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If there’s a smoothing tool in AD, I can’t find it. If there isn’t one, I need it, as I often use it in Illustrator, and I want to phase out Adobe ASAP. I also like Astute Graphic’s plugins and will make a separate feature request for that.

On Windows, the scrolling is very sluggish and requires more scrolling of the mouse wheel than necessary. Please increase the speed at which all scrollbars move. I would like to see the "Pages" view adopt a scrolling rate of one-spread-per-wheel-click and the main document view to scroll at least 2x faster than it currently goes.

I've searched and can't seem to find this. When I first went in and did a "new" document, I set the inside margin at 0.375. But now I want 0.75. I manually changed all the existing masters. But when I click NEW MASTER, it retains what I said for my "new" settings and still defaults to the 0.375 margin. I want to change this globally so it now defaults to my new desires. I had this happen last week when I decided to move from an 8.25 to 8.5 page size and couldn't do a global page size change. I had to do each manually. VERY frustrating. How can I change the default global settings in an existing document to change everything globally? Thank you.

I’d like to request a blur tool that varies the degree of blur between paths. Much how contour lines on a map indicate altitude, the path would set the blur radius. Not to be confused with the path blur you get in photoshop; it’s closer to a field blur, but instead of radial points it uses vector paths. I really dislike using masks on blurs as it looks unconvincing. I’ve tried other methods for realistic focal depth on a 2d image (painting my own z-depth, multi layered blurs, etc) but they are quite a lot of effort to make. I feel this method would be the quickest and easiest if only it existed! If this tool already exists somewhere/anywhere, please let me know! I’ve tried to illustrate the idea below (excuse the lame character)...

Hello everyone, Currently you can use 'simple' math calculations in the transform panel. Lets say I have an item with with: 500px, when I type in 50% in the 'width' box it scales it to 250px. I would like to suggest a CSS 'calc' like thing. For instance, the same box, that I can type in 50% - 15px that it will create an item of 235px.

Hey folks, I was learning about gradient maps in this thread earlier and I was disappointed to see that in Affinity Photo 1.7.2 there's no ability to use existing gradient map swatches in a new gradient map adjustment layer (I believe currently I would have to go and add them all manually again and save them as adjustment presets). This is a feature that I use very frequently and I'd love to be able to select things from my saved swatches (especially if I can drag it in)! Many thanks!

I don't know if there is a theory behind this action or not. I will be making file sizes and dimension up for this example and this process works for me when going to print photos. I hope it's easy to follow. 1. Let's say I have an image that is 5x8 at 1200 ppi and is 5MB in size. In photoshop the resize window shows width, height, ppi, and size in MB. I can alter the dimensions or ppi and photoshop will interactively recalibrate the overall size of the file. 2. If I want to use the photo at a larger size I will alter the H x W as large as I can and still retain the file size at 5MB. I try to resize photos at 300 ppi for archival purposes but I know that I can resize the photo up to a minimum of 188 ppi for printing. So for this example, say I rescale at 8 x10 @ 200ppi (again I'm making these numbers up). It always creates a photo that's printable without pixelization. As long as I retain the overall size of the file at 5MB it has worked for me. 3. The interactive adjustment of the dimensions and file size would be a great feature. Also AP's resize window does not show which value is the width and which is the height . . . Thanks.

Hello world, I seem unable to place page content in between the elements of the master Page, i.e. have some Master Page layer always on top of Page elements/layers, and other Master Page layer always below Page elements/layers. This is easily achieved in e.g. InDesign (and Scribus for that matter), so I am curious whether I am doing something utterly wrong or whether this is a missing feature (which I hereby request). Greetings, --Thomas

Sometimes I ungroup elements that had constraints or just simply wish to remove those constraints changes. When I want to do it I have to click and unclick all the constraints that I know I have on the selected layers. A "Reset Constraints" button would make that a much easier endeavour.

