Please put an "Export" button in the main Export Persona UI

[Stokestack]

I needed to export three images with the same size and format, so I decided to try the "Export persona" UI. I spent several minutes scouring the screen for an "Export," "Go," or "Do it!" button in order to actually perform the function that this layout is supposed to serve. No dice.

So after searching Help for "export persona" and bringing up an empty page (known, documented bug) and then searching again, I had to read through to the very end to find that the actual Export button is hidden by default, buried on the "Slices" tab. I'm not making or using slices, so I would not have found this. It would be preferable to have the Export button visible at all times. Thanks!

[Wosven]

Hi,

You already have a main export button, with an option for "continue", and "sub-button" to export depending of file type or individually:

[Stokestack]

Thanks for the reply, and taking the time to make that illustration! But as I mentioned, I'm not using "slices," and all of these are hidden on the "Slices" tab by default. If you don't have any slices, it doesn't seem logical to go to the Slices tab. This leaves no apparent way to perform the export.

This is what you see by default in the Export persona.

 

[fde101]

14 hours ago, Stokestack said:

in order to actually perform the function that this layout is supposed to serve

The Export persona is largely for more complex exporting tasks such as exporting individual layers or portions of the document in separate files.  All of these exports are based on slices.

For more "normal" exporting of the entire image, use the command in the File menu instead (no need to switch to the Export persona).

[Stokestack]

Thanks. I needed to efficiently export several open files with similar export settings. I figured the Export persona, being dedicated to exporting, would provide that efficiency.

In fact it was further hampered by Photo inexplicably switching personas when I clicked on different documents' tabs. The persona is supposed to be the mode of the entire workspace, which the tabs are subordinate to. So why on earth would I want it to bounce me out of the current persona simply because I selected a different image?

Affinity products are like an Advent calendar of baffling design decisions.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Stokestack said:

The persona is supposed to be the mode of the entire workspace, which the tabs are subordinate to. So why on earth would I want it to bounce me out of the current persona simply because I selected a different image?

What makes you think that the Persona is supposed to determine the mode of the workspace? Where have you seen that documented?

It is the active document that determines the mode of the workspace, to the extent that there is a mode for the workspace.

[Stokestack]

15 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

What makes you think that the Persona is supposed to determine the mode of the workspace? Where have you seen that documented?

It is the active document that determines the mode of the workspace, to the extent that there is a mode for the workspace.

The documentation, for one:

Quote

Think of Personas as different ways of working within Affinity Photo. If you want to work purely with core photo editing tools you can edit in the default Photo Persona. However, Affinity Photo packs a punch with additional Personas that each offer either a specific design environment or analogous toolsets, features or functions.

You can switch between Personas with a single click, with the workspace tools and panels changing to that Persona's way of working.

And this hierarchy is clearly depicted in the UI. The Persona buttons are on the main frame, which encloses all of the tabs and their images.

And finally there's the name itself. By selecting a "persona," you're supposed to be telling the application "I'm working as a designer," or "I'm working as an X." This holds true in other applications that feature task- or role-specific workspaces, such as Adobe Premiere. "I'm working as an audio editor," so audio-centric controls are given most of the screen real-estate. But the UI doesn't completely reorganize itself whenever the user clicks on a different file.

It's backward for the document to dictate the priorities of the person editing it.

[walt.farrell]

Thanks.

FIrst, I think you're reading something into the placement within the UI that is not intended.

Second, the documents really do have control, not the Persona. Each open document has its own set of tools, and its own Persona setting. That could, I suppose, be made clearer in the documentation, but I'm quite sure it's the way that Affinity is supposed to work.

[Old Bruce]

10 hours ago, Stokestack said:

It's backward for the document to dictate the priorities of the person editing it.

I have to disagree with your reading of the documentation. 

One thing I do frequently is to open two or more raw files and develop them one by one. When I hit the develop button in the Develop Persona that file and that one only is processed and automatically opened in the Photo persona. I would not want the other raw files to be processed at that time.

[Stokestack]

5 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

I have to disagree with your reading of the documentation. 

One thing I do frequently is to open two or more raw files and develop them one by one. When I hit the develop button in the Develop Persona that file and that one only is processed and automatically opened in the Photo persona. I would not want the other raw files to be processed at that time.

Thanks for the reply. I wouldn't expect them be to either. I don't know how that contradicts my reading of the documentation. If you select the crop tool and crop one of your open documents, it doesn't crop the others, right?

