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Feature Request : Brushes management


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Hi' here !

Hope all is fine for everybody :)

Here is a request I would like to share. I saw many topics on the subject but not really answers or message that it's taken into account.

My suggestion is to improve brushes management.

- Easier way to change brush : A context menu to change brush. It's quite annoying to cross all the screen in order to change the brush.

- Easier way to find a brush : Get the name over the brush display et have a field in order to filter by name. When a lot of brush are in a category it's quite annoying to look for the wanted brush, lost amoung the others, again and again and again.

- Sub-category : To avoid having many categories and avoiding looking for a brush lost amoung others it could be great to get sub-categories. For example Nature > Animals or Nature > Plants, ...

 

Thanks in advance :)

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  • 3 weeks later...
41 minutes ago, Baptiste said:

No discussion on that ?

Surprisingly, no. 🤨

I have seen some suggestions now and then - I believe a made a suggestion similar to yours a year ago or two.

I am a supporter of great brush-creating talents out there and I purchased quite a few brushes for this reason. Now I have a mess I can't reorder in Designers pixel persona, so there is definitely room for improvement and your suggestions all make total sense to me. 

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

Hi guys,

As for Digital painting, it would be great to have several features. So far, drawing/painting with AP is quite a pain in the a.. when it comes to select/ change a brush often. I believe it would be good for AP to improve that aspect of the software. So far, I feel it's more made for photographers than for digital artists per se.

I'm talking about these simple features  (not meaning easy to implement. Let's give credit to the development team):

- Context menu (right clic or customizable) when using the brush tool, allowing access to all the brushes in the selected category, at least . All the brushes would be even better. The context menu would provide access to the size of the brush as well.

- In the side bar, Brush window, previewing the strokes should be an option. It would be possible to see the brushes in a grid rather than in a list. The size of the pictures in that grid would be chosen from the option menu (small/ medium/big).

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On 6/25/2020 at 4:18 AM, MCoville said:

Recently I've found my brush dropdown to be a mess and there is no way to sort them. Something like the asset manager for brushes would be brilliant. Category -> Subcategory, and let us move brush groups with drag and drop.

I have the same problem. Have a huge collection of brushes from my Adobe time and import my most used in Affinity. Incredible mess.

Would really love to have the possibility to sort them better.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Fully agreed on all points. Also, fix the bug where Affinity does not remember which brush is being used when changing brush size and the bug on Windows where Affinity does not remember which brush category was open from the last session and instead resets to the Basic category every time. Super annoying to deal with to say the least.

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I am a yes vote for this as well!!!  It is a huge usability issue...

 

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) Mac OS 13 | 4.2 GHz Quad Core Intel-Core i7 | 64GB Ram | Radeon Pro 580 8 GB

Adobe Photography (Lightroom and Photoshop) | Affinity Designer 2 | Affinity Photo 2 | Affinity Publisher 2 | Capture One Pro (for now) | Topaz Labs Photography Suite | Fast Raw Viewer | NeoFinder

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On 5/25/2020 at 11:11 PM, Baptiste said:

Hi' here !

Hope all is fine for everybody :)

Here is a request I would like to share. I saw many topics on the subject but not really answers or message that it's taken into account.

My suggestion is to improve brushes management.

- Easier way to change brush : A context menu to change brush. It's quite annoying to cross all the screen in order to change the brush.

- Easier way to find a brush : Get the name over the brush display et have a field in order to filter by name. When a lot of brush are in a category it's quite annoying to look for the wanted brush, lost amoung the others, again and again and again.

- Sub-category : To avoid having many categories and avoiding looking for a brush lost amoung others it could be great to get sub-categories. For example Nature > Animals or Nature > Plants, ...

 

Thanks in advance :)

This major usability issue certainly deserves a solution together with another issue, that brushes should be shared between all three programs.

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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^^^ That design consideration was always odd to me...

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) Mac OS 13 | 4.2 GHz Quad Core Intel-Core i7 | 64GB Ram | Radeon Pro 580 8 GB

Adobe Photography (Lightroom and Photoshop) | Affinity Designer 2 | Affinity Photo 2 | Affinity Publisher 2 | Capture One Pro (for now) | Topaz Labs Photography Suite | Fast Raw Viewer | NeoFinder

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In Capture One managing styles is as simple as (on a Mac):  

1.  Navigate to MacIntosh HD > Users > "User Name" > Library > Application Support > Capture One > Styles

2.  Use Finder to create folders, rename folder, etc... Yes you can have sub folders so it is easy to organize different collections by one source.

[Managing brushes this way would not require writing a new brush management module but simply putting them where we can get to them...]

