Rocketdrive

I successfully used the Razor Core X with a RX580 connected to my MPB 2016. This is a slightly cheaper solution than the BMD eGPU, but upgradeable. There were no issues at all with this setup under macOS Mojave.

I am pretty sure that the current GPU is Your bottleneck. 5k are a lot of pixels that need to be pushed. An eGPU with a modern GPU with, say, 8GB should help. Just the other day I was testing a 4k detachable tablet/mobile workstation from HP. The native resolution was jus too heavy even for the Nvidia Quadro inside. Once I reduced the resolution to FHD (which, btw., looks just as fine on the puny 14in panel) panning and navigating suddenly became fluid. You could give lower res a try, maybe You won't even notice. Of course, that somehow defies the purpose of having spent money for the insanely highres LG

When Designer was released a couple of years ago I was totally thrilled: because of what it already was, and because of what Serif promised for the future. Now that future has arrived. We have super strong apps for a variety of design disciplines, with Designer and Photo even working on iPads. I don't know if Publisher will go down this path, but I wouldn't mind if Serif chose to do so. The team deserves a huge kudos for pulling off this titanic task

I use both platforms, here's what I miss: Windows: a fullscreen mode, i.e. without window bar - or is it called title bar? The one that stretches over the whole app, but houses only the min, max and close buttons. Think of macOS's fullscreen mode, or fullscreen mode for webbrowsers (F11 in most modern browsers, on most platforms). Tabs must stay visible, though. Mac: multiple palette columns. We have them in the windows version, please add them for Macs, too. While I see that some users circumvent this limitation via the multiple windows mode (not sure this is the correct name), that is a no go for me. I prefer the more elegant monolithic, non-overlapping and watertight UIs

My main usecase is illustration, as such I am a little picky when it comes to the brush engine and paint related stuff I used Photo for almost a year for most of the digital illustrations I did. Long story short: I found it suberb for finishing touches and compositing, as well as areas that I could create as vector shapes. But for actual drawing I switched back to other tools. Now I have no desire to bash, but would rather like to point out some areas that could improve the drawing experience a lot. Brush engine. It needs to become more fluid, and natural. Jittering needs to be addressed. Apple has nailed it with Predictive touch and Apple Pencil, and every app that relies on both. Adobe has nailed it with Photoshop and Wacom. I'd love to see Photo get there, too. In fact, Photo and Designer on iPad are much better for drawing than their desktop counterparts. Keyboard shortcuts. I'd love to see more flexibility here, at the cost of a more complex setup. Temporary hotkeys would be great, i.e. a function is active only as long as the key is being pressed. Like, hold "r" while dragging the pen could rotate the canvas. Or hold "s" and drag to change the brush size. Also, I would really need every function, toggle and widget in the UI to be configurable. Selection quality. Selected areas always look (and are) slightly jagged. It's not a biggie, but selection quality could be better.

I, too, would love to have a user configurable, simple hotkey or other method for changing brush opacity and size on the fly. There are many best practices out there, Serif just needs to pick one: Sketchbook has an always visible widget, dragging within horizontally changes brush size, vertically: opacity Procreate has always visible sliders for both Photoshop has a hotkey combo Blender (which has many brush uses) has a hotkey ZBrush also has single hotkeys

HTML 5 based apps and Chrome OS are what comes to mind. Ideally, they don't care at all if the hardware underneath is a tablet, or a server, or anything in between. While not ripe yet for the type who needs his Photoshop, or Designer, it would totally make sense to me to have app packages that run on a lightweight, standardized abstraction layer, whatever it might be called.

Great apps should be available on as many platforms as possible. Because only then will they reach as many great artists as possible. It has always bothered me that some apps work on PCs only, and others only on Macs. If they are cross platform often there is a preferred platform with tradeoffs on others. I hope that this will be over some day, rather sooner than later.

I prefer seamless interfaces. Fortunately most DCC apps offer docking of palettes. There sure is a reason for the single column, but can we please get multiple columns for Affinity apps on macOS, too?

Hi Sean, I must have deleted the file... Just checked but found .afdesign files only. Which means that I finished the job in Designer. I'll keep the bad boys next time for troubleshooting, though

I found out that on Windows I can dock multiple columns side by side. I tried the same on my Mac, and it doesn't work. Is it me, or "by design"?

Dude, Your tone ... I already agreed with You, while pointing out an alternative. If my suggestion is not a thing for You that's fine, we agree to disagree. Maybe it is for someone else. This is a place for open discussion and You are not the one shutting people down. Nor am I. So let's keep it calm and friendly around here. Using tools for (motion) design constantly involves work-arounds and tricks. And hearing how people solve problems is just a lot more interesting.

I totally see cases where having editable vectors would be nice. Been there, missed that, moved on. It's just that many posts sound as if there was no way to have Affinity assets in Motion. Which is not true, there is a way, and it is pretty straight forward, and it's totally fine for production. In many cases it doesn't matter at all if I import a vector or raster file. In the end, Motion will rasterize everything anyway.