7 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

FIrst, I think you're reading something into the placement within the UI that is not intended.

Thanks for your thoughts on it. Then the UI is poorly designed. If you can find any other example of a workspace spontaneously changing after the user has expressly selected it, simply because he selected another file of the same type, I'm interested in taking a look at it.

And because, admittedly, precedent isn't always a great excuse, think it through conceptually: If I'm in a paint booth and I bring a new piece of sheetmetal in, I don't expect the paint booth to transform into a dent-removal workstation. I'm in "painter" persona; I'm doing paint work. Anything I bring in, I'm going to paint.

[walt.farrell]

16 minutes ago, Stokestack said:

And because, admittedly, precedent isn't always a great excuse, think it through conceptually: If I'm in a paint booth and I bring a new piece of sheetmetal in, I don't expect the paint booth to transform into a dent-removal workstation. I'm in "painter" persona; I'm doing paint work. Anything I bring in, I'm going to paint.

A better example is that you are in the paint booth, and you have something to paint.

If you want to stop working on that item and work on something else, you leave the booth, pick up the new item, then decide which booth to carry it into. Perhaps you carry it into the dent-removal booth.

Later you want to work on the first item again, and it's still in the paint booth where you left it.

When you move from the paint booth to the dent-removal booth, all your objects don't follow you. Only the active one, that you're carrying, makes the transition. The others remain wherever they were.

[Stokestack]

If you could move documents from one pane to another in the app, that analogy might work. But here, the documents don't move. So we're left with changing the environment that surrounds the documents. Thus the persona buttons on the main frame.

To support your analogy, "personas" could be selected on or within each document tab. That would be clear.

And again: Selectable workspaces are not uncommon in media-centric applications. I don't know of a single one whose relationship to the document is inverted, as Photo's is.

[Old Bruce]

8 minutes ago, Stokestack said:

Thus the persona buttons on the main frame.

You are making a faulty assumption about the design. There is no frame. 

12 minutes ago, Stokestack said:

Selectable workspaces are not uncommon in media-centric applications.

Are you referring to Adobe Premier again? I am unfamiliar with it so I don't know if it will allow you to have two projects open at once. If you can are you forced to use the layout in True Grit while working on The Ladykillers? Meaning if you wish to do colour grading on True Grit does The Ladykillers bounce out of the Audio mixing?

[Stokestack]

1 hour ago, Old Bruce said:

You are making a faulty assumption about the design. There is no frame. 

Seriously? Scroll up. I don't know what to tell you if you don't know what that is. Frame, window, client area... all standard terms for decades. Grab the outermost area and drag it. Do the interior areas go (or change shape) with it? Then that's the main frame.

1 hour ago, Old Bruce said:

Are you referring to Adobe Premier again? I am unfamiliar with it so I don't know if it will allow you to have two projects open at once. If you can are you forced to use the layout in True Grit while working on The Ladykillers? Meaning if you wish to do colour grading on True Grit does The Ladykillers bounce out of the Audio mixing?

I got rid of the Adobe suite, but based on Adobe's tutorial video the answer appears to be that workspaces are superior to projects. So if you're in the "editing" workspace (or "persona") and you open a different project, the workspace doesn't change. But of course you're not forced to use any particular workspace, regardless.

Even if this weren't true, the situation isn't clearly comparable. Premiere has quite a few more levels in its hierarchy than Photo. There are the files themselves, then timelines, then projects, and then the workspace around all of those. It depends on how the UI depicts this hierarchy.

Resolve also has similar workspaces. Blender does too, but you can't have multiple files open.

[Old Bruce]

Okay then the Frame holds several different documents (until you enter Separated mode). Each document has access to the separate Personas.

I see no reason to assume that the different documents will all move into the different personas in lock step. As I pointed out I would not want several RAW files developed as soon as I developed the first one. 

On 5/28/2020 at 3:11 AM, Stokestack said:

The persona is supposed to be the mode of the entire workspace, which the tabs are subordinate to. So why on earth would I want it to bounce me out of the current persona simply because I selected a different image?

The persona is supposed ... I can understand that the way you work would benefit from this but that way would seriously harm my workflow. I doubt I could get any work done if that were in fact the case.

In fact it doesn't bounce you out, the document you are working on is still in the export persona.

[Stokestack]

15 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Okay then the Frame holds several different documents (until you enter Separated mode). Each document has access to the separate Personas.

Great, then that's where they should be depicted.