1131104696_StylesScreenShotSubFolders.png.e75ef92ded4b2420e9bf92abca3d0f33.png

This is a screen shot of my entire styles folder (I rarely use styles but have a propensity to collect them 9_9)

205487836_StylesScreenShot.png.09cab73b7a9be06a3ae83336b8aef253.png

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) Mac OS 13 | 4.2 GHz Quad Core Intel-Core i7 | 64GB Ram | Radeon Pro 580 8 GB

Adobe Photography (Lightroom and Photoshop) | Affinity Designer 2 | Affinity Photo 2 | Affinity Publisher 2 | Capture One Pro (for now) | Topaz Labs Photography Suite | Fast Raw Viewer | NeoFinder

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  • 4 months later...

I second, third and fourth the above comments. This is definitely still a bit of a housekeeping weak point in the Affinity suite for anyone spending any amount of time using the brushes in Designer or Photo.

Would love to see a new or improved Brush Management panel or an overall workflow re-visit where the Affinity team takes another look at the brushes system and tackles:

- a way to display brush names in the brushes panel...

- a breadcrumb, history or favourites feature to track or store your most used brushes...

- an easier way to duplicate or move brushes around, say into new or existing collections. Generally the ability to move, organize and name brushes in a more user friendly process. 

For example, when a brush is copied or moved into a different brushes panel, it should retain its name, currently it gets renamed as 'brush copy', which is not helpful. This is because to duplicate a brush to use in a different brush panel you first have duplicate it, it then gets renamed 'brush copy' then you have to move it to the desired panel. If you just want to move it, it will retain its name but it will be removed from the current panel. One solution to this might be to have the ability to have a second brush panel open at the same time so that you could move or duplicate, by dragging and dropping your selected brushes to it... 

- a solution to when a selected brush is resized and its highlight in the brushes panel disappears.

Better usability stuff like that. Please, please can we get a little more love in this area guys. 🙂  Cheers!

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Currently Paint Brush has no right click options. That would be a very simple way to make it easier to work with it. PS offers several options with a right-click, that speeds up the work-flow considerably. Especially when changing between several brushes in a short time (colouring, applying shadows and highlights, etc.)

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  • 2 weeks later...

YES!! PLEASE!! AFFINITY PHOTO NEEDS BRUSH NAMES DISPLAY.

This issue for the PC Desktop is making Affinity Photo extremely difficult to use. It's confusing and frustrating to paint anything when you don't know what brushes you're using. It gets easily mixed up when switching between tools, and then you don't know what brush is being used for which tool. Selecting from the list is... a memory game. I bought some cool brushes, and I haven't been able to use them properly. This is becoming close to a deal breaker for me, and if it gets frustrating enough, I will find another painting program. So disappointing for an "award-winning" software. Each update is frustrating as new bells and whistles are added, yet BASIC things like this are still not fixed. I've read in other posts that it's technically tricky to fix. Do we need to wait for Photo 2.0? 3.0? 5.0? XXX?

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  • 2 weeks later...
2 hours ago, Epithumia said:

Number 1 requirement for me is the option to display brushes by their alphas.  Most of my brushes are used as stamps, not paintbrushes, so the preview that shows them stroked is useless to me and forces me to stick with Adobe.

Same here. I've reluctantly gone back to Adobe.

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Yes, Affinity, PLEASE make an awesome brush management system.

Yeah, agreed. Using brushes is the whole way I make illustrations and I use custom and purchased brushes a lot for photo compositing and matte painting.  Digital painting has been around for 25 years and it blows my mind that brush management is still so clunky.  Even Photoshop only recently added a good brush manager... maybe 2-3 years ago... and only after a third party developer created a plugin that Adobe either copied or bought.

This clunky brush management in Affinity is a major reason I don't just switch permanently from Photoshop.

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FWIW, in the 1.9.2 Beta versions they have included the ability to sort the brushes

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Affinity Photo 2.4..; Affinity Designer 2.4..; Affinity Publisher 2.4..; Affinity2 Beta versions. Affinity Photo,Designer 1.10.6.1605 Win10 Home Version:21H2, Build: 19044.1766: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz, 3301 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s);32GB Ram, Nvidia GTX 3070, 3-Internal HDD (1 Crucial MX5000 1TB, 1-Crucial MX5000 500GB, 1-WD 1 TB), 4 External HDD

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Thanks Ron P.  That system may be an improvement but still seems awkward to me.  What I'd like to see is the collapsable nested click-and-draggable menus like photoshop has.  And to further improve on that would be to have the ability to easily colour code brush sets and individual brushes so I can spot them visually, not just by reading.  Even better than that would be if I could easily make my own icon or thumbnail images (especially if they could expand into a bigger image) to go beside the stroke swatch.  Some of my brush sets are huge and customizable visual cues would help me rapidly find my most important brushes.  

I'm a visual learner and processor.  I identify images WAY more easily than I can identify brush names when I'm visually scanning information to find things.

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