Document bounds question

[matthewsjc1]

In Affinity Photo how do you show contents outside of the document bounds? In Photoshop I would place assets I'm going to work with around the outside, so I could setup up the scene and experiment. Currently, Affinity Photo is clipping anything outside of the document's bounds, making my workflow much more difficult. I've searched and searched and cannot find an answer.

Thank you!

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, @matthewsjc1.

As far as I know you can't do that in Photo. It's a function supported in Designer and Publisher (View > View Mode > Clip to Canvas) but not in Photo.

[matthewsjc1]

Well, that's disappointing

Thank you for the reply!

[walt.farrell]

You're welcome.

The various Affinity applications are tailored for some specific purposes, and apparently Serif does not believe that function is important for photographers (the primary users envisioned for Photo).

[Wasp11b]

In Photo, doesn't Document/Clip Canvas and  Document/Unclip Canvas work?

So, set up your page or photo, (outline a blank page with a square box set to no fill and a narrow stroke width set to a colour you can see - Clip will work to this bounding box). Now put an object, say a circle outside the page, left and right (or above and below) to a distance depending on how much space you want (you may want to zoom out). Now Document/Unclip Canvas. You can place whatever elements you now want on this expanded canvas and move things around with the Move tool. When you have finished, make sure there are no elements on the canvas outside the page (which has been outlined by the box above) and then Document/Clip to Canvas. You can then hide or delete the bounding box.

Does this work or am |I misunderstanding something?

[walt.farrell]

5 minutes ago, Wasp11b said:

In Photo, doesn't Document/Clip Canvas and  Document/Unclip Canvas work?

No, that's something completely different.

Document > Clip and/or Unclip Canvas would actually enlarge the canvas to incorporate anything that had been drawn outside it. View > View Mode > Clip Canvas (if available) just makes the off-canvas items visible or not. They remain off-canvas, though, and not part of the design.

[mac_heibu]

1 hour ago, matthewsjc1 said:

In Photoshop I would place assets I'm going to work with around the outside, so I could setup up the scene and experiment.

No, you can’t do this in Photoshop. I bet you confuse Photoshop with InDesign or Illustrator.

[Wasp11b]

But cannot the enlarged canvas be used to place assets and play around with designs? Then, when satisfied, remove unused assets and clip to the page bounding box to recover the size of the page. It's a (poor?) workaround for want of anything else. Or is there a major downside I'm not seeing?

[walt.farrell]

32 minutes ago, Wasp11b said:

But cannot the enlarged canvas be used to place assets and play around with designs? Then, when satisfied, remove unused assets and clip to the page bounding box to recover the size of the page. It's a (poor?) workaround for want of anything else. Or is there a major downside I'm not seeing?

It could work, if someone intended to remove all the unused assets when done before exporting. But what if someone wants to keep them for potential future work? The need to delete them would be unfortunate in that case.

As you say, it's a poor workaround, and really isn't what the OP is used to doing, nor is it really the same thing we can do in Designer or Publisher.

[Wasp11b]

As far as keeping unused assets, one could on fininishing the design pull them into the bounding page, group them, clip, and then move the group to outside the page - they still have their layers and it's all saved so can be used again. No doubt tedious if you have dozens of assets to play with, but possibly a limited 'solution' for some. | entirely agree that's it's not the same thing as Designer or Publisher but the OP specifically asked about Photo;

[walt.farrell]

That could work.