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  • Staff

Hi ramsey sparrow,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
I'm sorry to know you are having trouble with the app. Can you please give us a few more details on those issues? Can you provide a sample file where the masking is not working as you'd expect? Or some video clip of the issues? We can't do much if we can't replicate them here. Check this link for additional info on how to report bugs. Thanks

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Layers, masking, history all seem to be working correctly for me.
Maybe you can expand upon your statement of bugs, bugs, bugs and give some specifics.

macOS 10.15.7  15" Macbook Pro, 2017  |  4 Core i7 3.1GHz CPU  |  Radeon Pro 555 2GB GPU + Integrated Intel HD Graphics 630 1.536GB  |  16GB RAM  |  Wacom Intuos4 M

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Just now, markw said:

Layers, masking, history all seem to be working correctly for me.
Maybe you can expand upon your statement of bugs, bugs, bugs and give some specifics.

It kills me to think how much of my life has already been wasted reporting on bugs in various software, so no - not really overly keen on expanding, to be perfectly honest.

Isn't there a quality assurance department who's job it'd be to test all this before it's released? That's one of the main reasons I quite Adobe - their arrogant QA model assuming the users are the testers and releasing software absolutely bloating with bugs (their flagship Photoshop/Lightroom being sole exceptions). So much time wasted.

All I'll say is this: mac pro 5,1, High Sierra, AMD VII, everything up to date and working flawlessly. Working on a HEIC format. Copy of the base layer, perspective shift tool on the copied layer, merge visible to create third layer, select/copy a fragment of that third layer, paste it to create a fourth layer, then trying to mask that one over the third one. Masking exhibits weird behaviour when masking back and forth between black/white. When undoing, then redoing, redoing looses history steps along the way etc.

When closing off floating windows of photos, photos go but windows remain (sometimes, not always...), switching to another photo's active window yet layers displayed are still from the previous photo etc.

That's for starters. I really can't be bothered to continue demonstrating all the other bugged behaviour I find when digging into workflows, it's not my job to do. 

the underlying message is: DO YOUR OWN IN-HOUSE BUG TESTING THROUGH AND THROUGH DAMN IT. It seems like majority of companies just assume it's ok to leave it to users on every release.

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14 minutes ago, ramsey sparrow said:

Isn't there a quality assurance department who's job it'd be to test all this before it's released?

There is, and MEB (who responded above) is part of that group.

But, since you referred to testing "all this", let's look at what the details of what you reported:

Quote

Copy of the base layer, perspective shift tool on the copied layer, merge visible to create third layer, select/copy a fragment of that third layer, paste it to create a fourth layer, then trying to mask that one over the third one. Masking exhibits weird behaviour when masking back and forth between black/white.

So, they would have to think to make a copy of a layer, use the perspective tool on that layer, merge to create a third layer, copy a fragment of the third layer, paste to create a 4th layer, and then (finally) mask the 4th layer over the 3rd one. And then the masking works oddly.

Frankly, that is a weird enough scenario that, if it is all required to exhibit the problem, I would not expect any standard testing scenarios or test team to find it. If it's all required that's 6 separate actions required to expose the issue. That is what my group back at IBM would have called "artistic testing", and whether something is found that way or not depends entirely on whether a clever tester happens to stumble upon the identical scenario you used, or one close enough to exhibit the problem.

Serif is quite happy to try to reproduce bugs, and figure out what is wrong, and log the bugs with the developers, when someone takes the time to give them a good recipe for a problem. And a recipe can be critical when bugs require such a complex setup. A sample file would help, too, in such cases.

By the way, you can always try your scenarios on the current beta (when one exists) to see if you've hit something that happens to have been fixed already. For Affinity Photo, check https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/61-affinity-photo-beta-forums/

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
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    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
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Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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I appreciate what you're saying Walt, but it's really not that complex.

The latter bugs reported are at the most basic level, while the main one is essentially selecting and copying a fragment of a layer that has a 'perspective' filter on it then trying to mask it. The undo/redo functions also seem to work irregularly regardless of the main bug.

If testing to this level is considered 'creative' then god help us all. If this is what it takes to spot bugs then this is what Serif SHOULD do to spot bugs, just play around with layers and filters and see if anything comes up. Surely it's not that much of a stretch?

Anyways, I'm simply dead tired of reporting bugs to audio/visual software devs, I don't know what it is, but seems that sometime in the last decade companies begun to comfortably assume that userbase will be their standard testers and years of releases by Adobe seem to be a testament to that. It's annoying to say the least.

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  • Staff
On 5/11/2020 at 3:13 PM, ramsey sparrow said:

Working on a HEIC format. Copy of the base layer, perspective shift tool on the copied layer, merge visible to create third layer, select/copy a fragment of that third layer, paste it to create a fourth layer, then trying to mask that one over the third one. Masking exhibits weird behaviour when masking back and forth between black/white.

I've broken this recipe down and gone over it countless times. The only time I encounter something odd is when I forget to hit the Apply button on the Perspective Tool.

And the software does get internal QA. However, as Walt pointed out, workflow and user error can play an enormous role in the way we find bugs. For example, if you were also forgetting to hit Apply (as I was) and this is causing the bug, that's a prime example of user error (which caught me out following the recipe).

We do not expect our customers to beta test the software. We give them a newer build that we often dub as a 'beta' but it's usually more stable and provides some customers a way out if they're stuck with a bug.

If you weren't forgetting to hit Apply and you are still seeing glitches or odd behaviour, a file or video can help us. It might also be worth seeing if Metal compute from Preferences > Performance is causing an issue.

Thanks for your time.

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  • 2 months later...

I don't know Chris. I certainly appreciate what you're saying and I apologise for a fit of anger caused by frustrations at the time, but I really never experienced that amount of a software bugging out on multiple and often rather simple operations when working with other apps. I guess it all just stacked up to the effect of really pissing me off at the time.

It may have been some strange and unexplained coincidence of a combination of a machine, system version, gpu and what not, but I don't know - I've just had quite a lot of issues with Affinity Photo on various fronts since I started using it and felt like perhaps the releases were too rushed as a result.  I certainly did not forget to apply the effect; if that was the case I'd have known since it'd have been obvious that the desired effect is not there to begin with.

I can only hope it'll all get ironed out with time.

Best,
M

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