Alright, the "Resource Manager" is a good start, I never noticed it. Thanks @fde101 for pointing that out. Now I was able to change all files from "embedded" to "linked" via Resource Manager (RM). However: in the layer pallette they still show up as "embedded" the file size is unchanged: prior to linking it was around 70 MB, and is the same after linking. So, my question stays

I just encountered some strange export quirks. The first screenshot is out of Publisher, the second is from the PDF. Definitely not what I want Oh and file sizes... We really need the PDFs to be smaller than the source files. Right now, the Publisher file is over 60 MB, and so is the PDF. Sorry to bring that up, but Indesign squishes that down to 4 MB, tops. That is the benchmark

I tried linking a Designer file, but Publisher will always embed it. This is unintended behaviour IMO. Is that something that will be addressed in future updates? A dedicated pallette/list of all linked and embedded files is also needed to keep track in larger projects

For assets that do not scale too much a solution that works just fine is to export them as layered PSDs. Motion should easily handle double or triple resolution assets. While I agree that vectors would be a more elegant approach, I've been successfully using exported layered PSDs and single PNGs in Motion for an animation project. What I'm saying is: there is a path from Affinity to Motion right now

Learning a few new tricks from time to time is a healthy thing I got used to nodes pretty quickly, and they are a better approach to solving many problems. They better describe the flow of information than stacked lists or layers and are also visually a lot more pleasing. I need to be honest, I got hooked on Fusion and do a lot of work in 3D apps. Most of them have such an elegant approach to complexity (including nodes, or other forms of procedural building tres), I have been wondering why the classic 2D content creation apps never adopted some of their tricks.

A good DAM would finally let me see/preview any of my files on as many devices as possible. That includes not only 2D image files but also pre-rendered or realtime rendered 3D assests. And ideally not stop there but also support (via plugins) office documents, HTML files, of course PDFs and all text based files. Digital content creation is more than 2D image files, even if they make out a big part The DAM should play nice with cloud storage providers, work on at least Win, Mac, Android and iOS, and be nothing less than a better, visual file explorer for each OS. It should support plugins which can take care of rendering previews for more exotic files. It should have a nice and fast cache (independently synced catalog?) for thumbs and previews and play nice with any apps needed for actually editing the assets. I wouldn't mind if it had it's own set of basic (RAW) editing tools for images. It must let me see the original folder structure, but also support tags and standard metadata and let me build smart folders (based on tags or other properties). It needs a lightning fast search.

OK I think I get the "logic" now. The list we see is one of brush PRESETS, right? It appears that as soon as I change any setting, like brush size, the highlight is gone because the current settings do not match the original settings. It would be nice if the preset stayed selected, like is the case with text styles, even if they get overrides.

I'd love to customise Photo (or Designer). A combination of the following would be useful: a custom shelf, or persona with say, up to 9 positions that can be anything, and I really mean anything: a brush preset, a tool (e.g. brush, spline or lasso selection), or just a toggle like "protect alpha". Or rasterize layer. You get the idea. directional gestures, or flicks. The sweet spot for these seems to be 6, which means I can have super fast access to 6 more controls that I find important. Could again be brush presets, filters or any command/menu within Photo. Background: I am painting a lot in Photo. This means that I use some tools quite often, while others I hardly touch in weeks. Things like the polygon lasso tools force me to switch personas in order to create a selection, and switch back in order to move the selection. This is crude. I'd rather customise an additional persona to my needs and never look back What do You think?

I like the idea of scriptable alot. Why not expand it to make Affinity Scriptable Everywhere? Opening access to all objects and creation methods would let people finally tweak and create their specialized tools and presets and shortcuts and take away pressure from devs, who could concentrate more on a solid core and care less about every special need that certain people have. Not that those are not important, au contraire, it is imperative to allow for more exotic solutions. Thats what many people like and need. Having a thriving third party developer community can be a big boost for software. 3dsmax was and is so strong because all sorts of specialized plugins helped expand the core for special needs. Blender is scriptable down to the bones, as are all major (3D) digital content creation packages. Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator have all some sort of API for scripting. This is a huge bonus for all. It would be gread if version 2.x of the Affinity suite opened up to dev access. Preferably with some sort of industry standard like Python (but don't take my word for it, I just read, but do not develop myself )

Maybe we can agree that anythig should be assignable to a shortcut? I'd like to map brush presets, toggles (like protect alpha) or other paint/illustration related toggles and brush tweaks to keyboard shortcuts.

Go check out Blender 2.8 alpha and Greasepencil. While I can totally understand the wish for a one-stop-shop (which may never happen), You can start building You own pipelines right now with the tools best suited. Look at the teaser below. The full tutorial ( $ on Gumroad ) from Jama Jurabaev explains a process that starts with 3D sketches in Blender and goes further in ... any painting app that You prefer, Photoshop in his case. Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with him in any way, I just find this a very unique way of creating concepts and art.