List of longstanding papercuts [AfPhoto]

[IPv6]

There is a personal list of frustrating things, that tend to ruin the work or make it harder that it should be. Yes, it is possible to get used to workarounds - but even after all this years of using AP it may be difficult not to fall to some UX traps (from personal experience). It`s about cognitive load that AP places on user to regularly avoid all this traps or find alternatives to missing pieces.

 

Tools

- Brush, Gradient: Alt picking color - not getting actual color in solo-edit (isolated) mode. it always get composited color, which is not what you expect to get when working in isolated mode

More here - https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/101463-ap-paint-brush-color-picker-should-use-color-pickers-source-setting/

- Brush, Gradient: Alt picking color - not working in mask solo-edit mode

- Paint Mixer Brush: no hotkey for setting "transparent color" (same as crossed icon in color widget but with hotkey), which is super-useful mode, "better smudge" basically. Would be cool to have such hotkey globally (like D for reseting to B/W)

- Selection Brush: Shift-click not supported (automatical straight line)

- Smudge brush: Single click always place a broken piece (from unrelated previous stroke). Clean single click important for making Shift-clicked smudged lines

- Keyboard numbers 0-1-2-3... work (as opacity hotkey) with some tools - but not others (not in Smudge, Mixer tools, etc). Really frustrating to switch between keyboard and mouse when using this tools. Control-Number works in Mac, but not Windows

- Brush: Active/Front madness (X/Shift-X). Strange "Front" concept (never find a single use for it after many years with AP), additonally crippled with the fact that state linked to the tool, so changing "frontness" with one tool guarantier broken color when switching to another tool. Especially frustrating when tabbed to fullscreen mode (no way to check without untabbing)

- Warp tool: no way to Alt-F (Repeat) on all selected layers, unlike liquify. With liquify you can change one layer and "repeat" on many, with warp tool it is not possible

- Color picker: "Apply to selection" option. This is default and it is disastrous - it is easy to ruin whole group just SELECTING (not even picking) color while this tool is active (and any group with layers selected in outliner)

- Color picker: "Apply to selection" off state is not remembered between restart or with document (so you need to off it every time)

- Dodge/Burn/etc tools: also should work inside masks (especially when edited in isolated mode). Masks editing really not on par with image editing (many tools not usable at all), which is sad - this is important/frequent case

- Replace color brush/tool: generally not usable, it useful for limited set of cases and can not be used in many cases where color replacement is really needed. more here https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/99302-improve-color-replacement-brush/

 

Liquify persona

- Brush Ramp, Hardness, etc values - not preserved between restarts/per document

- No Smoothing brush

- No Square/etc brushes

 

Layers, Interface

- No easy way to protect alpha channel (for all tools). "Protect alpha" checkbox on some tools not so convenient. Yes, you can disable alpha channel editing and get this protection - but it would be great for this alpha lock to be auto-synced with current layer settings

- Masks: compound masks are cool, but support for Add/Subtract/Multiply blend modes would be cool too (and easier to use, to be honest)

- RGB32 documents: Alpha handling completely broken. You can draw LINEAR gradient in any mask - and it will not be even linear (gamma 2.2 applied for some reason). Without this RGB32 mode basically unusable for anything render-related //
More here - https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/142528-1941065-copy-paste-masks-from-rgb8-to-rgb32-break-gradients/#comment-789370

- Layer Alignments: Not possible to transform/flip/rotate layer by menus/dedicated transform panel without selecting move tool first. Corresponding elements just grayed out without reason, which is kinda annoying

 

Curves

- No way to copy-paste selection of nodes/curves. You can break all, but no easy way to move one single spline from one curve layer to another

- "Add new curve to selected curve layer" should recognize child masks of curves layer as well

 

Adjustments

- Last Used Section not persisting (even during session) when editing adjustment parameters, they always starts from default state. For example: i mainly use levels, curves with alpha channel only. And when i click on adjustment later - i expect to see the same alpha section that was used before. Instead i need to tediously choose alpha from dropdown every time. Same with Lab - L channel, etc. The single changed section or last used section should be default.

- Procedural Live filter: no color input (with color picker)

- Displace: no way to set just angle and distance, like in affinity transforms (without dedicated color map). Or Affine filter as adjustment would be great. non-destructive Deform filter would be great too

- Bilateral Blur: no way to set another layer as a sources for "difference" for blurring current one. More here - https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/182521-ap-bilateral-blur-adjustment-need-more-options/

 

 

Macros/Scripting

- Smudge brush not recorded at all

- No support for paste actual clipboard content (paste pastes content at time of recording)

- Scripting: Not implemented yet

 

---

BTW, the list was longer and some things are fixed finally, but there is still room for improvements. Features that was on this list before, now now seems to be fixed: multi-rasterize layers, live warp adjustment, selection problems, gradients problem

I believe things will get better during V2 cycle, already bought universal V2 license to support developers

[Intuos5]

I think that the opacity tools 0-9 should actually be exposed to the keyboard shortcuts section. Then you could also remap these keys.