Has V2 fixed Affinity's biggest issues?

[tatanka]

22 minutes ago, chessboard said:

The logo you place in the CMYK Publisher document must have CMYK as colour space too. Otherwise it will be rasterized by Publisher.

Did that also. Same FOGRA27 profile in both the Publisher and Designer documents. Print it from Publisher and everything is rasterised, even text in a Publisher text box at K=100. Export that document as PDF X:1a and print it from MacOS Preview and the Designer document with the K-100 object works, as does the PDF and EPS exports that Designer document.

So I’ve reported the bug.

A bit hard to construct the test documents for the report, as Publisher kept crashing over and over. Sometimes the placed EPS would be missing from the file on re-opening. That also happened in other documents. Hope they got the crash reports. 

[AllAppsUser]

On 11/15/2022 at 10:03 AM, Kal said:

I learnt Illustrator first... which is probably why I preferred it.

Ah, the FreeHand thread, still going strong all these years later - says someting.

I learned Illustrator first - then discovered the printer rip at work had all sorts of problems with illustrator files. So with much reluctance I set about learning FreeHand. I was gutted when Macromedia sold out to Adobe and FreeHand was binned. FreeHand is still an all-time best vector app, despite me becoming fond of Illustrator.

The handles on vectors in Designer are pretty good it has to be said* - always an utter bane in Illustrator, and perfect in FreeHand. They were the one big thing to get right in a vector app. *I've not looked at Designer version 2 to see if Affinity have managed to trash the good bits, of course.

[AllAppsUser]

While I was nodding along to the UI frustrations, the big thing I see Serif seem incapable of grasping is colour, which manifests most obviously in the management of swatches.

During the apps early development - as soon as they added the utterly useless 'recent' colour feature, I knew they had no clue how important colour is to designers... Scenario that plays out again and again if you attempt to use it is: "ok, which of the last five shades of red sitting in the recent colour thingy is the red I actually used on that object? Errr, last one in the recent series, as in most recent?  Hope it's the most recent recent colour. Uh-ho, no. What now, there's 4 really similar shades of red!!!" Yeah, there's lots of other things to do to overcome it, but that lives in to my point that there is little point to the recent colour thing.

The colour features in the affinity apps always give the impression that, like so many in this world, they see colour as just a pretty, random, inconsequential thing designers and illustrators haphazardly muck about with, and they can't compute anything beyond that. When actually, colour is one of the most disciplined and important areas of designing anything.

It does not surprise me that you report @kal that version 2 appears to demonstrate minimal improvement in their understanding.

Edited November 26, 2022 by ProDesigner
To improve clarity for those unfamilar with the workflow I'm alluding to.

[tatanka]

Here are two more jarring omissions from v2:

1) Variable fonts support is missing, which in turn is connected to …
2) Support for complex scripts is missing.

Affinity have to shift all their applications to the Harfbuzz text shaping engine. It’s their only chance to get it right. Developing on their own in-house engine is biting them in the ass now. The only thing for it is to make the change sooner rather than later.

You get a sense of how much they care about typography when you look at the Typography-panel in Publisher. It’s a mess. The panel isn’t even a normal panel, rather some ad hoc abomination.

The entire font industry is shifting to variable fonts. Soon there will be typefaces that will only be available as variable fonts, then what Affinity?

[AllAppsUser]

15 minutes ago, tatanka said:

You get a sense of how much they care about typography

To be fair, I think there's an ocean of stuff they don't understand. I suspect the budget for paying truly professional level desigers to spend time giving them indepth feedback at their Nottingham office - if it's not moved and with all the complexities involved in our brave new hybrid working world - has always been, and is, too small. They also over relied on their history in PC apps, even claiming at one point that the microsoft ribbon was a great UI device - they so nearly went there. So their knowledge acquisition activity has been flawed.

They're probably in firefighting mode right now and for the foreseeable too, so learning mode is a long-long way off, tbh. Nothing damages app sales like crashes which a lot of people seem to be experiencing.

[chessboard]

2 hours ago, ProDesigner said:

During the apps early development - as soon as they added the utterly useless 'recent' colour feature, I knew they had no clue how important colour is to designers... Scenario that plays out again and again if you attempt to use it is: "ok, which of the last five shades of red sitting in the recent colour thingy is the red I actually used on that object? Errr, last one in the recent series, as in most recent? Oh, nope." Yeah, there's lots of other things to do to overcome it, but that lives in to my point that there is little point to the recent colour thing.

Sorry, but this sounds a bit ridiculous. Do you really have problems to indentify the most recent colour in a row that grows from left to right? The most recent colour is the most left one, the colour you used before this is the second left one. When there are two rows, the reading is left to right and top to bottom. The most recent is the upper left one. This is no uncommon way of sorting them. For example, Clip Studio Paint sorts them the same way. There is nothing useless with this sorting.

If one colour is really so importat for your work, you can save it as swatch in a document palette.

Can't imagine, that you really didn't get this.

[AllAppsUser]

23 minutes ago, chessboard said:

Do you really have problems to indentify the most recent colour

No. If you re-read the scenario the mission is NOT picking the most recent recent colour. It is:

Quote

which of the last five shades of red sitting in the recent colour thingy is the red I actually used on that object?

