Layer Comps use-case workflow

[JakeStaines]

I appreciate that there's been requests to add Photoshop-like layer comps to Affinity Photo before (and frankly Designer would also benefit!) but they typically just seem to say "can we have layer comps like in Photoshop?" without explaining why that's actually useful, so rather than just add a "me too!" to the bottom of one of those threads, I figured it would be useful to give a comprehensive example of how layer comps are used and why none of the options in Affinity Photo presently seems to meet the same requirement:

 

Let's say we're doing the card background images for the game of Netrunner, which I pick because there's an online card DB that makes it easy to link to concrete examples. (To be clear, I did not do the work for these cards; I'm just using them as an example of a very real workflow that is - so far as I can tell - tremendously difficult in the Affinity suite compared to other, similar software.)

The game has cards of several different types, e.g.:
Programs | Events | Resources

and each of those types can be in one of several different factions, e.g.:

Anarch | Criminal | Shaper

As you can see, there's some common elements (e.g. the play-cost disc in the top left), some common elements which are recoloured from faction to faction (e.g. the art credit and copyright bar along the bottom), some elements which are present for each card type but recoloured by faction (e.g. the general card frame for a program) and some elements which are specific to the particular kind of card (e.g. the grey strength oval in the bottom-left, which only appears for Programs or the faction-specific background designs).

Were I to be working on the graphic design for these cards, I would set up a single file with all the card graphics on, in which I would turn on and off layers, adjustment layers and filter layers to export the specific card layout for each combination of card type and faction. So I'd have my cost disc in the top-left visible on all my different exports, the credits bar along the bottom visible all the time but behind the layer that has the colour adjustment in, which itself has four colour adjustments for the four different faction colours, and so on. I could then turn on and off some combination of layers to export each combination of faction and card type, then use these as the backgrounds in Affinity Publisher or some more-specialised software like nanDeck to merge a spreadsheet of game data in order to produce all of the game's cards.

Given that Netrunner has four sets of faction colours and five different card types, that's twenty separate exports for all the permutations. (Actually more, because it's an asymmetric game, but the other side shares so few of these elements I'd use a different file.) If I do this entirely by hand not only is it going to be tedious but also massively error-prone, so I'd want to use software that lets me automate the export process.

The obvious place to start is the Export persona, but so far as I can tell the Export persona just... doesn't let you do anything remotely like this at all. You set up separate file exports from the same source .afphoto file by setting up slices, but these don't remember which layers are visible at all so if you set up multiple slices for the whole card area and try and change layer visibility on a per-slice basis, you actually just get multiple identical files output. So the Export person can't do this common export task at all, it seems. Which is a huge shame, because what the 'Continuous' feature on the slices promises would be incredibly useful for this kind of thing - if we could go around in the Photo persona making corrections to the file and have the exports just magically keep up and reflect the latest changes in a staging area without having to even switch to the Export persona, that would be perfect.

The next most obvious place to start is Snapshots, and this looks like it solves the problem because you can indeed set up presets of different layers to turn on and off, so I could save snapshots of Shaper-Program, Shaper-Resource, Shaper-Hardware, Anarch-Program, Anarch-Resource... and so on. But then it turns out that Snapshots also revert any changes made to the contents of those layers since the snapshot was taken, which makes them useless for this purpose already. (I'm actually unclear as to why anyone would ever want to do this - I guess it's a "I'm about to make a big change, let's snapshot" option for people without version-control software to prevent saving fifteen WIP copies of a file?) Even if Snapshots didn't revert all the interim changes as well, there's no obvious way to automate the export of Snapshots anyway. I'd have to individually load each one, manually export the file, choose the export parameters each time (in case I want to resize the image on export or something) and name the file each time.

So then I think that maybe I could set up a macro to automate the selection of layers/groups and the export of the files, but the macro feature can't record "Export File" actions, so that's a no-go. Maybe I'm missing some wonderful feature that would make this task easy, but I've played around in the software for a while, tried several things, and searched for options online, and nothing seems to actually solve the problem. Please let me know if I'm wrong!

 

 

If the art director wants me to make the credits bar at the bottom of each card a couple of millimetres wider and re-export the cards, that's ten seconds of work that then takes ten minutes to carefully export and double-check all the permutations of. I'm spending 5% of my time on my actual job and 95% of my time wishing I was using Photoshop while performing the tedious error-prone busywork of turning various layers on and off and exporting each of the files necessary.
 

