DavidMac

Let me start by saying that I have been using AP for a year now and I am, for the most part, absolutely delighted. I barely touch Photoshop any longer except pre-existing projects. What you have achieved in a short time is remarkable.

However there are a number of shortcomings that I believe could, and in some cases should, be addressed. This will not be a request for new features but suggestions for how I believe you could improve existing ones.
 
1) Skewing and Rotating: The selection area for skewing (shearing) and rotating is very small indeed and extremely difficult when working with a pen. One can easily lose the arrows simply in the distance of lowering the pen to the slate.  I find I have to put down my pen and use the mouse for this. This is very irritating. All my other graphics apps have a larger radius off acceptance for the pen. I have made this observation before and Miguel (MEB) on checking this agreed that it needed looking at and forwarded the request to the development team. So this just a reminder. 
 
2) Compound Selections: There is no easy way to create 'compound' selections - what in Photoshop would be done by holding the Shift key while Cmd Clicking in the layer icons. Affinity requires very convoluted multiple copying via channels to achieve this very simple and often needed operation. This has also been discussed elsewhere and once again Miguel forwarded this to the development team. So once again this is a reminder.
 
3) Layer Implementation: If you select a layer and then add a mask, a layer effect or layer adjustment AP exits the operation with the layer deselected. You have to go back into the layers palette and find it and reselect it each time. (My apologies for the bold type but this is the biggest single irritation and time waster I have when using AP.). I suspect that most people work as I do on a layer by layer basis whereby one often applies successive adjustments to the same layer one after the other. In my often complex images with large numbers of layers having to go back and find and reselect the layer each time is very frustrating. I believe that the addition of a mask for example should leave the new mask layer ready selected for painting. The application of adjustments or filters should leave the image layer selected ready for the next operation. I really think this is nothing more than basic good practice. Good manners even.

4) Merging Selected Layers: While on the subject of layers it would be good (and consistent) to have Merge Selected added to the right click context menu along with Merge Down and Merge Visible. It is conspicuous by its absence.

I think it fair to say that these four items above are less suggestions for improvement than corrections to genuine shortcomings.

Now to some suggestions for improvement.
 
5) Creating Mask Layers from a selection: When you add a new mask layer with a selection present AP creates a layer mask from that selection. I think it would be hugely helpful if creating a new empty mask layer did the same thing and created an inverted selection. It's a tiny improvement but I think a very helpful one.

6) Bounding box: I also would like a means to permanently turn off the bounding box when moving objects without having to hold down the shift key. I have noticed this request from a number of others as well.
 
7) Duplicating layers: Now I don't want to fall into the trap of saying make AP more like Photoshop but since you are in direct competition with them for a professional market some comparisons are inevitable. In AP to create a copy of a layer elsewhere in my layers palette I need to first duplicate the layer and then drag it it to its new position. In PS I can simply drag it to its new position while holding down the Alt key and it is automatically duplicated. It's a tiny thing but really convenient. AP already uses the Alt key for 'in image' duplication by dragging so this would be entirely consistent with AP's philosophy.
 
8) Locking Child Layers: There really is something rather un-instinctive and clumsy about having to select the move tool to lock children. I believe it would be far more logical if what is essentially a layer operation were to be found in the layers palette context menu. By the same token it would be very useful if locked layers carried some kind of flag to make it immediately apparent when they are locked.
 
9) Creating Layers from Layer FX: Whilst I have a perfectly workable workaround for this it is rather cumbersome. It often necessary to divorce layer effect from their parent layer. It would be good to see a single operation for this. I know that others have requested this too.

My next comments are much more in the nature of a wish list but they nonetheless represent occasions I have no choice but to leave AP and port across to Photoshop to achieve something I cannot do in AP ..... which is disappointing to have to do.

10) Cylindrical distortions: Cylindrical distortions are a common distortion which do not exist in AP. I can approximate this by eye using the Mesh Warp Tool but it is fiddly and not very satisfactory or accurate. You already have a spherical distort filter and a cylindrical distort is the same geometry applied to a single axis. It would seem to my ignorant armchair experts eye that the basic coding for this must already be in place. I think a simple way of achieving this (which would incidentally go a step better than Photoshop!) would be to provide two distortion sliders for X and Y axis. They can be locked in sync for spherical distortions and unlocked for X/Y distortions. This would allow not only spherical and cylindrical distortions but elliptical distortions as well! If the axis could be rotated as well then even better!

