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I noticed you can add an Affinity designer icon to the toolbar in the photo beta. It currently doesn't do anything but will this eventually allow you to open your current file in Designer or perhaps even more awesome, just switch to Designer view! Also to what extent will you be able to edit Designer files in photo or visa versa? Will it be like how you can currently embed documents into other documents and editing an embedded file will open up the correct application? I've already tried to put a Designer file in a Photo file and when I clicked on it it I was surprised to find that it opens! Its cool that it opens up in Photo but a little weird that I don't get Designer Tools. I can edit a gradient but some options are missing. It would be really cool if the tools and windows would just shift to Designer view or Photo view just like persona's do!

Been dabbling in the Affinity Photo Beta. I’ve been somewhat stymied by the philosophy of the workflow of personas. I’m used to Lightroom (LR), its plugins, and Photoshop. Looking forward to transferring to Affinity. However, how have some Beta users created workflows straight from RAW? Or do you work from LR processing and create Tifs to be processed in Affinity Photo Beta? Here’s where I can best be elucidated: The Affinity and Develop Personas seem to offer similar processes; but they are different—what’s the philosophy behind both? Is there some documentation (with more detail than the videos) that create a crude map of what some workflows can accomplish? Thanks in advance, Wei Chong

It would be better for layer and object management if 1. New layer would be inserted at the current location (currently selected object) in the layer stack. It is awkward to have to scroll, find and drag new layer where you want in the object stack after you create one when you have hundreds of objects. 2. There were a modifier key when creating new layer (like shift-click new layer icon) which would move all the selected objects to a new layer. That layer would be created at the current position in the layer stack (uppermost selected object, I guess).

To whoever it may concern, One thing I noticed on my initial use of Affinity Photo, is that the sliders work well, but if I want to change by entering numbers into my adjustments, the fields do not highlight the full field, and this can slow down workflow by a lot. I think that would be a good feature to adjust. :) I was looking through the color balance adjustment, I noticed that it defaults to the shadows adjustment. This is fine, an insight that I have is that it would be beneficial to default to the midtones, because this is a more generally desired adjustment (at least in my mind) and then keep the options for highlights and shadows (which I assume is pretty obvious, but I am saying it anyway.) Additionally, I couldn't find this feature yet, it might exist. A very useful tool for Photo editing is the before/after function, this can be done easily with single layers, but turning each layer on and off individually can take time. If the layers can be turned on and off by mass selecting and then clicking boxes. That would help, or to have a hotkey to have only the original layer on. That would help too. I also noticed that the Zoom in/out shortcuts aren't fully functional and bug sometimes jumping large amounts or doing the opposite function. When I was doing this testing, I was using a Mac mini (Mid 2010) 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256 MB A significantly older computer, but Affinity is working great! Thank you so much for this! I am very excited to see how Affinity does. I am already planning on purchasing it when the time is right!! -Jordan

Scrolling through all the pre-sets can make the menu unwieldy. In the interests of tidiness can these have a drop down option to display them, or a pop up when you access that part o the menu. Rather than always there? Action in preferences?

In Affinity + photo Is there any way you can bundle multiple adjustments to make a custom preset. I have a load in Aperture, some very particular and useful. A custom preset is great for ensuring a batch has the same look and feel.

So, first off sorry if posted somewhere else. I did spend a bit of time searching and didn't see an answer. I don't know that this falls under the RAW file load issues either. I am testing out 'Photo' with some .cr2 files that I have already processed through "Lightroom4". While the file I'm loading is the .cr2 file, it is also loading the sidecar information that was created when I made my corrections in Lightroom. Is there a way to turn this off and load the original .cr2? One a 2nd note for that, I am also seeing color shifts between the file that has been loaded, vs the file open in lightroom. Same working color profile of Prophoto RGB with the same calibrated monitor. Any thoughts here?

So far I am impressed with the Affinity Photo Beta Great replacement for Nikon Capture NX-2 and Aperture. Very intuitive on first look. So I am thinking about work flow and preservation of RAW files, edited files, layers etc. Can someone provide a brief outline to illuminate a workflow for Afinity Pro? A suggested Workflow using LR as a Digital Asset Manager?

