A more intuitive Develop Persona

[Uncle Mez]

Hello Everyone
Hello Team

I gladly spent the last few days working on projects and realized how easy and fluid Affinity photo have become but ... yes because can't move forward without a request for improvement.
I'd like to notify that the Develop Persona is something quite complicated from noobs perspective which should be revamped and made more intuitive for all levels of knowledges.

What's there and the way it works is cool but more for Pro/Skilled people to work with (same case for the Tone mapping persona)
to my defense on this, I used Luminar for like every projects I needed to finish which is actually a non-sens.
Looking at Photoshop with their improvement made on Camera Raw, I believe this is a sort of path to bring on the Develop Persona of Affinity Photo.
Making things easy to grad and to do without having to worry "what app will color grade with ease while making me save a big amount of time and money etc."
I know it's possible and the Team behing the Photo app can make it happen with the ease of a click for our pleasure and joy.

Something mid-ground between Camera Raw and Luminar will be welcomed.
Hope I posted in the roght place without creating a duplica of request that aleready existed years/months ago.

Blessings !

[fde101]

23 hours ago, Uncle Mez said:

hat's there and the way it works is cool but more for Pro/Skilled people to work with (same case for the Tone mapping persona)

As the Affinity series apps primary target professional users and those who aspire to be such, this seems entirely appropriate.

 

23 hours ago, Uncle Mez said:

something quite complicated from noobs perspective

Just about anything that is worthwhile for pros is going to seem complicated to a "noob" - the secret is to take the time to learn.

 

 

That said, this request amounts to "make it easier" - but there is no specific indication of specifically what it is that you currently find to be difficult / unintuitive...  can you be more specific about what it is that you are having trouble with?

[Uncle Mez]

13 hours ago, fde101 said:

As the Affinity series apps primary target professional users and those who aspire to be such, this seems entirely appropriate.

 

Just about anything that is worthwhile for pros is going to seem complicated to a "noob" - the secret is to take the time to learn.

 

 

That said, this request amounts to "make it easier" - but there is no specific indication of specifically what it is that you currently find to be difficult / unintuitive...  can you be more specific about what it is that you are having trouble with?

Thank you my friend by ease of use I actually mean the Develop Persona should come closer to what we have in other modern apps like On1 Photo Raw, PhotoLab 4 etc.
something that's less technical but opens the door to pure creativity.
After all, Photography, Photo-Retouch etc. all that is Art and the guy working with the tools, need to actually be more focus on making their Art better but with ease and not spending like a day for a photo.

The recent improvements brought to PS by Adobe have enabled their userbase to do more and much better in less which can be proven by growing amount of piece of Art on behance but also a constantly increase of their tutorial production on YouTube.

The Affinity line of product can achieve the same without scarifying this or that but shaping things and making them even better.
Even the guys at Luminar understood that and now about to deliver the one killing app they never imagined they could ship to us.

[fde101]

3 hours ago, Uncle Mez said:

the Develop Persona should come closer to what we have in other modern apps like On1 Photo Raw, PhotoLab 4 etc

Again, closer in what way?

This is still "make it more like other apps" or "make it better" - but you haven't qualified what "better" actually is (from your point of view) or in what manner you want it to be "closer".

PhotoLab and On1 Photo RAW are dedicated non-destructive RAW developers with an entirely (and intentionally) different workflow.  Affinity Photo is a destructive photo editor, not a dedicated RAW developer.

Affinity Photo is its own application and being different from the other applications is in general a good thing - otherwise there would be no point in having developed it, rather it would simply be redundant.

What specific feature or behavior are you requesting a change in?

[Uncle Mez]

2 hours ago, fde101 said:

What specific feature or behavior are you requesting a change in?

1- Non Destructiveness
2- Better and understandable Adjustments
3- More intelligent and Less agressive Tone Mapping filters/functions
4- more comprehensive functions on the develop persona (which here tends to be confusing in regard to what is available on the Develop Persona
5- Save with History to become default (but must allow that function to be disabled if needed)
6- Crop tool shouldn't crop the entire canvas or Art but act like the crop tool in designer or allow for crop on precise layer
7- Affinity Designer is capable of creating both vector and pixel layers why not Affinity photo ? When it is possible to move from one to another to do things in a more precise way.

This is a short list of what I can talk about right now.

[fde101]

34 minutes ago, Uncle Mez said:

Non Destructiveness

This runs contrary to the design of the application.  Affinity Photo is by nature a destructive photo editor.  It does have some non-destructive capabilities, and extending this to some degree into the Develop persona has been discussed in other threads (suggest searching for and adding your comments to the existing thread if you have something to add), but the program as a whole will never be 100% non-destructive.

 

37 minutes ago, Uncle Mez said:

Save with History to become default (but must allow that function to be disabled if needed)

This can bloat file sizes, particularly for larger and more complex projects.  I think there should be a preference as to whether or not this should be enabled by default for new documents, as some will want it and others will not, depending on how they work.

 

38 minutes ago, Uncle Mez said:

Crop tool shouldn't crop the entire canvas or Art but act like the crop tool in designer or allow for crop on precise layer

Other people are complaining that it doesn't really crop, but want it to destructively crop the canvas when they use it.  This again is a function of different people working in different ways, and the current crop tool is likely most appropriate for Affinity Photo.  You can still use a shape as a mask to gain the effect of cropping an individual layer.

Also, the concept of cropping a layer is kind of foreign to the develop persona anyway as it only ever operates on a single layer.

 

40 minutes ago, Uncle Mez said:

Affinity Designer is capable of creating both vector and pixel layers why not Affinity photo?

Wrong tool for the job.  This feature is not ordinarily needed in a photo editor and is a very reasonable feature to have left out to help differentiate the products.

If you have both applications and you really want that capability, you should be able to bring a "vector layer" (not really what they are but whatever) from Designer (or Publisher) into Photo and store it as an asset so that you can drop it onto other documents later on.