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Designer does not support plugins. Photo supports them, but the only documentation is supplied by Adobe for Photoshop, or by studying Open Source implementations like G'Mic.

Hi @Volker Krenz, Thanks for the screenshots. Please try the following: in the Photoshop Plugins Preferences in Affinity, in the Plugin Search Folders section remove the /Applications/Nik Collection line. Leave only the /Applications/Adobe Photoshop 2022/Plugins line. Restart Affinity, check if all plugin's names are present in the Filters>Plugins menu and try those two that weren't working previously (Silver Efex Pro and Viveza). Let me know if all is working correctly now. Thanks.

Exactly! If AP would have NO option to open artboards, it would define this tool as a single canvas, single focus etc. As users we see however, that there is an option to do so and the whole point of saving and switching to another tool is a plain frustration from the user perspective. The confusion and lack of integrity between the apps is exhausting. Designer gives you some raster features, but they are so limited that you need to switch to APhoto and the same goes for Photo and vector features. As a graphic designer who shifted into UX/UI design I can understand the defensive stance of some users, especially if they do small jobs or their work is mostly single file focused. Been there, done that, it changes when you have to scale. As of 2023 I simply can't imagine to work effectively with my designs scattered between hundreds of files. When you collaborate in a team, the more files you have, the possibility of creating inconsistencies increases. Photoshop is going into live design in a collaborative file for a purpose - it's extremely hard to control your brand/design/system consistency otherwise. I've worked in several teams/products where I was a center point at the crossroad between marketing, development, design and sales teams and single source of truth solutions really saved us at the end of the day. I will only mention iterative design and constant changes & improvements - it's unbelievably hard to update your materials when they are scattered. In the UX/UI field, one of the main points that such revolutionary app like Sketch was overtaken by Figma, was the ability to remove that pain (online, collaborative files). Sketch failed to allow teams to have up to date design files, some third party plugins tried to provide version control - but they worked awfully bad. That's why artboards in AP would allow us to work efficiently, compare dozens of creations, create variants/versions and decide what works better. Without hundreds of switches between AP/AD. As a person who creates whole product designs (UX/UI, branding, marketing materials (online & DTP)) I can see that my usage of Affinity suite is decreasing, despite new features being shipped. Recent examples: Instead of AP/AD I use Figma for social media and any online content, because I can have everything in one place and find/change multiple elements in a breeze. Instead of AP I recently switched to Luminar AI (they were giving away free keys) to quickly adjust MULTIPLE raw photos from photo sessions. It can work slowly, but it covers the need to replace Lightroom. Doing it in AP would be way longer. Oh and about Affinity and being jack of all trades, just look at SYMBOLS feature in AD. Intended for UI designers - is a pure pain & laugh through tears.

Actually, for things like this Serif could add plugin support. So people could code their own extensions if wanted. Affinity Photo seems to support Photoshop plugins, but Designer does not. There would be downsides to this though, so maybe they know why not to support this

I'm trying to get the new Stable Diffusion Photoshop plugins to work at all in Affinity Photo 2. They're very new, and do not load or even appear in the plugins section. I was experimenting with some very old photoshop plugins I found online, and they're in a 8bf format and it seems to get recognized by the plugin loader. So does this mean that new photoshop plugins are not compatible with affinity photo 2? I've been having no luck with the .ccx files. The plugin manager doesn't recognize them and extracting to their own folder doesn't seem to work either.

How specifically did you do that, & what folder were they in? In Preferences (or Settings) > Photoshop Plugins, what do you have set for Plugins Search Folders & Plugin Support Folders? (A screenshot of this window would help.) Finally, if you are using a Silicon Mac, you probably have to run AP in Intel emulation mode unless the plugins have been (re?)released as Universal ones. Do that by Getting Info for AP & check the “Open using Rosetta” option. For more about this, search the web on "Rosetta 2 Mac" or similar.

I share those worries, really don't want to see Affinity Photo falling by the wayside. I don't have problems integrating Photoshop plugins though. For example I recently trialled DXO PureRAW3, I opened the files as I normally do in another program called Fast RAW Viewer, the image opened in DXO PR3 was processed then DXO automatically opened the processed file in Affinity Photo 2.0.4., I can also open other plugins like Topaz Denoise A.I. and Luminar 4 in Affinity, it may be worthwhile for you to have another go at enabling 3rd party software in Affinity Photo, simply point to the location of the exe file for each plugin and make sure you have "Unknown Plugins" selected as you can see in this screen shot. Hope this helps.

