Artboards in AP

[alfaex]

It will be really cool to have multiple artboards/canvas in AP.

 

Thanks

[loukash]

17 hours ago, alfaex said:

It will be really cool to have multiple artboards/canvas in AP.

And lo and behold, you can add as many artboards as you want.
The Artboard tool is your friend.

affinity.serif.com/en-gb/tutorials/designer/desktop/video/301627979

[walt.farrell]

9 minutes ago, loukash said:

And lo and behold, you can add as many artboards as you want.
The Artboard tool is your friend.

But not in AP (presumably Affinity Photo, but could also be Affinity Publisher, I suppose).

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, @alfaex. If you're requesting a product enhancement, you need to do that in one of the Feature Request & Suggestions forums.

[loukash]

Just now, walt.farrell said:

not in AP (presumably Affinity Photo

Ah, I misread that.

Well, not having multiple artboards in Photo is ultimately "by design", as far as I'm concerned.
But…
Nothing prevents you to open an *.afphoto document in Designer and add as many artboards as you want. It just works.

[walt.farrell]

3 minutes ago, loukash said:

Nothing prevents you to open an *.afphoto document in Designer and add as many artboards as you want. It just works.

Yes, you can add them.

But if your experience doing so is anything like mine, you will quickly experience some very odd behavior if you return the file to Photo for further editing. I think I reported some of them as bugs, but I no longer remember the details.

(I encountered them when playing around with a macro to create Artboards in Photo.)

[loukash]

I have no experience doing so because essentially there's no need in doing so in APh.
APh is an image editor, not a layout tool.
If one needs artboards, then one obviously wants to create layouts.
APh is the wrong tool for that.
Even though it, er… "works". Kinda.

Heck, a few years ago I had to rebuild a gatefold sleeve double LP layout in InDesign because the artist thought he could do everything all by himself and laid it out in – yuck! – Schmotofopp! Of course, the print house was "not amused" and sent him the artwork back to rebuild it, which – not being an educated design artist – he wasn't able to accomplish. Because, well, even though PS is a powerful tool, it's not meant for this task. Period.

So if you need artboards, work primarily in Designer, and switch either to the Pixel pesona or to Photo if you need to perform more sophisticated "pixel pushing" every now and then.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

(I encountered them when playing around with a macro to create Artboards in Photo.)

How could you make this macro? There is no Artboard Tool in AP, nor any other way I can see to add an artboard short of switching to AD.

[walt.farrell]

37 minutes ago, R C-R said:

How could you make this macro? There is no Artboard Tool in AP, nor any other way I can see to add an artboard short of switching to AD.

The same way that @Paul Mudditt created the first macro that enabled Text on a Path in Photo, and possibly a few others. You create them in Publisher.

 

 

[Paul Mudditt]

19 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

The same way that @Paul Mudditt created the first macro that enabled Text on a Path in Photo, and possibly a few others. You create them in Publisher.

 

 

So I recorded the CreateArtboard macro and added it to my Mud's Macros pack, it works but unfortunately Affinity Photo adds the artboard but then crashes on my Mac. Will try macro on my iPad and PC.

Mud's Macros V7.afmacros

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, Paul Mudditt said:

So I recorded the CreateArtboard macro and added it to my Mud's Macros pack, it works but unfortunately Affinity Photo adds the artboard but then crashes on my Mac. Will try macro on my iPad and PC.

After I found the issues that Photo has with Artboards I decided not to encourage their use and didn't release my version (if I remember correctly).

In my latest test on 1.9.2, when used on an image file I opened, it created an artboard that incorporated half the image as the left-side of the Artboard, and then created a large transparent area as the right-side of the Artboard.

[R C-R]

5 minutes ago, Paul Mudditt said:

So I recorded the CreateArtboard macro and added it to my Mud's Macros pack, it works but unfortunately Affinity Photo adds the artboard but then crashes on my Mac.

On my iMac, your CreateArtboard macro works once in AP, but only if there is already a layer in the document. It does not crash the app but if I try using it a second time, after a brief delay the app hangs ('not responding') so I have to force quit it to recover.

TBH, I never thought about recording a macro in APub's Photo persona that involved switching to a different persona ... & I wonder if the developers ever even thought about testing that.

[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, R C-R said:

TBH, I never thought about recording a macro in APub's Photo persona that involved switching to a different persona ... & I wonder if the developers ever even thought about testing that.

It enables some interesting function, but I suspect it hasn't undergone much formal testing. (Just as it seems that artboards in Photo haven't had a lot of formal testing.)

[Paul Mudditt]

50 minutes ago, R C-R said:

On my iMac, your CreateArtboard macro works once in AP, but only if there is already a layer in the document. It does not crash the app but if I try using it a second time, after a brief delay the app hangs ('not responding') so I have to force quit it to recover.

TBH, I never thought about recording a macro in APub's Photo persona that involved switching to a different persona ... & I wonder if the developers ever even thought about testing that.

It is just a side effect of how the software is constructed, being an ex software developer in my earlier professional days I could see that there was never really 3 packages, just one software core with different user interfaces exposed so knew it would work but perhaps not work well because such test cases would not have been tested.

[Paul Mudditt]

Although it does crash on iPad, it seems to work better here than on Mac, it took the existing layers and wrapped an artboard around them on first use, on second use it duplicated the artboard and its contents.