Layer-Crop missing

[Fritz_H]

Both Designer and Publisher offer to crop an Element/Layer - Photo does not; it only offers to crop the whole Canvas...

@Serif: please add/fix this, thanks.
@all: please don´t waste your time with hints for work-arounds. I really appreciate your effort but it´s simply Serif´s job to add missing features.

Fritz

[fde101]

6 minutes ago, Fritz_H said:

it´s simply Serif´s job to add missing features.

You are assuming that the feature is not missing intentionally.

I'm not sure what the value would be to a general photo editor of having this feature in Photo.

You can always use a rectangle as a mask.

[Fritz_H]

Just now, fde101 said:

I'm not sure what the value would be to a general photo editor of having this feature in Photo.
You can always use a rectangle as a mask.

Thanks for your reply.

The only intentional reason I can think of is to sell more Publisher-Licenses...

What for?
Image-composition of multiple Sources-Images

Masking: that´s just a work-around to me.

Fritz

[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, Fritz_H said:

Masking: that´s just a work-around to me.

Masking is exactly cropping is implemented in Publisher and Designer. It's just hidden behind a more convenient tool that lets you draw a rectangle and automatically clip-mask the underlying object with it. It's easy to do the same thing in Photo by drawing a rectangle, positing it, and dragging it in the Layer panel. Just not as convenient as having the tool.

[Fritz_H]

5 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

 It's just hidden behind a more convenient tool..

convenience = usability = it´s a must at 2020.

Fritz

[walt.farrell]

16 minutes ago, Fritz_H said:

convenience = usability = it´s a must at 2020.

Perhaps. But it will be awhile, if ever, before Photo gets the same kind of crop tool as Publisher and Designer have.

So you either take a few extra seconds to do the masking approach, or you work in one of the other applications (perhaps Publisher, using the Photo Persona to get the crop you want), or you pick some other application.

[fde101]

47 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

But it will be awhile, if ever, before Photo gets the same kind of crop tool as Publisher and Designer have

Agreed - even if Serif did decide to add this, it is highly unlikely that they would add it to 1.8 as the 1.8 version of Photo is now in release candidate status, so we are probably looking at roughly a year for the 1.9 versions - and personally I think it is unlikely that they will add it even then.

[fde101]

1 hour ago, Fritz_H said:

convenience = usability

It can also equate to laziness sometimes, though how much of an effect this particular omission would have on you would be largely a function of your specific workflow and use cases - as @walt.farrell suggested, perhaps you are better off considering a different program for now if you are doing a lot of this.

It is also possible that scripting support in the future might make it possible to have a shortcut key assigned to create a rectangle the size of the selected layer, make it a mask of the layer, and leave the user with the mask and the move tool both selected...  even if Serif doesn't implement the tool directly it could be hacked in by a user.  Of course, that too won't be there at least until 1.9 (probably longer?), which again I am guessing to be a year or more away...  assuming Serif decides to implement scripting at all.

[Fritz_H]

@walt.farrell @fde101 

May I remind you, that it´s not your job to "protect" Serif from evil users with allegedly impertinent requests?

Making software easier to use is not a luxury but a necessity.
People do not read manuals or FAQs (often simply because of a lack of time...)
The stuff needs to be usable intuitively - esp. for those customers who are used to similar products from other developers.

Your postings-counters show that both of you spend quite some time in these forums.
Since that you will have noticed that there are lots of complaints about missing basic features or errors in standard operations.
(e.g. I saw lots of complaints about PDF-related problems, performance issues, crashes etc. recently...).

Honestly, I am going to lose my patience with Serif: too many bugs and missing features - too little progress.
Although I use these applications just for fun, I stopped recommending Affinity-Products to PRO-Users.
They need software that works properly - with the earnings from one good job the whole annual fee for the complete Adobe Portfolio is paid.
= those users do not care about the money.

I hope you understand my p.o.v.

kind regards
Fritz

[walt.farrell]

And I hope you understand ours (or at least mine, since I can't speak for @fde101😞 you can work around the functions you find missing, or you can use another application.

I'm an not protecting Serif, and I don't consider the request impertinent.

I'm a realist. The function is not there. It likely won't be there soon.

Feel free to ask for it, and wait if you want. But I'm going to tell you what you can do now to actually complete your project, if you want to complete it using Affinity. And if you'd rather use something else, that's fine.

 

[fde101]

Agreed...

There are plenty of things I would like the apps to do that they do not.  There are long-standing bugs I would like to see fixed (such as the fact that when there are two global color swatches with the same underlying color assigned to them the wrong one is often highlighted in the swatches panel when an object is selected, even though the correct one was assigned - that totally annoys me at an intellectual level, partly because it seems to imply the app is doing a lot of extra work behind the scenes to find the wrong thing to highlight, which is STILL broken in the current beta...).

I am not getting frustrated with Serif over it - these things take time; I know enough about software development to recognize that things don't always go as planned and users' expectations can be all over the place sometimes compared to the reality of what developers are facing.  We don't know how they have set up their code base or how their internal working environment is structured.  We don't know what all of their priorities are.  We can only really go by the behavior of the apps as they exist and what Serif has told us on the forums or through other means.

Considering that this is relatively easy to work around using masks, my guess is that this tool is missing intentionally, possibly to avoid confusion with the exiting crop tool in Photo, which as you pointed out works differently, perhaps to help further differentiate the products...  or perhaps for some other reason we are unaware of?

In any case, I don't use Serif apps exclusively.  If one of the other apps that I have is better suited to a task or more familiar in how I would approach it then I will use something else.

As the saying goes, if the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail...

[walt.farrell]

29 minutes ago, fde101 said:

In any case, I don't use Serif apps exclusively.  If one of the other apps that I have is better suited to a task or more familiar in how I would approach it then I will use something else.

I also may use non-Serif applications. And I don't restrict myself to just one of the Affinity applications, either. If I needed to layout a document with multple photos on a canvas, and wanted to easily use a masking-type crop tool to arrange them, I might do that arrangement in Designer or (more likely, now) in Publisher, then do any further editing of the images in Photo (or the Pixel Persona of Designer, or (now) the Photo Persona of Publisher).

Serif have clearly stated that their vision is not to make all the tools and functions available in one application. They want the application functions segregated, and (I believe) expect that if their customers have workflows that need functions from a different application, they will purchase multiple applications. Which, to me, is reasonable given the relatively low cost of each of the applications in the Affinity Suite

[Fixx]

Probably it has not occurred anyone Photo should have layer crop tool. I do not know any other sw that has. People are used to using mask tools instead as they are more capable in photo editing tasks.