15 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

I see no reason to assume that the different documents will all move into the different personas in lock step.

The documents (all of them) are displayed onscreen as being INSIDE the ONE active persona. It's right there. I don't know what to tell you; I didn't design the UI.

15 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

As I pointed out I would not want several RAW files developed as soon as I developed the first one. 

And I agreed with you. I don't know why you keep bringing it up, or would expect that to happen.

I'm mystified as to how a consistent workspace would harm your workflow, but OK.

In my case, I opened several files that I quickly needed to resize and compress for Web deployment. So I switched over to Export persona, thinking I could efficiently rip through all three tabs and export them... but no. I had to switch the persona for every tab. That's absolutely antithetical to the whole "persona" idea.

Anyway, that's enough time spent on this. I asked for a simple, unobtrusive button that's always visible so the user can immediately perform the action to which this "persona" is dedicated. When you go into the Export persona and there's no visible export button by default... that's counterproductive. Having one wouldn't hamper anyone else's workflow or UI-hierarchy concept,  but would help others.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Stokestack said:

Seriously? Scroll up. I don't know what to tell you if you don't know what that is. Frame, window, client area... all standard terms for decades. Grab the outermost area and drag it. Do the interior areas go (or change shape) with it? Then that's the main frame.

No. You drew some outlines and claimed they were frames.

But there is, officially:

1. The Menu
2. The Toolbar, which has the Persona icons and a set of tools that are dependent on the Persona (e.g., Autolevels, Auto White Balance, etc.)
3. The Context Toolbar, which depends on the Tool that is active in the vertical Tools panel.
4. The workspace, in which you find the tabs and the active documents.
5. And on the sides, the Tools panel, and the Studio panels. These also depend on what Persona is active, but are not contained within anything.

The Toolbar is not a frame, and does not contain anything below it. It contains only the items that are within it.

[Stokestack]

And what surrounds the workspace (in which you find the tabs and active documents)?

A frame. You can click and drag on it, and the entire app UI moves. Now try the left side: Yep, same behavior. Try the bottom: Yep, that moves the whole app UI too. Interestingly, the only exception is the right edge. But then... we've seen some wacky UI inconsistency in Affinity apps, haven't we? And whether you think the frame describes a full rectangle or not, there is no debate that it resides at the topmost level of the UI and stretches from edge to edge of it, encompassing everything below it. Like the masthead on a newspaper. Also obvious from the on-screen rendering is that the tabs and their documents are the innermost and most subordinate objects in the UI organization. Personas are shown as outside; documents inside. That's not legitimately debatable, because what happens when you select a persona? Everything around the tabs changes, on all four sides... around and outside all the open documents.

And again, as demonstrated in apps with a similar concept: This is how task-specific workspaces (personas) work: They rearrange the UI to present the most-useful controls for a specific mode of working, not for a specific document.

Aaaaaand we're done.

[walt.farrell]

7 hours ago, Stokestack said:

A frame. You can click and drag on it, and the entire app UI moves. Now try the left side: Yep, same behavior. Try the bottom: Yep, that moves the whole app UI too.

Not for me.

On Windows, dragging works only from the Menu bar. I can't comment on what Mac might allow, but the fact that you can drag the entire window around says nothing except that the entire window is a unit. It implies nothing about any hierarchy within the window that you're trying to infer.

[fde101]

On 5/29/2020 at 7:13 PM, Stokestack said:

And I agreed with you. I don't know why you keep bringing it up, or would expect that to happen.

I'm mystified as to how a consistent workspace would harm your workflow, but OK.

The Develop, Liquify and Tone Mapping personas in Photo are modal.  You are locked in while working with them and can't leave until you either apply your changes or cancel them.

When developing a RAW image, that image is locked into the Develop persona until you have finished making your adjustments.  Applying them converts the image to a non-RAW image and automatically switches to the Photo persona.

If all of the open images were required to be in the same persona, you could not have some images being developed in the Develop persona and others which had already been developed and in a different persona - trying to develop an image would cause you to leave the Develop persona, and any other open images would at the same time leave that persona, either applying the (potentially incomplete) changes or canceling them.

Unless and until all personas were modified to be non-modal, what you are requesting would not be practical in Affinity Photo.

[Stokestack]

Good observation, and that's how Photoshop handles this. While I would never hold Photoshop out as a clinic on good UI, their raw-photo "development" procedure is very clearly modal and conveys to the user that until it's applied, you can't do any "normal" editing on the image.