No nothing in V2, the thing is, these plugins probably aren't like Photoshop plugins, they need a proprietary connection, kind of like the Panels plugins for photoshop or the extension type of plugin. So, I doubt you will see any of the indesign plugins being able to work with Affinity Publisher.

It looks to me like you have your Nik installed in Program Files\Google\Nik collection. Is there a reason they aren't in the 2.0/Plugins directory? When I click on Open Default Folder in Explorer, it takes me right to my 2.0/Plugins folder, where Gmic and Nik Collection reside. When I click on the Nik Collection directory, all of the Nik plugin folders are there, including Uninstall Nik Collection.exe. I have no such Program Files\Google\Nik collection showing on my Photoshop Plugins page under Plugin Search Folders. My only directory showing under C:\Program Files\Google is Chrome, and of course that doesn't show up on the Photoshop Plugins page.

The third-party plugins are Photoshop plugins, written to the Photoshop specification for image plugins, and probably a rather old version of that specification (probably 2015-2016 timeframe). Consult that documentation and you are on the same footing as the creators of the other plugins that work in Affinity Photo today. You could also look at the G'Mic plugin, which is open source, for a working example (for Windows, at least).

I wonder if something has changed, since when you installed them for Photoshop. I just noticed that what I downloaded ("nikcollection-full-1.2.11.dmg") is not a set of plugins, but of stand-alone applications. So, while AfPhoto can see the other Photoshop plugins I indicated, these can't, because they aren't plugins! I wonder if the plugins are still available, or they can now be downloaded only as separate apps. Paolo

When plugins are not installed in AP, maybe add a submenu that points to a greyed out "None installed" or a message that suggests the user can install photoshop plugins, etc. As it is, if someone goes to highlight and click this option, nothing happens. It can give the impression something is broken or that something failed to load in the background. I'm aware "..." is for dialogs but this isn't necessarily evident to others.

Hi all, I just installed Affinity Designer (v1.8.3.641) on Windows 10. I have the Nik Collection Plugins by DxO. I am trying out Designer with the current 90-day trial to see if it can replace Photoshop in my workflow. But I cannot install the plugins. The Preferences menu simply does not have the "Photoshop Plugins" tab at all! See screenshot. How can I fix this issue?

Let me add my two cents here. I am also having issues on MacOS getting Luminar NEO to show as a plugin. It works as expected under windows. I also reached out to Skylum (as has a number of others). I also use ON1 Photo Raw. ON1 can also run Photoshop plugins. When I point ON1 to the Luminar NEO install, it works great. This tells me that the Luninar NEO plugin is available and working as expected. Given that Affinity Photo on Windows works well with Luminar and ON1 Photo Raw works on MacOS, this would suggest an issue with plugins in Affinity Photo.

Annoyingly, that just shows the Photoshop Plugins window for the Windows version of AP & worse, it implies that all you need to do for either OS is to tick the 'allow unknown' box for it to work. That may be true for Windows but not for Mac. Also, I suspect that is meant for using the Topaz AI plugin(s), & I'm not sure it is supported as a plugin in the Mac version of AP. Anyway, I think what it all boils down to for Macs is unless somewhere there are the plugin files (ones with the .plugin file extension) stored in a user-accessible location, they won't work.

The Photoshop Lens Flare filter, is ok, it's a pretty half-hearted filter, its a single preset for each of the four lens options and has a slider for brightness but it's biggest flaw is the light source cannot be moved out the bounds of the canvas, so you have this false naff looking light source. You can expand the canvas first, apply the filter with the light source outside of the original dimensions and then crop it back to the original dimensions afterwards to omit the naff light source but that's just a PIA. Would be an idea to list the apps that have lens flare and any plugins that can do lens flare. Most lens flare capable plugins I know of are for video, like Knoll Light Factory by Red Giant and the standalone Lens Flare Studio by Brainfever.

Can we please get an update to the OCIO support in Affinity Photo? OCIO has been updated to OCIO v2 which supports a lot of cool new features including built-in transforms for ACES etc. Currently we cannot use OCIO v2 configs and this is rapidly becoming the standard as Nuke is beginning to integrate it, Maya 2022, Arnold Renderer, Redshift Renderer, both Photoshop/After Effects OCIO plugins and more. It would be great to have it upgraded to use OCIO v2 configs inside of Affinity Photo. Thanks! https://opencolorio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/upgrading_v2/_index.html#upgrading-to-v2

