Paint Perspective

[tingham]

I’m probably more surprised by the lack of a dedicated workspace for painting than I am from the lack of any significant UI customizability. I’m loving all of the quality of life improvements you’ve made but there’s a big question mark over having more purpose-built perspectives than just photo ops.

Editorials aside, it would be great to have you partner with a few professional illustrators/fine artists to come up with a sandbox for digital painting. Perhaps splitting the mixer from the regular brush as distinct tools; and enhancing the brush metadata to make it clearer which brushes work best with which of the two primary tools.

I’d also love to have a mixing palette or color picker that I can move around for inline sampling and comparisons. There’s a lot of room for innovation in the perspective space on this pipeline.

[Randall1028]

From a painting/illustrating perspective, sadly I'm thinking both Photo and Designer are lacking too much to upgrade.  While the interface rework on iPad will go a LONG way, there's just still too many quirks to deal with when there's other options out there. And I'm not a professional who has particular needs either, I'm still noobish enough to adapt to almost anything.

But the following problems just keep me from adopting Affinity beyond minor asset creation. None are particularly world-ending, but they're annoying enough that when there's other options out there, it's easier to go there instead of going with the Affinity suite.

On the iPad:

- Navigator is still tiny and you either need to choose between seeing it and other tools

- Still no ability to have 2 instances of a canvas / large preview / reference window.

- Still can't split screen with another app

- Still no keyboard ability to zoom (yes, i know the ipad is touch screen, but now that there's a heavy focus on the magic keyboard/mouse support, sometimes it becomes more of a pain to reach up and touch the screen than it would be to have a shortcut on teh keyboard for it)

 

 

On the Desktop:

- Brushes on the Desktop still are not labeled and then aren't highlighted if you switch to another tool and come back, so there's too much "what brush am I using" going on. Why this problem seems to only exist on Desktop is extremely confusing.

- Doesn't work well with my huion (HS610) tablet at all. Quick, sketchy, curves are choppy (see image)

- Adobe brushes still don't respond nearly at all how they should (again, see image). As I made mention before, if they don't that's fine...but let's either have them work as they should, or remove the functionality all together. Cause right now it comes across as "broken."

 

There has been some updates though which I am grateful for and will likely lead me to get the suite on ipad alone. 

- New interface. Death to the super-large, non collapsible, intrusive settings "pill'! WOOO!!! This alone will be the reason for me spending the money on the new iPad apps, if I do.

- The access to the full tool set without needing to switch personas is certainly helpful.

- flipping the canvas in Photo is very welcome. It should also be in Designer too, though. 

- I like the easy ability to select color with the modifierkey shortcut thingy (but the quick menu needs to be fully customizable with any action, not just the few Serif deemed worthy. For example - "flip canvas" isn't in there but "solo" is?)

- The paint brush seems to retain its behavior if switching from another tool and then back again (though the wet-setting still keeps kicking on). 

 

Overall, I know photo and designer have a very focused "use case" right now, and that's fine, but they've had this same focus for a very long time and I personally think that's a mistake to expect and be content it stays that way. Photoshop has the status it has now because it went beyond simple photo editing. If serif ever wants to seriously go after the Adobe crown, it's going to have to compete in this area, no matter how low cost the software remains.