11) Motion Blur: Another filter I find limited in its usefulness is Motion Blur. It blurs the object on both sides at once. Since one of the commonest uses of this filter is to represent movement there is a real need to be able to blur on one side in one direction only.

12) Ripple Filter: Lastly the ripple filter is also sadly limited. It provides adjustment of amplitude only - nothing more. I think the ability to be able to adjust amplitude and wavelength independently is an absolute minimum requirement. For water rippling some kind of randomiser would be a wonderful addition as well.
 
Well that's it! It is terribly hard to write a post of this nature without sounding mean spirited because it inevitably sounds like a catalogue of complaints. Please accept my comments in the framework of my absolute admiration for what you have achieved in an astonishingly short time frame. It is tribute to the quality of your support that I can even sit down and write this confident that it will be intelligently read and assessed ......... even if not necessarily agreed with.

I could go on with a wish list for adding new and extravagant bells and whistles for ever ..... but I have deliberately confined myself only to how I believe you can make the existing tools even better. I do hope I have succeeded in expressing my sometimes critical comments as positive suggestions. 

Please keep up the good work!!

 

This has been a hot topic for ages and is being gradually implemented. I will make only the following remarks.
 
Settings should, as much as possible, be sticky not just within a single session but from one session to the next.
 
All tool settings should be sticky. 
 
All dialogue positions should be sticky.
 
Many dialogue settings such as Re-Size could be sticky as well. (This one is my pet hate. It defaults to Nearest Neighbour - probably the least likely option ever to be used in an app that is principally for photographic images! I have to remember to change it every time I use the dialogue.)

This has been a hot topic for ages and is being gradually implemented. I will make only the following remarks.
 
Settings should, as much as possible, be sticky not just within a single session but from one session to the next.
 
All tool settings should be sticky. 
 
All dialogue positions should be sticky.
 
Many dialogue settings such as Re-Size could be sticky as well. (This one is my pet hate. It defaults to Nearest Neighbour - probably the least likely option ever to be used in an app that is principally for photographic images! I have to remember to change it every time I use the dialogue.)

Yes. Using channels is exactly what I discovered for myself by playing. It works fine but it seems unnecessarily convoluted for such a basic (and quite frequent) requirement.
 
I was really hoping for something better and more streamlined.  :(
 
So unless someone's got a better way ......... Another one for the wish list .........?

Shear and rotate handles have FAR too small a detection radius. They are unnecessarily difficult to find and use. Even after finding them, the tiniest drift in lowering pen tip to slate for the click will cause them to be lost again. I have checked every other graphics app on my system and they all have a far larger radius of selection.
 
So far this is the single biggest irritation I have with AP. I have used it almost exclusively for six months now and am delighted with it, I want to stick with it, but this one weakness could be a deal breaker. It's such a tiny thing but it costs me so much in time fiddling around and puts me in such a foul mood that I am not sure I want to put up with it much longer. What really irritates me is that I can see absolutely no good reason for it. Why make life so difficult? Sorry guys, in the midst of all the miracles you have achieved, this one simply makes life hard.

Because the kind of work I do really needs freehand transformations that can be viewed 'live'. Typing in numbers would be even clumsier and more frustrating than it is trying to find the arrows and hang on to them. I do use the panel for precise numerical translations, especially rotations, but such occasions are very rare. 
 
My real frustration is why is it like this? It seems so unnecessary. What is the positive aspect of this tiny selection radius? No one else makes it so hard. Is there some piece of reasoning here, some positive aspect, that I am failing completely to see?

I have posted this before but not in this forum so I am adding to this thread.
 
I am well aware that macros are a work in progress so I shall presume that these remarks may be premature …. but ……
 
It would be hard to make this palette less legible if you tried. It is almost impossible to see when the buttons are pressed or not and other text and icons are on the extreme edge of legibility as well. This really needs looking at. Coloured buttons following the well established universal code of Red/Record, Green/Play, Grey Stop/Pause perhaps?
 
As you make the recorders abilities more sophisticated so will the complexity of the macros grow. A single step replay to help debug problems would be very helpful.
 
And, on the subject of macros, can you please make them assignable to keyboard shortcuts?

Thanks for this Miguel. I've written about this on a couple of occasions in the wish list entries but never had a response. From a position of blissful armchair coding ignorance I cannot believe it would be hard to change. I really do think it would be helpful. It certainly would to me!  :)

Shear and rotate handles have FAR too small a detection radius. They are unnecessarily difficult to find and use. Even after finding them, the tiniest drift in lowering pen tip to slate for the click will cause them to be lost again. I have checked every other graphics app on my system and they all have a far larger radius of selection.
 
