Mark Oehlschlager

@Frozen Death Knight It's very tough to knock off an incumbent in a space where network effects create virtual monopolies. Adobe is the 800 pound gorilla in that regard. Regarded as the industry standard, where it's assumed that everyone will be exchanging files in native Adobe file formats, and dependent upon proprietary effects and features. I think it's pretty clear that Serif are targeting small professional graphic design firms, who are unhappy with and uncomfortable with Adobe's subscription model. Large agencies and corporate in-house teams are not really troubled by the subscription based licenses. For small creative firms, the three biggest worries about Adobe's subscription model are a) the never ending expense of renting one's tools; b) the risk of seeing the rental cost of the tools arbitrarily and dramatically increased; and c) the idea that if one were to stop paying the rental price for the tools, that one would lose access to one's own work product. The single most powerful aspect of the Affinity Suite value proposition is the availability of professional alternatives to AI, PSD, and INDD for a fixed, perpetual license fee. That's augmented by the availability of those tools on the iPad as well. The biggest worries for Affinity users is whether they can build a closed workflow independent of having to exchange native Adobe files with clients and collaborators. Helping Serif customers overcome or mitigate the problem of workflows that demand the exchange of Adobe file formats is a major strategic challenge.

The Affinity Suite is astonishingly good for a 1.8 version, and does most of what the Adobe trio (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign) does for graphic designers. Thus far, the opportunity that Serif have been able to exploit is the distasteful subscription policy imposed by Adobe, and the fact that Adobe is rather late in coming to iPad (though Adobe now has versions of Photoshop and Illustrator for iPad). If it weren't for the subscription only business model from Adobe, Serif wouldn't be in business. The Adobe Suite is more polished and mature, and is more extensive. It also has the advantage of being an "industry standard" and benefiting from a kind of network effect. Serif need to maintain feature parity with AI, PSD, and INDD, or (even better) exceed the features of AI, PSD, and INDD, and maintain an attractive one-time perpetual license fee. If either Adobe were to offer their suite for a fixed fee, or Serif were to convert to a subscription model, Adobe would win hands down. Still rooting for Serif and the Affinity Suite, but they are really facing an uphill battle.

For some reason, you have applied a 12pt baseline shift to several paragraphs on pages 30 and 31. That's what is causing your problem.

What you're doing in Photoshop is clipping the orange square to the Patreon symbol. In Affinity Photo, you would place your PNG Patreon logo with transparent background, then draw your orange square shape on a layer above, then drag that orange shape layer under the layer label for the Patreon logo to make the orange layer a "child layer" of the logo layer.

You may want to select a font with Small Capitals that you can raise with a baseline offset. Small Capitals are designed to match the optical weight of the complementary capitals and lowercase letters from the same font set at the same point size. The problem with scaling the "M" up or "EDITATIONS" down is that you get obvious mismatched stroke weights. The example below is set in Adobe Caslon Pro, using small capitals.

@evtonic3 I've tried to reproduce the video tutorial above, and I can't apply levels directly to the spare channel in Affinity Photo either. You can paint on the spare channel, but you cannot apply levels, curves, or any other adjustment. The only approach is to rasterize any placed background image; Control + click on a layer channel and select Create Grayscale Layer; apply a Levels adjustment to that Grayscale layer; then Control + click on the adjusted Grayscale layer and select Rasterize to Mask. But none of that is achieved by working directly on a spare channel.

Is it possible build press-ready documents in the Affinity Suite apps where one can control the inks used (CMYK and spot inks), and where one can both proof the color separation, and be able to output black & white color separation files complete with registration and printer's marks?

Presently, in Publisher, one can only setup symmetrical, two-page spreads, but I am requesting the ability to set up variable width, multi-page spreads for use cases such as the following: page fold-outs in books and magazines that reveal large maps, charts or photos half-page inserts in books and magazines soft covers and dust jackets for books and magazines with panels for front flap, front cover, spine, back cover, back flap In Designer, one can group several artboards to set up accordion or gatefold brochures. Can't the same principle be extended to Publisher to allow variable width, multi-page spreads? Thank you for your consideration.

@dsnaps12 Pricing should not be complicated nor encourage the user base to be scattered or fragmented across multiple versions of the software. The price and frequency of paid licenses should strike the right balance between covering operating costs for development, marketing and support, and making the purchase decision a no-brainer. The pricing strategy must cover cost + modest profit, but remain attractive enough to grow the user base, where everyone can afford to stay up-to-date — no user base fragmentation.

@MEB Here are my Performance preferences. I accepted the defaults of the download: Open GL. I'm running on Mac OS High Sierra (10.13.6) on a 2012 iMac. 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M 512 MB

Just downloaded Photo Beta 1.9.0.199. I noticed that many brushes are not rendering in the Brushes Panel nor in Brush Editor. See attachment.

I see that the app icon has much rounder corners. Was this imposed by the Apple Human Interface guidelines for Big Sur?

Not a show-stopper, but off-putting nonetheless: often layer thumbnail images for new layers and masks do not render. Is there a way to force layer thumbnails to render correctly as they are created?

@anon2 Thanks for that tip. I would never have guessed.

@Andy Somerfield Would it be possible to use the Dodge and Burn tools directly on a Spare Channel as well as Mask Alpha Channels? EDIT: Maybe, for now, the solution is to paint greyscale tones with the Brush tool set to Overlay blend mode, although one can't target shadows, midtones or highlights in that way.