I've just gotten into using Affinity for responsive UI designs. It's quite great! (when it's not doing the constraint group bug that moves the contents somewhere else entirely or when it breaks Symbols if your top level layers in that symbols have constraints added). What I have found out, however, is that many times I'd like to make an iterative symbol, just for a select group of symbols to have some elements missing and some stuff placed somewhere else. While one could delete all but one object of that query and do the modifications in that one then duplicate that one, it's cumbersome and is quite difficult with large batches of objects (and it'd also need to be repeated for any other major changes in that object). Thus I request having a Detach to separate symbol feature (that can work on multiple copies of the same symbol selected).

At present, Publisher does not seem to offer different preview modes; all documents must be viewed as "spreads" in their final layout. But this makes it harder to perform a final check of the text and contents. Please consider providing alternative preview / viewing modes (like PagePlus does); particularly the ability to view all pages as a single vertical stream. This would allow the user to zoom in enough to read / check the text and then to progress through the pages of a booklet by simply scrolling vertically... rather than having to zig-zag: down... up... across... down... in order to read facing pages. Checking and performing the final tweaks to a multi-page booklet would be made very much more convenient.

The startup screen is nice, it makes the app feel less empty when you open it. It has some easily accessible templates and guides. What I'm missing though is an Open Recent list ala Blender or a more graphical one a-la Adobe (i'm perfectly fine with a blender-like one tbh but you might want to experiment some more). Here's a quick mock-up of how I think it could work (Only showing the 6 more recent files, you'd rarely go more than that, and only 3-4 sounds like too few) Oops just realized the titles for the default screen are above, not under.

For a future update would you consider giving us the ability to sort assets by name; by date created and sort manually(dragging)?

Hi All, It would be fantastic to use gradients saved in an Application Palette in the Gradient Map Adjustment. For details: Thanks! Have a nice day!

(1) Not sure this is a bug or not, but I'm unable to boolean merge (add) the 2 curves in the attached document. It doesn't work directly and it doesn't work via compound. I simply get an empty result set after an operation (both curves disappear from screen.) For some reason going to the "Layer" menu the "Expand Strokes" option is offered for both curves, even strokes are disabled… feels a bit odd too. I remember that there was/is some issue with the smart nodes, so I made sure to select all points and convert them to the normal ones ("Smooth"), but this didn't solve the problem either. (2) Unrelated to the actual boolean failure: if there's some sort of error Affinity Designer should report them (pop up the assistant and let me know the operation failed or something). Basically it just fails silently. In a more complex situation I might entirely miss the problem and then run in problems later when I notice a graphical element is suddenly missing for some reason. Let the user know there was an error. Bug,1.afdesign

Dear Affinity Team, I love your applications and I’m immensely happy about having an InDesign alternative now as well. However, there’s one thing that somewhat annoyed me from the beginning: for the navigation through text you chose the Adobe shortcuts instead of the native macOS shortcuts. This is rather disturbing if you’re a keyboard person and constantly using Apple’s iWorks suite as well as different text editors. As I somewhat understand that you want to make the switch easy for Adobe users, why not add the “Text shortcuts” as listed on your help site to the keyboard shortcuts customisation in the settings? You can even do this in Adobe programs. Example Moves cursor to start of word: macOS native: ⌥← (which is Text/Spacing/Tighten in Affinity or Adobe) Affinity: ⌘← (which is Moves cursor to start of line in macOS native shortcuts) I wrote something similar a few years back and I am not the only one disturbed by this. Cheers, Hagen.

As a longtime Photoshop user coming into Affinity Photo for pro work I wanted to suggest improvement for Photo's curve adjustment tool. Curves works great but I think the picker tool needs to be able to instantly pick on the curves graph as I click on areas in the picture. Right now I can add points but I have to wiggle left or right in order for the point to be added, and then I might accidentally pull the curve up or down slightly when all I wanted to do was to select a point. Use case for this is that I might want to select all the color areas in a face and protect those ranges. Or select a few area in a landscape and pull all those areas up and down. I mention this because I can easily and quickly do this in Photoshop but this is one of those things where I really struggle with in Photo. However I have an idea for making curves better in Photo than Photoshop. What if I could lasso or shift-select a given range of points I have made in curves? How amazing would that be. Then I can pull a select group of points up or down and this becomes quite powerful. Think of this like the ability to move a selected group of vector points in Designer. You can't do this in Photoshop. Perhaps you can just pull up the points or stretch the selection - I'm referring to all that you can do in Designer with selected vector points.

