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Improvements for digital painting and sketching


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I've just downloaded Affinity Photo. I like the app very much so far, but it must be admitted that it isn't quite ready yet for digital painting and sketching. Here are a few suggestions:-

 

Very important

- Add ability to re-define keyboard shortcuts! I'm glad it's already on the road map!

- Add shortcuts to decrease and increase the size of the current brush!

- When using the brush and holding down some key (e.g. command), the brush should be
  restricted to a horizontal or vertical line, depending on the starting direction! Very
  important for quick sketching!

- Add the ability to decide the number of swatches generated when creating a new palette
  from a document OR make the numbers of swatches generated about 256.

- Add the ability to rotate the entire canvas (non-destructive), and make this available
  from a simple keystroke (e.g. R)


Quite important

- Add a keyboard shortcut to open the list of swatches without removing them from the
  toolbar if it is visible there; immediately close that temporary picker as soon as the key
  is released. Idea: Quick way of picking a colour when painting full-screen!

- Add a keyboard shortcut to open Apple's default colour picker.

- When in full-screen mode, the TAB key should make the *entire* UI go away. Currently,
  document tabs persist as well as a fairly thick (and useless?) border to the right and
  at the bottom.

- When in full-screen mode and the UI is hidden (TAB key), the menu bar should *not*
  appear when moving the mouse to the top of the screen, and neither should Apple's
  dock!

- Add the ability to mark my favourite brushes, and add a keyboard shortcut to quickly
  toggle between them!


Not quite as important, but still important

- Add a digital painter persona

- UI panels should *not* reposition when switching to a panel whose height is too short!

 

- There should be a Swatches manager window. Having to do everything from the context
  menu is kind of tedious.

- Ability to import Photoshop swatches (.act files)
 
- Should I really be able to add a system palette? Why would I want to use the system
  palette anyway?
 

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Hi digorydoo,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Thanks for your suggestions. 

You can already change the size of the brush using the [ and ] keys. You can also adjust it's size and hardness on the canvas dragging the mouse horizontally (size) and vertically (hardness) while pressing ⌃(ctrl) + ⌥ (option/alt). Additionally pressing the 1 to 0 on your keyboard will change the opacity of the brush (1 for 10% and 0 for 100%). If you type two numbers in quick sucession you can also set a specific value: example pressing 2 and 3 quickly will set the opacity value to 23%.

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Thanks for the reply! Unfortunately there is no [ and ] keys on my keyboard, the Swiss German keymap assigns them to option+5 and option+6, however these are not recognized by Affinity Photo.

 

I already figured out 0-9 for opacity, it's the same in Photoshop. The ctrl+option shortcut for size and hardness is quite cool, thanks for the hint!

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Instead of adding new topic, I will add something here...

I've bought Affinity Photo for digital painting, but unfortunately I had to opt for refund. This is not ready for painting yet. Mainly because of 1 thing: no opacity control with tablet's pressure.

 

There is a button to control size of brush with tablet's pressure, but sadly no button for opacity control. I was suggested to use Flow Jitter with option set to Pressure, but this is far from Photoshop's opacity control. In Photoshop you can turn on one button and you have control to paint many different brush strokes with different opacity. With Affinity Photo's Flow Jitter control you have almost no control over Flow and completely no control over Opacity.

 

When you will add this one single function, I will be happy to buy your app again, but now it is not mature enough for digital painting.

 

I wish you all the best. I really hope that you will be strong competition for Adobe. Good luck!

NEXT PLANET / Design Studio / UX / GRAPHICS / ANIMATION

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Just to add one more suggestion:

ALL colors in AD, APh and Apub must be "global" (an Adobe term) by their deffinition. Means, when you change the color later in your work, all the instances of that color must be changed, even in the gradients and transparences.

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Just to be more clear: I think it is much better ALL the colors to be global/link colors in the process of defining them. Not to make it optional if user wants or not.

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
15” Dell Inspiron 7559 i7 Windows 10 x64 Pro Intel Core i7-6700HQ (3.50 GHz, 6M) 16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600 MHz (8GBx2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED - Backlit Touch Display
32” LG 32UN650-W display 3840 x 2160 UHD, IPS, HDR10 Color Gamut: DCI-P3 95%, Color Calibrated 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort
13.3” MacBook Pro (2017) Ventura 13.6 Intel Core i7 (3.50 GHz Dual Core) 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB 500 GB SSD Retina Display (3360 x 2100)

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@mallow: Even in Photoshop, I always use flow for pressure control and set opacity manually using the shortcut keys 0-9. This technique was also suggested by Feng Zhu in one of his youtube videos on channel FZDSCHOOL. (Btw, check out his stuff, he's one of the greatest concept artists I've ever seen!)

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@mallow: Even in Photoshop, I always use flow for pressure control and set opacity manually using the shortcut keys 0-9.(...)

 

Hi. Yes, I know. I change opacity with 0-9 too. But this only changes how much opacity you have on whole brush stroke. With opacity controlled with pressure, you can control opacity more. Start brush stroke with less opacity to make it lighter, end with more opacity. It gives you much more control.

I tried changing flow with pressure in Affinity Photo, but it didn't give me good results. 

NEXT PLANET / Design Studio / UX / GRAPHICS / ANIMATION

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