To be clear for anyone unfamiliar: in Photoshop, that ten minutes of tedious, error-prone work is performed instead in a single menu item - export layer comps to files - and Photoshop just trundles through all the layer comps you've set up and saves them all to the path you chose. That's why people want layer-comp-like functionality in the Affinity suite: avoiding all that potential error and wasted time. And while card game graphics are an easy-to-explain use case, there's many more. My wife, for example, does freelance illustration often for visual novel games, which frequently have full-screen illustrations depicting events in the story. Often her client will ask for the same illustration to have several variations, so she'll set up various layer groups for each of the elements in a scene - maybe two people are playing basketball and the illustrations show just before a shot is taken, during the shot, and after. The BG would be the same, each of the line-art, colour fill and so on layers would be grouped by character, etc. If her client comes back and asks "could you just change the colour of this guy's socks to yellow" she opens up the layer group for that character, opens the layer group within that for colour fills, the group within that for socks, and changes that one element on the three different layers that contain the colour for each of the three output illustrations and hits the 'export layer comps' menu option and sends the output back to her client. Moving to a layer-group per illustration wouldn't be feasible because then she'd be hunting for the socks in three different hierarchies of layers and possibly miss one and have to go back and repeat the process, and sometimes these illustrations aren't so simple as just three variations - there could be twenty different variants showing a character wearing or not wearing a hat and/or carrying different things or whatever depending on the client's requirements, and because the files will be loaded by software they have to have precise systematic names. The lack of layer comps and that workflow in Affinity Photo has led to her completely writing the software off for her use, despite liking many other things about it.

 

 

To my mind the ideal solution would be something that has a UI like Snapshots, but that just controls the visibility of layers. I guess a 'live-update' option on snapshots might be suitable, but it seems like it could be risky. It ideally needs to be a one- or two-click action to restore the visibility, as with Snapshots. Then to complete the workflow, we'd need an option on an export slice to select the layer-comp to export for that slice rather than just using whatever the current layer visibility is - preferably also with an option to automatically create export slices from each of a document's layer comps.

[Old Bruce]

I really think you are going to have a horrible situation when the one file gets corrupted and you loose all the work for everything. 

In my mind five types of cards calls for five different files. I would use one file that has the basic stuff like the Copyright notice and place that in the five different files.

I have to question your desire to have adjustment layers and filter layers in use. Do all the filters and adjustments on the artwork before you import it.

1 hour ago, JakeStaines said:

... set up a single file with all the card graphics on, in which I would turn on and off layers, adjustment layers and filter layers ....

Also I would not use Photo (you mention Adobe Photoshop so I assume you want to use Affinity Photo) for this, I would use Designer (and Publisher if it is necessary to use the Merge feature). I choose designer because the examples you show have very little in the way of Pixel artwork. One background image per card seems to be it everything else seems to be doable with vectors.

[JakeStaines]

9 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

I really think you are going to have a horrible situation when the one file gets corrupted and you loose all the work for everything.

Sorry, but keeping files from getting corrupted is trivial. Leaving aside that I've literally never had it happen and I have not found the Affinity suite to be that unstable, backups, version-control software, even something as basic as Dropbox can deal with that - it's not that big a concern. What is a big concern is saving time; if one is working on something professionally then the ten or fifteen minutes this costs is a monetary cost, and one only has to perform such repetitive tasks a handful of times a month before - to be blunt - the Photoshop or Illustrator subscription pays for itself. And if one is working on hobby projects in one's spare time: speaking as someone with a full-time job and a family, if I can pay a relatively small amount of money to save myself significant time then that's money well spent, because it means I can actually spend my hobby time doing my hobby rather than tedious, repetitive, and error-prone work.  Software is more useful the more it facilitates your work.

20 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

I have to question your desire to have adjustment layers and filter layers in use. Do all the filters and adjustments on the artwork before you import it.

I'm talking about creating the artwork in Affinity, that's why I'm talking about doing the adjustments in Affinity; there is no 'before import'. The above example has many elements which are the same from faction to faction, just using different colours; the most efficient way I know of to do that work is to create one version of the artwork and use adjustment layers to change the colours as appropriate to match the other factions' requirements. Without something like adjustment layers then I have to maintain four separate versions of the shared-but-in-faction-colours elements, meaning that if the art director asks for a change to them, I have to make an identical change in four places instead of just once in one place. Not only does this take extra time, it also introduces more scope for error - people make silly mistakes all the time, and the more of these skill-less tasks you can automate the fewer silly mistakes you'll get. Again: the goal is to reach the same effect without wasting valuable time.

15 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Also I would not use Photo (you mention Adobe Photoshop so I assume you want to use Affinity Photo) for this, I would use Designer (and Publisher if it is necessary to use the Merge feature). I choose designer because the examples you show have very little in the way of Pixel artwork. One background image per card seems to be it everything else seems to be doable with vectors.

