Digital Painting Absolute Must-Add's

[jarombra]

I'm very excited for Affinity Photo to become an "industry standard" digital painting tool, but there are a few things it needs first:

 

- Color picker HUD (fly-out palette accessible while working on the canvas)

- Customizable hot-key commands

- Live rotate tool

- Canvas flipping hot-keys.

 

If those four things can be added to the software as it is now, there is no reason for digital painters to keep their exorbitant loyalty to Adobe. I for one am eager to get off the bank-busting CC subscription, and I know that Affinity is the imminent promised land once the aforementioned needs of digital painters are featured in Affinity Photo. Please feel free to add more items my fellow digital painters in this thread. I hope the Affinity staff takes note!

[ONSO]

I totally agree— those addition would make Photo and Designer even better. 

[Herbert123]

I am unsure about focusing too much on painting tools: the danger lies in fragmenting the focus of the application, in my opinion. And the market is already saturated with a number of extremely powerful digital painting and drawing tools, and trying to compete with those would probably take up all of the Affinity developers' time.

 

For example, I do not see them competing with Krita, which is open source, and arguably superior for digital painting even when compared to the likes of Photoshop. So is ClipStudio, Corel Painter, Art Rage, and newer applications such as Mischief and PaintStorm Studio.

 

How can the Affinity team hope to compete with dedicated apps? I think it should not. The developers behind Krita, for example, decided to shift their focus on digital painting a couple of years ago, rather than developing an all-purpose app, which worked out well for them. Affinity Photo is better off primarily focusing on becoming a great photo and image editing app, if you ask me.

[jarombra]

I am unsure about focusing too much on painting tools: the danger lies in fragmenting the focus of the application, in my opinion. And the market is already saturated with a number of extremely powerful digital painting and drawing tools, and trying to compete with those would probably take up all of the Affinity developers' time.

 

For example, I do not see them competing with Krita, which is open source, and arguably superior for digital painting even when compared to the likes of Photoshop. So is ClipStudio, Corel Painter, Art Rage, and newer applications such as Mischief and PaintStorm Studio.

 

How can the Affinity team hope to compete with dedicated apps? I think it should not. The developers behind Krita, for example, decided to shift their focus on digital painting a couple of years ago, rather than developing an all-purpose app, which worked out well for them. Affinity Photo is better off primarily focusing on becoming a great photo and image editing app, if you ask me.

 

 

I see what you're saying, but from years of digitally painting experience I can say with some confidence that the bulk of the features in those painting-only applications are not necessary for many professional visual development workflows. All that is needed are the features I've listed above, absolutely all of which fit into other compositing and photo editing pipelines as well.

 

While many painting softwares tout their sophisticated brush and materials dynamics, at the end of the day all you need is a simple default round brush, and Affinity Photo already has more than enough on the brush front. They just need to ad some basic maneuverability UX stuff as mentioned above. I hope they do - I for one like painting and compositing all at once or at least under the same roof.

[Herbert123]

I see what you're saying, but from years of digitally painting experience I can say with some confidence that the bulk of the features in those painting-only applications are not necessary for many professional visual development workflows. All that is needed are the features I've listed above, absolutely all of which fit into other compositing and photo editing pipelines as well.

 

While many painting softwares tout their sophisticated brush and materials dynamics, at the end of the day all you need is a simple default round brush, and Affinity Photo already has more than enough on the brush front. They just need to ad some basic maneuverability UX stuff as mentioned above. I hope they do - I for one like painting and compositing all at once or at least under the same roof.

 

Workflows in compositing and matte painting have advanced, and HDR painting is is one of the features becoming more prevalent in those areas. EXR and 32bit per channel support are missing in Affinity, and are important in 3d work as well.

 

In Krita and Photoline I can work seamlessly with 32bpc, multi-layered EXR files and HDR files. I can combine 32bpc renders with HDR imagery, and paint details in highlights and shadows.

 

Even Photoshop's EXR support is very limited to a single layer workflow, and users will have to invest in a commercial plugin which costs more than Affinity Photo!

 

 

Until Affinity receives an update in these areas, it will be considered immature and unsuitable for these areas of work, no matter how good or bad the painting tools will be(come). But I have a feeling the developers are mainly focusing on designers and photographers as customers, and are less concerned with including features which are aimed at higher level compositing.

[ajay.ganapathy]

 

 

I am unsure about focusing too much on painting tools: the danger lies in fragmenting the focus of the application, in my opinion. And the market is already saturated with a number of extremely powerful digital painting and drawing tools, and trying to compete with those would probably take up all of the Affinity developers' time.

 

I think the real problem comes down to the fact that it's difficult to round-trip files between apps.

 

As a front-end developer I firmly adhere to the unix philosophy of software - that individual pieces of software should do one thing well, rather than many things poorly, and that software should be composable. 

 

It's more important that affinity designer can import and export files in industry-standard formats so that users can switch to their preferred apps for specific tasks like painting.

 

The affinity suite does a great job of implementing the unix philosophy - you can seamlessly open an affinity photo document in affinity designer, and add all sorts of pixel and vector brush effects.

 

Software should only have features that improve the workflow for a majority of use cases.

 

That being said, I think rotate canvas would be a great addition to affinity designer because it improves three key use cases:

1) digital painting

2) transforming objects (i.e. instead of transforming along the x and y axis, you can rotate the canvas, and then transform by an angle)

3) snapping objects (i.e. instead of snapping to the nearest neighbors on the x and y axis, you can snap along a diagonal axis)

 

also, If this helps, you can customize keyboard shortcuts from the OS X keyboard preference pane. 

 

As for the hud, perhaps that can be bundled in with force touch as part of the brush tool. That way, it only pops up when it's relevant.

 

 

[Herbert123]

I think the real problem comes down to the fact that it's difficult to round-trip files between apps.

 

As a front-end developer I firmly adhere to the unix philosophy of software - that individual pieces of software should do one thing well, rather than many things poorly, and that software should be composable. 

 

It's more important that affinity designer can import and export files in industry-standard formats so that users can switch to their preferred apps for specific tasks like painting.

 

The affinity suite does a great job of implementing the unix philosophy - you can seamlessly open an affinity photo document in affinity designer, and add all sorts of pixel and vector brush effects.

 

Software should only have features that improve the workflow for a majority of use cases.

 

I agree - in this regard it is interesting to note that there is software which tries to ease the workflow. For example, Photoline enables a workflow in which a layer can be sent to any other application through the use of SVG, TIFF, PNG, or PDF for editing, and when the external application saves the (temporary) file, the source layer in Photoline is automatically updated. Or send the entire file to the external app, or a flattened file.

 

This is an original solution to mitigate the difficulties surrounding round-tripping. It works really well, and is quite a novel approach, and It also means almost any application which can handle graphic files may be integrated in Photoline as a kind of 'plugin'. It saves a lot of time: with a flick of a key I send a layer to Krita for painting. Or another shortcut sends a group of layers as a flattened version to a web image optimization app for final output. When I require a special filter only available in Gimp: send the layer to Gimp, apply the effect, and send it back to Photoline. Super handy and efficient.

 

Although it is not a perfect solution, it beats having to limit oneself to only a group of applications from one vendor which only 'talk' well to each-other, and no other applications can be easily integrated.