Annehouw

There is a lot to like about Affinity Photo. While putting it to first professional use, I have been bitten by something that made me abandon the software for now. I am using Capture One as my Raw and DAM front-end. Going to and from AP works very well. I use the TIFF file fomat to do so. Yesterday I hade been editing for a few hours on an image with many layers (multiple exposures, lightpainted details etc). Everything went smoothly. I saved a few times and both in AP as in C1 no problem. Up untill the last layer I added. I saved the image, the export progress bar came up as before. However in C1, the warning "unreadable or damaged file" came up. I went back to AP and the file was not readable as well, complaining about corruption. My guess is that the file stack exceeded 4GB and that caused the corruption. However, there was no warning of any kind. I looked at the TIFF file in explorer and it had about the same size as the original TIFF without all the layers. I do not have versioned back-up software running in the background. Normally there is no need and I never lost a complete image stack before. Aside from the erroneous behaviour in corrupting the file, it would be nice if AP kept an internal recovery file for situations like this. Hope this is in the roadmap?!

@Wosven' Some great suggestions. I did the sequence you wrote down (without the shortcuts for the moment) and that works as well. I need to rewire my muscle memory but that will be OK. Thanks!

Hi NotMyFault, Thanks for this superquick reply! Much appreciated. In step 5, I indeed move the layer (partially filled because of my selection earlier). Deactivating the layer and picking the colors indeed is a good trick and there I the tutorial is a good pointer as well to quickly change one color in the gradient. However, this still gives me a monochromatic fill layer. In my use cases, there not only is a luminosity change but als a hue change across the gradient. So then I will need to go into the fill menu to change the end hue. (But see the shorter workflow based on your suggestions below). I have thought about the swatches, but since this is a retouching effort based upon what is in the image, no gradient is the same twice. Ever. "Why not draw the gradient directly after step 2?": I do not know if I understand what you are saying here. Maybe this? Define the selection Sample a color as my background color Add a fill layer Select the Gradient Tool (which now has one correct sampled color at one of its ends) Drag to create a linear fill Deactivate the fill layer Sample my second color from the image with the color picker giving me the other sampled color at the other end of the gradient Re-active the fill layer Reposition the handles (and possibly mid point) to get the color gradient to match the surrounding area Mask and blend Add noise That indeed saves 7 steps already! Thank you.

I am starting the investigation to migrate my workflow from PS to AP. Most things are more or less in line, but I have come to an essential workflow element that is so inefficient in AP that I am wondering if I am doing it completely wrong. Any suggestions are very welcome! Let me explain: Retouching on a gradient is hard to do. One of the tricks in my toolbox is to replace that part of the image with a gradient fill based on end-colors picked from that segment of the image itself. The workflow in PS is as follows: Make new empty layer Define the selection Set the background color to one end of the selection Set the foreground color the other end of the selection Select the gradient tool Draw the gradient Mask and blend with soft brush Add a bit of noise In Affinity Photo I have found no quicker way than doing it as below Define the selection New fill layer Change type from solid to linear Activate the move tool Move selection out of the way (as it blocks the area I want to pick colors from) Activate the gradient fill tool Click on the color bar With the first end point selected, click on a color bar again Pick the color from my image Activate the other gradient end point Click on color Pick the second color from my image Select the move tool Move the selection back into place Reselect the gradient fill tool Draw the gradient Mask and blend with soft brush Add a bit of noise That is a lot more effort! I have tried, but failed, to get fill and gradient tools to open up with my selected background and foreground colors as end points: Fill layer starts with the background color and changes to a luminosity range of this same color when choosing linear fill The Gradient Tool starts with black and white by default.