For what it's worth I'm probably more familiar with Designer than Photo, and - for example - did these game tokens entirely in Designer. Game cards do actually relatively frequently get worked on in Photoshop rather than Illustrator, for a variety of reasons, but regardless: Designer also doesn't have any such feature, so far as I can see, so one would have exactly the same problem there. I would agree that this would be a useful feature for Designer as well!
Also, as I stated in my original post: I used the example of game cards because it's easy to explain, but my wife is a freelance illustrator who frequently works on full-screen illustrations for videogames, which most certainly would not be feasible to do in Designer; Photo is the correct tool out of the Affinity suite for that. I showed her this thread earlier and she informed me that the most complex scenes she works on can have over 50 slight variations over what is fundamentally the same illustration; in Photoshop she could make a small change and then easily re-export all the variants she needs to give to her client; in Affinity she can't, and it would be an hour-plus-long task to get the same result. So she continues to use Photoshop, at present.

 

 

 

To be blunt: maybe I'm reading it wrong - and I apologise if that's the case - but your post comes off as a fan's defensiveness, as if I'm criticising your favourite software and it needs to be countered. I'm not; I like the Affinity suite, I've paid for Photo, Designer and Publisher and I use them fairly regularly for a variety of work. This is a feature request to improve the software and make it more useful for a variety of tasks, not a casual comment and certainly not an attack. I appreciate the Affinity suite is kind of an 80/20 version of the Adobe pantheon and is priced accordingly, but I'd wager that this kind of feature is more useful to more people than - say - Snapshots, which apparently made the cut and would almost certainly have been a more difficult feature to code.

I've stated it as clearly as I can and I've stated why it's useful; I have a distinct workflow that I know works for my use-case, my wife's use-case, and clearly the use-cases of a lot of other people requesting the same thing. If you have a better approach that doesn't take more time, then by all means let me know! But telling me that it's not a good workflow is clearly false because it works absolutely fine for a lot of people in other software; and telling me that it's not a good workflow without presenting any alternative whatsoever is even less useful.

[Old Bruce]

3 hours ago, JakeStaines said:

Let's say we're doing the card background images for the game of Netrunner, 

When you say "card background images' do you mean these pixel things, the bird and the eye?

I had the idea from reading your first post you mean the whole card, the whole set(s) of cards.

[JakeStaines]

1 minute ago, Old Bruce said:

When you say "card background images' do you mean these pixel things, the bird and the eye?

...

I had the idea from reading your first post you mean the whole card, the whole set(s) of cards.

I don't think these details are at all relevant to the feature request, but as it goes:

I'm talking about everything except the bird image and the text on the card. A very common practice when setting up cards for print is to start with an image or set of images which is the entire card background but without card-specific illustrations or text; then load those images into something like Affinity Publisher or InDesign and apply the game text and specific images for individual cards (the bird and the eye in the examples you posted) via a data-merge or similar.

In this example case I would expect to produce a series of around twenty images* for all the different permutations of card type and faction - one image for use with all Shaper (green faction) Programs, one image for use with all Anarch (red faction) Programs, etc - and then hand those over to whoever was doing layout to do the work of merging all the game details into them.


* Pedantic details: on one hand, in this specific case there's actually nineteen different card backgrounds required due to the details of how the game works, but that's irrelevant to the workflow problem; on the other hand, there may also be mask images to use to determine exactly which bits of the card-specific image (the bird etc.) get used, if for whatever reason the layout person is positioning those images over the top of the background instead of me leaving a transparent window and them positioning the card-specific image 'behind' the main card BG in their layer stack.

[Old Bruce]

I guess my problem is that I truly do not have any idea what a Faction and a Program are in the sense of a set of cards. What is going to be different from the first card to the second then on to the nineteenth. How best to build these various items. You know exactly what you need do and I am just guessing, most likely, wrong.

I guess I just do not know enough about what Layer Comps do, it has been a very long time since I used them. So I am unsure what Layer Comps would bring here that is going to make the job so much easier and quicker.

[JakeStaines]

It doesn't matter what a Faction or a Program are: the point is that there are many different combinations of layers, several of which are shared across different output documents, several of which are recoloured via layer adjustments, and need to be exported in a number of known permutations. The point of the workflow is to make it as easy as possible to make changes in response to feedback without having to go and edit a load of different layers or perform a load of manual skill-less tasks that could in theory be automated.

