DavidMac

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.

With almost any (but not quite all) of the basic tools selected you can right click in the image and select Reset Rotation. 

As a footnote this is also how you can rotate if you don't have a touch pad or rotate disc on your Wacom.

I'll take your word for it .............  :huh:  ;)

I have been trying to create some realistic water ripples in AP. I am after a general randomised overall ripple, not the radiating circle type. This is not an urgent need, it is simply an exercise I set myself as part of really learning AP in depth after years of doing things its competitor’s way.
 
AP has a ripple filter but it has no independent control over amplitude and wavelength and no means of randomisation. It really isn’t suitable for this particular task.
 
PS has an excellent wave filter but the whole point was not to use it!!
 
I found two plugins for this: Redfield Water Ripples and Flaming Pear Flood. The former is Windows only and the latter doesn’t seem to work in the AP plug in environment.
 
I tried using a high contrast black and white image of rippling water as the basis for the Displace filter but the results were less than satisfactory.
 
So does anyone have any suggestions for doing this in AP?  :wacko: 

I forgot to add I also played withe liquify persona for this. It proved very fiddly and the results were not really very useful as it gives the shape (sort of) but completely 2D - no shadows and highlights. 

I don't have a solution but I admire the problem :D

Thank you guys for this beta. It just goes on getting better!
 
One request. When the polygonal lasso is implemented can we please have an open curve? The closed lasso can get confusing and drives me up up the wall sometimes!! Just my little two cents worth .........  ;)

It occurs to me that you may be able to ameliorate the problem by using what in the movie business we call "soft cuts". That is say, when you make your final video, using a very short dissolve of five to ten frames between each image instead of a hard cut. It's not a cure - it's a disguise. But it may help.
 
Certainly clean registration of the originals by carefully measured camera position exactly centred on the picture will save a lot of heartache. This also applies to the lighting which should be equally as consistent as possible and even across all the picture so you don't get brightness changes in parts of the image from one shot to the next. Easiest way to do this is in a darkened room with two lamps of equal brightness either side of camera at about 45° to the your picture. This will avoid hot spots from reflections of the lamps. Keep them some distance away, if they are too close the outside edges of the picture will have a tendency to be brighter than the centre. One simple way to check even lighting is to hold up a finger in front of the picture. It will cast two shadows. As you move your finger from side to side across the picture the two shadows should stay the same brightness. Try and adjust your lamps to achieve this. I do this often when lighting green screens for effects work. Its crude but quite effective. 
 
Obviously if you have an incident light meter than you can measure the brightness across the image. But they are not something found in the average toolbox!
 
Very best of luck.
 
David Mac

Hi Jackamus
 
I took a look at your file. If have understood your requirement correctly, this sounds less to me like a cropping problem than a registration problem.
 
If you can get the car in perfect registration so it doesn't move then everything else should register fine as well and cropping should not be necessary.

Here is my suggestion:
 
Turn off visibility in all but the bottom two layers. Set layer 2 to something like 50% opacity. You can now use the arrow keys and tiny adjustments of the bounding box handles to stretch, squeeze or rotate. to get layer two perfectly registered over layer one. I won't pretend it will be easy - it will likely be very fiddly, but it should be entirely achievable.
 
Once you are happy with the first registration set layer 2 to full opacity turn on layer 3 visibility, set to 50% and repeat the registration ...... and so ad nauseam until you have registered all layers. You should now have a perfectly static car and in theory, if the car is registered, so should the edges of the coloured background be registered too.
 
That's my best guess at this ....... 
 
Good luck
 
David Mac

Now that is very clever. Thank you!!!

HI Kip
 
In all fairness to Affinity the release nots for the the beta made it absolutely clear in advance that there was no backward compatibility and gave an equally clear advice not to use it for production work.
 
That being said here's a possible workaround. 1.5 has an excellent PSD export. Export your 1.5 beta files to PSD and then open these in 1.4.3. I have tried this on a couple of quite complex images and it seems to work fine with everything preserved intact. Inevitably there are probably going to be some incompatibilities with certain features but I haven't discovered them yet. I must however caution that I have only tried this with 8 bit images.
 
Worth a try maybe?

In Preferences > User Interface there is an option Show Selection in Layers Palette
 
​For some reason the explanation for this item is missing from the Preference Panel > User Interface section in Help. 
 
I have tried checking and unchecking it and performing various selection functions whilst watching the Layers Palette and am quite unable to determine what this preference does. 
 
It's not life threatening, but the fact that I cannot work out what this does is like an itch I can't scratch.   ;)
 
Could someone please enlighten me ......?
 
Thanks.

I love mesh deform  in Affinity Photo. Such a hidden treasure.  Prefer it a lot  over Photoshop . Always thought their puppet wrap and adaptive wide angle are useless toys not allowing necessary precision.   I had to use 3d max or Blender to mesh deform an image before.        To bad in Affinity it doesn't work on embedded files or groups  nondestructively.
 