This is a feature that has likely already been requested to be added, but I searched the forums and didn't notice anyone posting this same sort of request. In CC 2019, a REALLY nice gradient feature got added to Illustrator called the Freeform Gradient. The way you use it is you add different points for the gradient to follow. You can make them different colors, make gradient paths using points, and even adjust how much those colors spread from those points. Unfortunately, Designer doesn't have this feature yet and I would really like to see it implemented soon because it seems like such a nice way to make gradients. There are also gradient meshes, but it seems like Designer doesn't have these either, even though these seem a bit harder to work with on average. I don't use Illustrator currently, but I have in the past and I think Affinity Designer lacks some of the features that Illustrator does. There are a couple more things that I can think of that I don't see an option for in Designer, but there is one for in Illustrator. I can make 1 or 2 separate posts about those, though.

Foreword Hello dear Serif development team & hello fellow Affinity Photo user, I created this topic to write a little bit about Affinity Photo and what I see could be improved! I worked on my latest piece entirely in Affinity Photo to see how good I can work with it. Note: I have been using Affinity Photo for quite some time now but only to do sketches and a little bit digital painting now and then but I never spend very much time with it. So if there is already a solution for my "problems" than I would really appreciate it if you'd tell me So, before I start, let me give you a bit information about me and why I chose to write this article. I am a 21 year old, German Game Art & Animation student who has a background in digital art - most in digital painting. I started my journey around 6 years ago in Photoshop CS6 and since then I have always been checking out other art programs such as Rebelle, Paintstorm Studio, Clip Studio Paint, Sketch Book and now Affinity Photo as well. I have been using Affinity Designer for quite some time now and I just love it so after Affinity Photo was announced I was all raring to check it out as well. And now with Publisher released I am very confident that Serif and their programs can have quite the impact on the creative programs market and I would like to contribute to make them even more impactful. Because I did a digital painting this time my suggestions and feature requests are more suiteable for the painters but since Photo is a pixel editing program I don't see why it should not succeed in the digital painting sector as well. Room for improvement Rulers First of all I'd like to request rulers. Rulers in general for example to make parallel lines, to constrain the brush to an editable ellipse and some French rulers. In addition to that a tool to create and to constrain brush strokes etc to a perspective grid. And I don't mean something like the perspective warp tool - something more like the options the neaty little program Lazy Nezumi Pro provides. I really would like to use it in Photo as well but the downside is that the developer only focused on a good Photoshop implementation. You will get perspective issues when you zoom or pan the canvas with this tool in any other program so it is not really useful in regards of that matter. Color picking Moving on, I'd like to request something like a toggle to tell Photo to pick a color by just Alt+Click. I tend to just go very swiftly over my canvas and using the shortcut for the eye dropper tool to get colors I've already used but to use Alt+Drag just really kills my workflow. Don't get me wrong, I would just like the eye dropper tool to be active when I hold down Alt so that I can pick my color with just one click and I'd like to drag it after taht to get the exact color I want to. The layer panel Next up on my list are suggestions for the layer panel. I'd like to Make working with the Layer panel a bit more comfortable by giving access to the most used commands for manipulating layers via right click on the layers. For example create a merged version of selected layers on a new layer or clip the selected layer to the layer below. In general the idea that you can drag and drop the layer on another one too create special layer versions is good but you have so many options to create a different versions than what you've wanted to do that it gets quite frustrating + to get the desired result I really have to "aim" with the layer what is a bit counterintuitive to a nice workflow. A simple rightklick on the selected layer and then "create clipping layer to below" (or something similiar (making a mask for example)) would do just fine. Next, I'd like to have a better merge layer method. Something like "Select layers and then right click "create a new merged layer" from the selected ones but keep the origial ones. In my painting I had to select the layers > Document > Add Snapshot, then Layer > New Layer from snapshot. It feels unnecessary and complicated (I figured that out by myself after I searched for a way to do the merged layer thing). Masks After that, I'd like to speak a bit about the masks in Affinity Photo. To be honest I find working with masks in Photoshop is the most convenient thing to do than in any other program I've tested so far. For Photo I'd like to see that you can turn the entire mask black my using the flood fill tool by just selecting the mask and go. Because right now you have to right click the mask > edit Mask and only in this mode you seem to be able to make the entire mask black. Speaking of masks: When working on a mask the colors in your "current color circles" (the one where you can switch between them via x) should turn to black and white automatically and turn back to the previous selected ones by exiting the mask (by clicking on a normal layer). Creating and manipulating layer selections I'd like to have a shortcut to make a selection out of the content of a layer by Shift+Click -ing a layer. I know that there is a function that you can use via Ctrl+Shift+O but as far as I am concerned it only selects the active layer. And with Shift+Click one should be able to load a selection of a layer whether its active or not. You could also make it so that you can alter the current selection by Alt+Click -ing another layer to subtract the content of that particular layer from your current selection. The brush panel Finally, I'd like to give you a few suggestions regarding the brush panel. I find your way of organizing brushes via categories okay but for me its too segregated (of course it depends on how one handles and creates the brush packs). I had the idea in mind of giving brushes tags when you create them. For example I create a brush and give them the tags #scribble #sketch I could use a filter system to explicitly search for brushes with the tag #sketch. Combining this system with a favourite system (like with the fonts) it could sort the search with that even more. Closing For the time being that is everything I noted where I see improvement. As said in the beginning if there's already a way to get specific things I've mentioned done, pleas feel free to tell me! I would really like to learn everything so I can master the awesome program suite by Serif. Also I would really like to hear your opinion about the things I've mentioned and engage in a discussion! As for now, thank you very much for reading and considering! PS If you are interested to see the image I have painted I uploaded it here:

I use Illustrator less and less, but this is one feature from Illustrator that I really miss in Designer. Illustrator has the option in the "select"-menu to automatically select objects with similar properties as the one selected (see screenshot). This comes in very handy if you want to convert all your 2 pt strokes to 3 pt strokes or something similar. Maybe there already is a way this can be done in Affinity Designer now, but I couldn't find it.

I make a lot of isometric illustrations, so I the isometric pane makes my life so much easier (thanks for that!). But It would be even better if the isometric window could also be shown in the pixel persona so you could switch planes and lock drawing angles to the isometric grid while making the sketch for a vector drawing.

To add blending modes for the 2nd brush in a dual brush. This gives much better control and better outcome (as in photoshop).

Hello! I'm a proud owner of the full Affinity suite and I really enjoy using it. Selection dragging in AD and AP can be chosen to be either the Corel way (drag over the whole objects) or Adobe way (intersect with objects). It would be great if we could map a hotkey or modifier to switch between the two modes, as sometimes one is more suited than the other for what I'm trying to accomplish. Thanks a lot for all the hard work!

Working with Masks is greater than in any other application I have worked with so far, the ease of having child layers and being able to stack a mask over the other truly is amazing. However... One thing that I have found disorienting is that when I use the colour picker tool, rather than picking a value of black an white from the mask that I am working on, Afphoto decides to pick a colour from the Parent Layer (Even when the Source is set to "Current Layer" while having the mask selected). Even though working a mask will only paint with the luminosity value of the sample taken, as you may well know, the values on the Parent Layer are part of a whole and having the Colour Picker Tool to take a sample from the Parent Layer and not the Mask you are working on results in picking an unwanted value when I am actually trying to pick a shade of gray that has already been used on said mask In the long run this means that for me to be able to take the desired sample, I must go to the colour wheel / sliders manually and try to guess what that value was or take my attention away from the whole and having to isolate the mask to get the value that I want. If the colour picker could be adjusted in a way that it picks the shades of gray FROM the mask while working INSIDE the mask it could certainly enhance workflow speed and consistency. Thanks for the attention and time to read this request. Cheers!

It would be great to have some functions like convert to selection with pen tool. Vertical text typing . And text on curve.