jlandd

Still no wisdom on this?

I would love to be shown that I'm just suffering from a settings issue, but I'm still unable to use brushes due to what was described earlier. Can anyone point out how to set the brushes so that they do not function like in the example? No matter how I set them, they don't adhere to shadows/mids/highlights, which makes getting proper results burning and dodging futile. Hesitant to upgrade to current version if this is still the case. Devs?

No matter how I have it set, protect hue or not, when brushing burn on an image I still get the same result as in the dog image. Doesn't really matter how it works on blocks of solid colors. Using that image as an example, you cannot do any work on the darks of the eyes or eyelids because, setting it on shadows, it just burns everything. If you wanted to just slightly darken a patch of white fur with the brush, setting it to highlights, if you went into the dark fur it would burn that the same. It does not respect any shadow/mid/highlight settings when brushing onto an image, at least not in any way that enables you to use the brush as expected, and as it works in nearly all other image apps. If it's not broken I would have thought I'd have gotten some response pointing out which settings to change to make it usable.

I tend to do a lot of brushing on of filters to selected tonal ranges, and a LOT of burning only on selected ranges, and I've never understood why this function never seemed to work in Affinity Photo, so I've more or less gone back to other apps for it. It has always seemed that no matter what the settings, the unchosen ranges should not, or just barely, be affected. Burning with the brush tool with tonal range set to shadows should result in only shadows being darkened. That's how it works everywhere else It's a great way to add bits of contrast very selectively and neatly. But I've never been able to get close to doing it in Affinity. In 1 (and I've been asking around before upgrading and responses have been that that particular thing hasn't changed, so it seems also in 2) that brushing burn or dodge into a chosen range lets way too much of the other tonalities be affected, enough that the function isn't usable. Hue protect on or off. It certainly doesn't respect the edges of the tone. Attached is a quick example of burn at 65px, opacity 100%. Highlights, mids, then shadows, hue protect on. Is there any difference between them? Sure. But no matter how I adjust the parameters of the tonal range or brush, this is the kind of separation I get, and it's not nearly enough. Is there any way to change whatever default results in this behavior to make brushing/burning to a selective tonal range work as expected? I went to Affinity Photo from Aperture and PS, and even an older version of PS Elements to tide me over until I updated the OS beyond it, and none of them responded to burning like this. All of them would burn into shadows and literally only shadows would be darkened. Thanks, J

I have to respectfully disagree on this one. There are several resize options most users would never use, such as yards or meters. If a user needs to resize by them why not have them type in yard or meter values? Percentage is such a common need among the general user base (meaning those who aren't adding five meters to an image) that it makes more sense (in my opinion, of course) to give % a slot in the menu real estate. I would personally set it as default and switch to pixels at the end of the work. It's just a UI decision based on which menu items deserve to be in there and which the user should enter symbols with the value. But, for example, someone who only deals in millimeters, centimeters and meters is not going to miss inches, feet and yards not being in there, and vice versa, so it seems an odd call to leave off percentage, which would be used by both. Just my 2 cents

Some good info here but some gaps remain. I don't use PS yet AP exports an inferior JPG in terms of definition to any plain vanilla image app I use, as well as when I pull up Aperture just to check. No sharpening is done on output on any of these (if it can be done, I have it turned off) and JPG quality is taken into account. It's not comparing a 100% JPG export to a 70% one and this particular comparison involves sRGB all around. I don't resize in AP on export, always first and then export that changed size. But I have been using the default bilinear to reduce dimensions before exporting , as I had assumed it would default at least to something not noticeably inferior, and as jowday notes, it is recommended for reduction. But something is making it not yield a good result, and again I stress it's not comparing to a reduced JPG that has been sharpened on export. I'll do some tests with Lanczos (non separable) and see what I get. Basically I only work in RAW, TIFF or JPG (if that's what the original is) and export TIFF for myself and JPGs of various parameters for others. Should I simply avoid bilinear and stick with L (non sep) if it seems to improve what I'm experiencing? Thanks for any wisdom on this : ).

+1, absolutely agree with this