Hi, I've been trying out the demo version for a couple of days and wanted to applaud the team for a truly impressive effort in trying to bring the best of both (vector and raster) worlds. At the same time I couldn't help but feel greatly underwhelmed by user experience of Affinity Designer and would like to mention a few points and see both how users and the team feel about that. In short, I think by trying to so closely copy the UI of Illustrator and Photoshop, Affinity Designer is missing a fantastic opportunity to start fresh and IMPROVE on these programs. Great success of programs like Sketch show that users may not necessarily want *cheap* Adobe products, they want *new* kind of products that better adopt to their particular workflows. Hence I will use Sketch for example of what I'd call workflow-based UI and Illustrator and Photoshop as feature-based UI. Photoshop and Illustrator have evolved over decades and over 20 iterations, and with this long history comes a huge baggage of legacy where early GUI decisions need to be carried over from early versions for the sake of consistency (people generally don't like change if they are used to one way of doing things). Also each new version meant bunch of new features that kept piling up and needed to be squeezed into existing UI paradigm of panels and toolbars, and hence the product that is based around features is created, with each iteration being more powerful but also feeling slightly ever more bloated. By "bloated" I mean that everyone, especially creative people, want as little friction from the tools they use. Obviously one way to remove friction is to repeatedly use the product, but for example, even after using Photoshop for almost 20 years I still often cringe by the way I constantly need to shuffle between different panels, and toolbars: even if I can customize their position and what not, I am still forced to break my workflow in order to rearrange some panel, or click a certain button to open a subpanel with more options. In order to solve the problem of cramped UI Adobe has introduced, years ago, concept of Workspaces, which is kinda like GUI on top of the GUI, and while it does help ease the problem, Workspaces is a duct-tape patch and not a true solution, which is quite understandable given the size and legacy of a huge program like Photoshop (or Illustrator, or even worse example: Autodesk programs like AutoCAD and Max - compared to Autodesk's miserable efforts of managing feature bloat, Adobe is doing an excellent job!). On the other hand, a new program has opportunity to approach UI from different angle, and programs like Sketch (or similarly named Sketch Up, to continue analogy to Autodesk competitors) tried to focus on concrete task that user wants to perform and build a flexible dynamically changing UI around these tasks, rather than to simply group buttons into panels based on features. Now obviously it is ridiculous to compare Sketch to Photoshop, as it is a niche program that caters to specific target market and specific workflows (GUI design only), but there are a lot of lessons to be learned on how friction between the idea and the tool can be organically reduced if you start from clean slate and not by copying software behemots with over 20 years of GUI legacy: 1) Edit everything in-place to give more hands-on control over the effect. Example is the way Sketch gradients are edited directly on the object, vs. having to do it in a dedicated UI element separated from object. 2) UI adopts intuitively to users logical next action. You don't need to switch tools or modes if it's obvious what you will do next. For example: - one click at the object selects it and automatically turns into Transform mode. Double click will automatically turn into path editing (moving anchors around). - when you have a line selected and click on an anchor or bezier handle, you will automatically get into edit mode in Sketch because obviously direct click on a handle of a selected object means you want to move it around. Iin Affinity, you will stay in your present tool which means you are likely to start creating another line instead (althout there is a misleading PEN- pointer that leads to think that the following action will be anchor deleting). 3) Don't float feature-based panels around, but use several fixed positions for GUI. If you follow point 2) this means that GUI will adopt to what you do and you always intuitively always need to move your attention to the same part of screen when wanting to perform complex tasks. Another Sketch example is Inspector (a paradigm widely used by Apple products) which is a sole UI element that always adopts to whatever you are doing at the moment. So I know that whatever I plan to do, I only need to look to the right side of the screen and I will always have a RELEVANT tool set. 4) Modular and consistent functionality. By modular I mean the way different types of fills can be stacked one on top of another in Sketch, and controlled via extremely simple but powerful interface. Another excellent example of modular pproach is the concept of Modifiers in 3D Max, where you can basically start from a simple 3D cube and end up with a human figure just by applying a range of non-destructive modifiers (and a bit of skillful positioning of the points) and at any moment you can always go back to any step and modify it in a non destructive manner. By consistent I mean things like Styles which are common place in software packages to ensure consistency. Ok, hm... I'm sorry it's getting late here (2:30am) so I am starting to lose focus here. Back to the core point: I understand Affinity is going after Adobe users, but that really doesn't mean that all we want is cheap Illustrator + Photoshop. You can do much better by trying to approach the functionality from a new fresh perspective and I can assure you will get a faithful user base much easier by doing NEW thing than trying to copy everything 1:1 - because you know, making another Photoshop AND Illustrator in one software piece from scratch is HUGE amount of work. And people will ALWAYS keep comparing Affinity to Illustrator and Photoshop and be kinda pissed off because feature XYZ is misssing. By starting fresh, you can focus your efforts and be more effective in solving user problems with less actual work. Plus, don't underestimate your potential users: if you do things with fresh perspective, it may take us a bit of learning curve to get used to your product, but if early on we figure out that we are seeing a new better way of doing things, most of us will gladly spend some time to learn and adopt. Case in point: I liked Affinity demo very much, but it doesn't really solve anything that my Photoshop and Illustrator CS4 don't do (except dang retina screen support). Even if it's feature packed, and cheap, there is not very much incentive for me to buy, as it feels just too familiar to these two packages. Maybe I am minority here, but really would like to hear what other users thing on this. Good night :) N.