So far this is the single biggest irritation I have with AP. I have used it almost exclusively for six months now and am delighted with it, I want to stick with it, but this one weakness could be a deal breaker. It's such a tiny thing but it costs me so much in time fiddling around and puts me in such a foul mood that I am not sure I want to put up with it much longer. What really irritates me is that I can see absolutely no good reason for it. Why make life so difficult? Sorry guys, in the midst of all the miracles you have achieved, this one simply makes life hard.

I tried focus magic out of curiosity when I first posted. It does work with AP. And as expected it didn't do much. But that's partly because the shake in the image in question has more than one direction. And focus magic sets only to one axis of removal.  It also has the problem that camera shake is not necessarily the same me across the entire image but it processes the entire image so parts that were previously not necessarily very shaken get shook .......   

Like content aware filters these kind of things look amazing in the carefully chosen demo images but don't always live up to real life challenges ......  ;)

Removing camera shake needs specialised sharpening. Zooming in on your picture there appears to be shake in two different directions which will be very hard to remove, there is also some general blur from the long exposure. AP's tools will definitely produce some improvement with the general blur but won't cope with the blur resulting from shake. Specialised filters are needed for this that work by attempting to analyse the path of the shake. Here are two specialised apps (Mac and PC) you could try. They both carry a hefty price tag - maybe a web search will find cheaper or free. Piccure 69€ is an independent standalone app. (If you want it can also be called as a plugin from within PS but doesn't work in AP). Focus Magic 65$ is a plug in only and it works fine with AP. Both are available as free trials so you could download them and try. Given the combination of blurring here don't expect miracles. 

Just a tiny niggle, but I do wish AP offered output levels too. It's very useful on occasions.

I was about to say "There's always more than one way to skin a cat" but perhaps this is definitely not the forum for it. ;)  But of course there are all sorts of approaches to the same thing and I can do this with Curves for example, but It would be a logical and useful addition to Levels. 

Hi Fixx,
You should be able to do this without moving the mask to outside the image layer, however there's a bug preventing this from happening when the mask was added (nested) directly to the image layer from a selection. I will get this logged.

What Micheal said!!  :)  :) 
 
I am, like Michael, an Adobe 'exile' since CS6. The hardest part is not learning, it's adapting, and unlearning the ingrained habits.
 
But .......
 
....... call me old fashioned if you like, I also hope that one day there will good printed material that I can lay on the desk beside me to absorb at my own pace instead of stopping, starting and sometimes back stepping videos.
 
But ......
 
....... there is an excellent 'printed' and printable instruction source. It's right here! It's this forum! The quality of support and help here is second to none. I have never failed to have a question answered helpfully and promptly.
 
The only difficulty is the embarrassment I sometimes feel about asking too many questions .......... I can only hope that, with time, I will become experienced enough to give back what I have received by answering other people's questions in turn.

I just got a mail inviting me to download 1.5 from the App Store. When I go to the App Store it doesn't offer me a download. The text is for 1.5 with a what's new section etc., but the button simply says Open. When I click it simply opens my existing 1.4.3.
 
Any suggestions?

We should consign Alfred to purrgatory for that one ......... 

We should consign Alfred to purrgatory for that one ......... 

Try spherical distortion ......... 

I have heard it discussed as a possible first question in the interview... No word of a lie

The cat is also a standard unit of measurement in Affinity.  ^_^

Wow ....... daily updates! You guys are astonishing!
 
A beta a day keeps Adobe away .........  B)

Wow ....... daily updates! You guys are astonishing!
 
A beta a day keeps Adobe away .........  B)

Wow ....... daily updates! You guys are astonishing!
 
A beta a day keeps Adobe away .........  B)

Now this is embarrassing. I can't remember if this is something I set myself or if it is built in. I though it was built in. :unsure:
 
Anyway the important thing is you have discovered that there is a shortcut that can be set. 

Can you add a little thing still that'd save a lot of time for 1.5?
 
When painting in a mask layer, temporarily switch to full black (bg) and full white (fg) in the colour picker? Right now it stays colour and you're painting in the mask layer / layer mask with the greyscale equivalent of the foreground colour.
 
Will test for the 32f white flashing later tonight/tomorrow.