Budget constrains for a job that requires a higer investment are always, always a red flag. If you ask 10K for a job and the client is willing to pay 5K "because we're tight on the budget" then I walk away. If they can spend 9K we can talk about it. There is absolutely no reason to take an underpaid job "because the client is on a tight budget". I don't care. I make my price, you decide if you can afford it. If you can't, you will find cheaper professionals who will gladly do it. Can you give me a reason why companies still hire professionals instead of pushing one button to generate a full website/ecommerce with multiple tools, languages, billing dashboards and shipping tools? That's what you can do with Shopify, which is just one of the many available premade tools that requre zero knowledge. They are dumb-easy tools that anyone can use. They are exactly what you describe in your AI comments: an automated tool that does the job of a professional for a cheaper price, without requiring any experience of any kind. Push a button, get the product. So, why do companies still hire developers? Back to Photoshop and Affinity Photo. We already have content aware fillers. And the extremely cool Inpainting Brush (on Affinity Photo). Even ignoring the AI, which is a very recent news (still in beta anyways), why don't you feel the same about these tools? I am sure you would agree with me that both the filler and the brush require zero experience: just click an icon, drag the mouse across the image, done. You edited an entire element out of the photo. Anyone can do it, even a little child. So, why didn't those tools/plugins create any problem, similar to the AI problems you're worried about? I honestly can't find a single reason to ignore the AI and not adding it to AP. Seriously. Unless you also think that other plugins and tools are a danger for our jobs.

Just to tie threads together, @laurent32 also posted about this in the Photo bugs forum and noted that in Photo there is a similar issue with French and the large UI font for the Photoshop plugins pane. I confirmed this and found it's a problem in German, too. French German Also, Photo left aligns the buttons for Miscellaneous in French, German, Spanish, and Italian and right aligns them in Portuguese and Japanese when they should be centred. This isn't related to UI font size. And in Spanish, the Photoshop Plugins and Software Update names don't fit into the left nav in the large UI font size. Photoshop Plugins doesn't fit at the default size, either. In Italian and Portuguese, the Software update name doesn't fit at the large UI font size. In Japanese, the Software Update and User Interface labels don't fit at the large UI font size. Spanish Italian Portuguese French Japanese German

For free plugins, you can tryout if the older Google based NIK Collection 1.2.11 (Intel architecture based, so will need Rosetta 2 on Apple silicon architecture platforms) from 2016 still runs under the latest APh and MacOS version. Google Nik Collection (Mac) Vollversion: Nik Collection Photoshop Plug-ins für Mac OS ... etc. Other than that a Forum and/or Google search after "free macos PS plugins for affinity photo" should give you probably some hits.

If it's "nikcollection-full-1.2.11.dmg" ~ 618,2 MB, then everything is inside there, aka also the plugins. - You have to take a more closer look! Other than that, you can also download the NIK Collection Mac plugins from here (use Google translate if needed by you)... https://www.chip.de/downloads/Vollversion-Nik-Collection-Photoshop-Plug-ins-fuer-Mac-OS_91417094.html Further see how to install on Macs here (since site is in DE use again Google translate) ... Nik Plugins in Afffinity Photo installieren How to install Google NIK collection on Win into PS 2021 is described here (again a DE site use again Google translate) ... Photoshop Tutorial: Google Nik Collection unter Photoshop 2021 installieren

I figured it out so I wanted to update here just incase someone else has this issue... So I had read on another forum that in order for topaz to work in affinity, you had to install the software directly from the affinity website. In my case, I had installed it from the App Store. I initially didn't think that should matter but I tested it out and it actually is the case. After installing directly from the Affinity website, I added the plugin under settings, photoshop plugins, "plugin search folders". After that I was able to use topaz photo ai as a plugin with no problems. Hopefully that helps someone :)

How many Photoshop plugins do you have installed on your system? I ask because there's an issue with many audio DAWs, wherein they'll go through looking at all the audio plugins, regardless of whether or not they're for them, on any given system. Maybe (and I have no idea this is the case), Affinity Photo is sniffing into your Photoshop plugins folders. And were plugins the reason your 3ds Max install took minutes to launch? And/or having all their content packs installed and the script debugging tools etc?

Unfortunately, for me doesn't run with any V2 release and works properly with V1. Now I have only copied G'MIC files into C:\Users\UserName\.affinity\Photo\2.0 and 2.0(Beta)\Plugins. In Anffinity Photo, in Prferences -> Photoshop Plugins, Option 'Allow "Unknown" plugins to be used' is selected (marked). Plugin is visible in menu Filters->Plugins. Only doesn't run 😞 Where should I copy G'MIC files or how to install it in V2?

How do I delete?uninstall photoshop plugins om my MacBook Air