Wondering about something... Yesterday, I was running some tests using Blender, Pixelmator and Affinity Designer (I hope it's all right that I mentioned a competitor's product here) to try to generate a PDF/X-3 file. Here was my process: Generated an image of a 3D scene out of Blender Saved as an 2400 x 3000 pixel PNG file (so it would be 8 x 10 @ 300 dpi/ppi) Opened it in Pixelmator to try the "soft proofing" feature and adjust the saturation of the RGB image for use in a PDF/X-3 workflow. Saved the PNG file as a 300 dpi TIFF. Created a blank 8.5" x 11" CMYK document in AD; imported the TIFF file. Realized that there were no PDF controls for exporting X-1a or X-3 files in AD at this time. Cheated; the apple print dialog box does allow for the exporting of AD documents as PostScript files. I own a copy of Acrobat 8 Professional so I reinstalled it on my Mac (2007 Macbook, OS X 10.7.5, 2 GB RAM, 2.1 GHz, 64 MB VRAM/Intel GMA 950) and for the interest of this experiment, Acrobat 8 DOES WORK on Lion. Distilled PS from AD on the PDF/X-3 settings. Worked like a dream. CMYK PDF/X-3 on my desktop. Now, let me comment on what was missing: 1) Pixelmator's soft proofing feature lacks a "gamut warning" feature so that when one pulls back on the saturation, there is no gauge (such as the appearance of gray pixels on screen as in Photoshop) to know how far to reduce the saturation. I made a ballpark guess--having generated images from Blender for use in my designs for a while--of anywhere from -20% to -33%--so it is not TRULY known if all the colors in the TIFF file were "in gamut" or not. 2) By using Acrobat Distiller, the goal was simply to be able to use AD in my design workflow to generate a press-ready PDF file. Not always do my jobs require InDesign or Quark. The majority of my Display and Exhibit work is done in Illustrator and Photoshop, but in many cases the final files are still delivered as Hi-res, CMYK PDFs which requires that the colors be brought into gamut. Incidentally, for this experiment the gamut used was "U.S. Web Coated SWOP 2.0". Having said all that, I have 3 questions. 1) Will there be a feature similar to Photoshop's "Proof Colors/Gamut Warning" combo put into either Designer, Publisher or Photo at a later date? If you troll through the 'net--particularly on Pixelmator and GIMP forums--a lot of designers state that this is the one feature that keeps them tied to Photoshop. 2) Will there soon be controls in Designer accompanying the export of PDFs so that we don't have to use Distiller (Distiller was just the easiest way, this can be done in GhostScript as well by invoking the "ps2pdf" API but it can currently only be done in the command line/unix shell on Macs)? 3) Is the feature set in Photo planeed to be more geared toward Photographers/Photo Retouching with more of the illustrative features in bitmap editing remaining in Designer? Either way works for me as I am also a Photographer but also think that others may have unrealistic expectations if Photo is not as fully featured as Photoshop and fail to see that between Photo AND Designer, that feature set IS realized. I hope I'm not coming of as a royal pain, but we've (the design collective who refuses to be treated like Adobe's ATMs) have been searching ever since this cloud/subscription nonsense started for a serious alternative to the software from the big red "A". I was already a believer in the gospel according to PagePlus and DrawPlus and feel very fortunate that, at this particular time, you guys are releasing the Affinity line for the Mac. Can't wait to try out Photo and Publisher. Quarian