can't other DAMs have that feature? Capture One's layers are basically just adjustment layers, which is great, but it would be nice to have object layers as well. I assume there are Affinity features you need or want but thought you might not know about how good Pixelmator Pro works recently.

@Madrooster7 Have you tried Luminar 4 ? As far as I know it offers an entirely new approach to (non-destructive) photo editing (including loads of filters, presets, and even AI).

Merry Christmas & a Very Happy New Year to all of you !
Enjoy your well-deserved rest  
 
 

Yeah that's wonderful! I kept arguing with the Quark guys about adding pre-flight but they seemed to think the rules feature was good enough. That should give them a lot of competition given on top of the fact that the pages panel also works much better in Publisher than Quark as well.

I love you guys

There's a lot to like about the new New Document window. However, I can see some room for improvements:
1. Should be able to resize the window. I have a large monitor and would like it bigger so I can see more without scrolling.
2. Popup menus should respect the dark mode setting. Currently they're light even though I'm using dark mode.
3. Most of the settings are wiped out if you pick a different page size. For instance, I set up a Letter sized document, set it to use Picas, set my margins and bleed, and if I click on the Legal thumbnail on the left, it resets all of those things. I should be able to change to a preset page size without wiping out my other settings.
4. The "link" to set Inner/Outer/Top/Bottom the same in Margins/Bleed should take affect as soon as you click it. For example, right now if you have them unlinked and all set to 0, if you change one to 5 and then click the link, they end up being 5, 0, 0, 0 which isn't right if they're supposed to be linked.

The initial versions of Mac OS X were quite inconsistent. They had about 2 or 3 interfaces going on at the same time; aqua and brushed metal. I remember it taking the better part of a decade to let it evolve.

Mojave toolbar buttons are way too small. I also don't see why the persona buttons need to get a lot closer. I am curious about the title area of the document. Will I eventually be able to click on that and be able to change the document title, tags, and location like with many other programs? If so that would be a useful update to the way 1.7 is. I hope these interface improvements get in place before bring the interface over to Photo and Designer. I hope you can also enlarge the tools icons on the left side of the screen as well.

(It would indeed be interesting to discuss variable fonts … elsewhere. While this new technology is currently drawing a lot of attention in the type design world, I am still not sure whether it will have the resounding success that is hoped for in the typographers’ world. I haven’t seen any variable fonts yet that would really convince me of their typographic benefit over a well-developed typeface with optical grades. Pointers are welcome. Furthermore, as variable fonts tend to lay the burden on the user to proceed with taste – at least unless they are not using predefined locations in the design space –, I have the slight fear there might be another wave of bad typography on the horizon. Somehow, the current developments remind me of the early times when DTP on personal computers started off. But to discuss this further, let’s make a different thread.)

Wow. Really greate update. It should be named 1.9.

It wasn't necessarily that, it was that we didn't keep the roadmap up to date, and we started shipping new features which never appeared on the roadmap, and then customers (understandably) asked about why the particular feature they were interested in, that was still on the roadmap, hadn't shipped it yet. The roadmap was a vision of where we thought the software would go, 5 years ago, but over time, our vision has changed slightly (well, individual features have got re-prioritised).

The numbering is interesting. Rather than going to 1.7.4 they've jumped to 1.8. At the same time some functionality is introduced in the Windows version which has been available in 1.7 for Mac, e.g. "Added Remove White Matte and Remove Black Matte to filters".

I've probably been one of the annoying critics of Affinity products in the past ...  but since it's always easy to talk about negative things I feel it's time for some positive feedback as well.
The new drag and drop feature for layers in the beta is excellent! Very long looked after and now working very well! Makes things just a lot easier. Thanks for implementing it!

It looks like the linked files crash was fixed as well. For a while it seemed like every time I had a linked file Publisher crashed, sometimes even embedded if I remember right. Glad to see things are working.