Here's a simple example file (attached): I've set up fake layer comps using Snapshots, so you'll need to open the Snapshots palette and restore each of those. Snapshots don't actually work for this at all as they record the state of the document at the point the snapshot was taken, so any changes made to the original layers won't get reflected - the point of layer comps the way they're implemented in e.g. Photoshop is that one could - say - make a change to one of the faction logos and just hit the "export my layer comps" button and get all the card backgrounds re-exported and ready to go, without having to do it all manually. If one needs to, for example, change the way the credits bar (second from bottom layer) looks - say rounding off the end, or pulling it across to fill the whole width - then one only has to do it once on the "Credits Bar" layer and then re-export layer comps, rather than do the change, and fiddle around with layer visibilities again to export nine different permutations of the file.

 

 

If there's a way to achieve that - automated selection of pre-determined permutations of layers/groups, that update as you make changes to the document, and preferably are also selectable as separate exports by the Export Persona - then please do let me know. But I haven't found it and it seems to me it doesn't exist.

layer comp example.afphoto

[Old Bruce]

7 minutes ago, JakeStaines said:

perform a load of manual skill-less tasks that could in theory be automated.

This is one of Affinity's great weaknesses, one of many. Very little to none in the way of automation.

Your explanation shows that Layer Comps have advanced a great deal since I used them back in their early days.

I shall look at the file in more detail. Not what I had in my head at all. Thanks for taking the time to do such a clear mock-up.

[Bilbo Bowman]

I use Layer comps all of the time for one of my clients.

This particular client manufactures antique and retro styled ranges and refrigerators. From one single master image I can generate multiple different range configurations images in all of their colours. Some ranges have gas cooktops, some might have ceramic burners, some have glass cooktops, some have nickel trim, or brass trim, or copper trim, or even no trim.

Once I save a layer comp for each burner and trim configuration in each colour, in seconds, I can export out each range configuration in each colour as a png, jpeg, psd etc. This is especially handy if they make a change to the gas burners for example. I simply swap in the new gas burners into my master file, update the layer comps and export new final images…so efficient!

Using layer comps to manage a single master file that can generate 40 or so ranges in all configurations and colours in mere seconds is a MASSIVE time-saver and so much easier than having separate layered master files for each range and colour.

A poster earlier in this thread mentioned that you would lose a lot of work if that one master file got corrupted. My response would be, that's why I have a robust back-up strategy. I have multiple local back-ups of everything as well as off-site back-ups. Any professional that doesn't have a good back-up strategy is playing with fire. I generally pull a copy of the master file into the new project folder before making any major edits anyway. Fortunately I've never had the master .psd file get corrupted, but it could happen.

[prophet]

Layer States might be equivalent to Layer Comps?

https://affinity.help/designer2/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/ObjectControl/layerStates.html&title=Layer states

[Bilbo Bowman]

5 minutes ago, prophet said:

Layer States might be equivalent to Layer Comps?

https://affinity.help/designer2/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/ObjectControl/layerStates.html&title=Layer states

Thanks, I wasn't aware of Layer States, but it sounds like it will do what I want. Hopefully I'll have the ability to export each state to single files in a single step. I'll investigate that further. 

I am still investigating whether I can make the switch away from Adobe and your suggestion is most definitely helpful. Thanks again.

[prophet]

16 minutes ago, Bilbo Bowman said:

export each state to single files in a single step

Maybe not a single step, but with the Export Persona, it should be relatively simple to achieve.

[Bilbo Bowman]

Just now, prophet said:

Maybe not a single step, but with the Export Persona, it should be relatively simple to achieve.

It appears exporting functionality is coming in a future update. (Soon I hope!)

Thanks again for pointing me to Layer States, it appears to do exactly what I need. (Apart from exporting.)

B

[prophet]

Glad it works for you, and good to see the promise of further developments.

[Bilbo Bowman]

On 9/3/2024 at 1:38 PM, prophet said:

Glad it works for you, and good to see the promise of further developments.

Actually, as it turns out, it doesn't work for me. If I make a change to a Layer State, like adding a new layer to that State, then update the State, the change does not stick. Also, if I add a new layer to my file, then randomly select one of my saved States, the new layer's visibility should be switched off, no? This layer was never saved to any of my existing premade States.

In my opinion, the States feature seems to be half-baked and needs a little more time in the oven.

In addition to a State remembering layer visibility, and effect settings, I'd like it to also remember position. (Technically, it doesn't seem to reliably remember visibility, so that needs to be fixed.)

[prophet]

I see what you mean. I've not really used the Capture State feature as the Queries option suits my work better.

But yes, it seems the Capture State "remembers" only the layers that currently exist when captured, but not new layers. A work around could be the use of groups or Layers (capital L) as organizational containers. If those "top level" containers are present at the time of capture, additional objects or layers (small L) added within the "top level" container will be present in that state.

I could see where capturing position might be useful.

BTW This thread is in the older v1 forum. It might be worthwhile to create a new topic in the current Feedback forum to bring your suggestions a bit more attention.