 Does Design  have similar tool for bitmap filled objects?  I wasted my trial period 
 
 
ps. $4   is a current price in Russia

1) You can buy it; no rental.

Toggling blend modes from layers updates a preview on the fly, where as in Photoshop, you have to select the blend mode and wait for an update. I think how Affinity updates as you move from blend mode to blend mode is better. 

I know that macros are still very much a work in progress so I hesitate to criticise too much at this stage but I do have some serious issues and some questions. 
 
I'll start with the problems I have ......
 
Panel Contrast is so appallingly low that unless I am in a darkened room I can barely read it. The words Save, Export, Import are just legible but why not use the same pale grey and white used for the rest of AP's interface?
 
The on off state of the record, stop and play buttons is even worse. It is so subtle that I quite simply don't know whether I am recording or stopped. You use coloured icons throughout your interface. They would be very helpful here and there is an established green play, red record, white/grey stop, colour coding that is almost universal across all kinds of apps. Why so shy?
 
I have read in posts of an undocumented eye icon for pausing which is also hard to see for similar reasons. In my case it seems to be so hard to see that I am quite unable to find it at all! Can someone please tell me where to find it? 
 
Now a couple of requests.
 
Macros aren't always straightforward and the more sophisticated your recorder becomes the more complex the macros can get and to debug if they don't work as expected. A step through playback mode would be a huge asset in my view.

Also can we please have the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to macros? The two are entirely complimentary as both are about speed and productivity.

This is a great addition to AP but please lets have it clearer and easier to use. Once again I do appreciate that this is early days so forgive me if my criticisms are premature.
 
David Mac
 

I can confirm this. I have the same problem here. Exactly the same symptoms.

Hi DavidMac,
If you press and hold ⌥ (option/alt) while clicking on canvas over the layers you can cycle thought them from top to bottom (unless they are inside groups - in that case the group is selected instead).
 
You can select a layer in the Layers palette with the mouse and use the Move tool to move it around without selecting the layers on top however I have not tested this with a tablet/pen yet. I believe it was already reported but have to check that.

Hi DavidMac,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
Select the triangle then go to the context toolbar and check Lock Children. You can then move the triangle without affecting mask's position.

Yes, I've asked about this several times in the past. Every time I install a new version I have to completely re-configure my workspace. Since AP remembers your workspace from one session to the next it must keep the parameters stored somewhere. The ability to export those to a workspace configuration file would be a huge bonus!
 
Please, please, pretty please, developers. It can't be rocket science!  ;)

I am covered in embarrassment Andy. How did I miss it! Thank you yes. It is there! Working my way through the rest of the new stuff at the moment. Looking good.
 
David Mac

Looks terrific. Thanks!  :)  :)

Looks terrific. Thanks!  :)  :)

So far I have done a few photo corrections and basic extract, cut and paste in AFP and was sufficiently impressed to decide to invest some time and effort into trying to learn AFP to a usable standard.
 
This is my first attempt to produce an image entirely in AFP. I can't pretend it wasn't very frustrating at times. One of AFP's most amazing features, the way it stacks and nests layers, masks, adjustments, is very powerful and subtle, but it's also the most difficult to get your head around. You have to forget anything you learned elsewhere and learn a quite different approach and philosophy.  :unsure:
 
This simple image contains no photographic elements at all. It is 'painted' entirely in AFP using pen, brush, Layer FX, and some noise. That's it. Just the very basics. Given that my next best passion after photo manipulation and creation is my kitchen and cooking, I thought a foodie subject would be appropriate. I broke an egg into a non stick pan put it beside my monitor and created the image from life just as one would a traditional still life painting. This is very unusual for me as I normally work photographically, but it seemed a good way to get to grips with some of the tools.
 
Can't pretend to be entirely happy but no one should be ashamed of first attempts, that's how we learn ............ and I learned a LOT by doing this.  :)
 
I shall definitely be persevering further.
 
David Mac

This is my second full image produced with Photo. Once again it is quite simple and, once again, it is focused on familiarising myself with a small set of specific tools. My previous image (the egg) focused on pen and brushes. This image focuses on vector shapes, boolean operations, fills and mesh warping. The snake was created from the rectangular texture shown in the inset above. I used the wonderful Mesh Warp Tool. This is an amazing tool!! The ability to define where you put the mesh grid yourself is just terrific. Whoever developed this gets my five star award ...... so if someone from Serif is reading this please pass this on to them. :) I also played with the Deform Filter but failed utterly to comprehend its workings and got hopelessly lost. So I shall have to hope that there is a tutorial on this later.  :unsure:
 
This really is a great app!  :)  :)