SymbioticDesign Posted August 6, 2021 Posted August 6, 2021 Hi. First off, I love your Photo/Designer/Publisher studio platform. It really is awesome, but it needs some simple tweaks so that I am not interrupted in my workflow. I have been wanting (and expecting) some updates. I need user definable preferences. Here I am, I have around 80 comic characters to get ready in Designer for Publisher, and I only want to save the selected area (not the 8.5" x 11" document). I run Photo to crop because I don't think the crop tool is working in Designer. It says there is a new version, I download and install it. I was running 1.9.2 Photo, Designer & Publisher. Now I have 1.10 Photo and I cannot "Edit in Photo" as usual probably because they aren't the same version? So, I have already started this project and I have 20 SVG cartoon characters loaded in Designer. I work around it and export the selected area (the illustration layer) to SVG (even though I would rather have the right sized AFDesigner file). But every single time I have to change the Export drop-down from "Whole Document" to "Selected Area", over and over again. I look at this screen and wonder why? If I last saved it with Selected Area, and I am doing this 80 times, why is it always showing "Whole Document" selected in Export? If I could select that "Selected Area" was always selected for these big mineal, labor intensive jobs, that would save me a lot of wasted time. And it's just me here, I have no employees, so I have to do the crappy work, too. This is not the only one, either. In Photoshop I was always resizing stuff down for the web. If I wanted to keep the same aspect ratio, I am resizing the image. If I need to crop strange parts off (I do this a whole heckuva lot) like fingertips in front of the lense or the nix the tree-line on a nice sky or sunset, I will resize the canvas according to the pixel number of the guide I use to measure exactly where those pixels are gone (no, I do not want to paint, smudge, clone or heal anything, I do this quickly all the time and need to I am simply giving a simple example). So I enter the right size of the edge I want to eliminate in the box in the resize canvas, and the stupid chain link isn't clicked and I have to reset everything, disturbing my workflow. If I can set whether or not the image resize and the canvas resize do or do not scale the image in a preferences file, when I am doing 80 different photos I don't get upset because it doesn't work how I believe it should. Don't get me wrong, you guys have great products, much, much better than Photoshop, for sure, light years ahead of indesign (what a damn mess). But I need to work a little faster and each cartoon character line drawing is a different size, each photo can maintain the aspect ratio I need in Publisher with a picture frame, I am just cutting out garbage. I have 80 things to do, and each different, so even a bulk action won't help (although I want to be able to script stuff, too, that's not my repeat issue. Each line illustration, whether character, cartoon or font is different, it has to be, and I need a much better work flow. There are so many preferences I want to edit and can't, that if I could set them, then I would not run into a brick wall in my work flow and wonder why, I would just be able to continue and save. I have lots of things about your suite I want to suggest, but as I have another 40 of 80 line drawn illustrated characters to straighten out before I can even use them in Publisher, I have a lot to do... I'll tell you about it when I run into it next time. More robust Prefs, PLEASE! wtrmlnjuc 1 Quote
Old Bruce Posted August 8, 2021 Posted August 8, 2021 I am not entirely certain I understand what you are trying to do but I think the Export Persona may be of help. You can promote Layers to Slices and export them as SVGs. Quote Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.6 Affinity Designer 2.5.7 | Affinity Photo 2.5.7 | Affinity Publisher 2.5.7 | Beta versions as they appear. I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.
SymbioticDesign Posted August 9, 2021 Author Posted August 9, 2021 What I did was select the Group I wanted to save and exported the selected area as an SVG. The reason the images were loaded was to process them, but in the end I wanted to crop the overall size. In other words, instead of the 8.5" x 11" artboard, I just wanted to crop the canvas size to a rectangular area surrounding the character selected (which was made up of a bunch of selected curves). The reason was to give the character breathing room (white space around each character), but because of the update to Photo, Photo was no longer available (possibly because it was now a different version number than Designer). I could have set a text frame around the character with the breathing room I wanted, and then added that to my selected layers, but I wanted pixel depth control of the crop which I do not get in Designer. I want that level of control so that I don't have to resize each character when I reload them in another program such as Publisher, I just place them. The bonus is that I can use them at any other size anyway as an SVG, but just trying to make things easier in the long run because I will be using these characters over and over and I would like a default, defined size, aspect ratio and dpi. Of course, each character is a different size, either height, width or both. So, I am just trying to get a default size in Photo. Of course, I have a hard time explaining things without getting wordy. My fault. None of that has to do directly with why I want to be able to define my preferences, it was just the process I was going through at the time when I kept running into the fact that I can't define the user preferences. Sorry. Quote
Old Bruce Posted August 9, 2021 Posted August 9, 2021 I Group things and then put a larger or smaller stroke on the group and give that stroke 0 % opacity. Then I go to the export persona and export the groups by selecting them in the export persona's Layers panel and creating slices from the selected layers. See if this is of any use in figuring out what I am nattering on about. breathing room.afdesign Quote Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.6 Affinity Designer 2.5.7 | Affinity Photo 2.5.7 | Affinity Publisher 2.5.7 | Beta versions as they appear. I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.
SymbioticDesign Posted August 16, 2021 Author Posted August 16, 2021 I see. But the issue is not fixable in that way when a stroke is required with my line drawn characters. In fact, that's all they are, strokes. I think I can setup a picture frame, rectangle or a text field, move it to the back and select it to get the just right breathing room I want. But that's still a separate issue than user definable preferences. Like, every time I export, the "Whole Document" is selected to save, even though every single time I have exported the image, I have always had to manually select "Selected Area." Yet, all the other settings are the same as when I exported it last time. I almost always want to maintain a documents aspect ratio when I resize it, but almost never the canvas. So If I could select the way I actually work with stuff in prefs, I wouldn't have to change it every time. Quote
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