Sure I should have then written - "hope it's the last most recent recent colour. Uh-oh, no. What now?" That would have been clearer. I'll edit it so it is clearer.

When deciding a colour right at the beginning on the fly, you might go through a few shades of similar colours in quick succession, applying them to various objects to see the overall effect. That's before deciding which one to turn into a swatch. You then end up with several very slightly differing shades of the same colour. I'd challenge you to know which was which.

The recent colour thing can work for a series of distinct colours, though even then there are draw-backs. For something more nuanced with several shades of a colour, it's hopeless.

You don't state anywhere what kind of work you do and whether you create illustrations, or you're more graphics. So I don't know if the workflow I'm describing is familiar to you or 'another planet'. Though....

Quote

Can't imagine, that you really didn't get this.

Meant good naturedly. If you can't take it with a smile, don't dish it out.

[debraspicher]

23 minutes ago, chessboard said:

Sorry, but this sounds a bit ridiculous. Do you really have problems to indentify the most recent colour in a row that grows from left to right? The most recent colour is the most left one, the colour you used before this is the second left one. When there are two rows, the reading is left to right and top to bottom. The most recent is the upper left one. This is no uncommon way of sorting them. For example, Clip Studio Paint sorts them the same way. There is nothing useless with this sorting.

If one colour is really so importat for your work, you can save it as swatch in a document palette.

Can't imagine, that you really didn't get this.

When it comes to painterly work, CSP's history function makes more sense because it's not necessary for a color to be "specific" (base color), but rather "transitional" (blends) if that makes sense. The painter is more than likely relying on the eyedropper than individual swatches.

With design work, specifics matter especially when flats dominate the work-piece.

[AllAppsUser]

Hey @debraspicher. Yes, I beleive you're correct. Have to admit that for 'painterly' (raster-pixel) illustrations I use ProCreate.

Even with 'flat' or 'flatish' coloured (vector) illustrations, the recent colour list contributes nothing. It's of limited use case - as-in: only when the colours are distinct enough to be able to discern one from the other, and relate them.

I'd love to watch someone who uses the recent colours list a lot for coloured illustration work, to see how they get value out of it, btw.

It's perhaps the number and complexity of colours in the artwork that makes the recent colour list useless. It perhaps proves valuable in 'graphic' pieces, though even then I've found - because Serif don't really get colour - you think you're picking a swatch you last used from the recent colour list. You check the colour and find it's not. I'm not sure how many people trust that it is and don't realise it's not the colour they thought they were picking.

[chessboard]

Quote

You don't state anywhere what kind of work you do and whether you create illustrations, or you're more graphics. So I don't know if the workflow I'm describing is familiar to you or 'another planet'. Though....

I'm a professional illustrator (professional=this is the job I live from) doing some parts of graphics design as well, for card games, for example (I learned graphic design when there was no "desktop publishing"). Of course I know your scenario. But I still don't see your problem. You switch through different shades of a colour looking for the best fitting. So far, so clear. I do this daily. I really try, but I can't get the problem, that you have with recent colours (except that 10 are too few color patches in my opinion).

If I was unsure about colour combinations, I would duplicate the artboard and test another one. Or I would set a color to my liking and save it as swatch to be able to access it again if necessary. In the phase in which I'm not at all sure about the color, I of course also switch very quickly between the colors. But the colors that I then pass over are ultimately also out of the question for the design. And after all, I can get at least the last 10 recent colours. I would never change a colour so lightly that I couldn't tell, if it was this or this one and try to restore it from the recent colours palette.

After all, you can change the colour of any vector shape at any time and adjust it to match the overall design.

The recent colour list is just a helper to get back the last 10 colours you used. It's a comfort thing, nothing more.

May make more sense with painting, than with graphics.

Quote

which of the last five shades of red sitting in the recent colour thingy is the red I actually used on that object?

Not ment as an insult(!): Just click on the object and you will see which colour it has. Of what interest could it be, which one of the recent colour it was? The actual colour is the colour the object has, isn't it? Perhaps you expect very other things from the recent colour list than I do.

 

[debraspicher]

55 minutes ago, ProDesigner said:

Hey @debraspicher. Yes, I beleive you're correct. Have to admit that for 'painterly' (raster-pixel) illustrations I use ProCreate.

Even with 'flat' or 'flatish' coloured (vector) illustrations, the recent colour list contributes nothing. It's of limited use case - as-in: only when the colours are distinct enough to be able to discern one from the other, and relate them.

I'd love to watch someone who uses the recent colours list a lot for coloured illustration work, to see how they get value out of it, btw.

It's perhaps the number and complexity of colours in the artwork that makes the recent colour list useless. It perhaps proves valuable in 'graphic' pieces, though even then I've found - because Serif don't really get colour - you think you're picking a swatch you last used from the recent colour list. You check the colour and find it's not. I'm not sure how many people trust that it is and don't realise it's not the colour they thought they were picking.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by not being able to find the object color? Is the object already colored on the document? Do you mean with regards to the swatches panel? If you select the object, it will show what is being used if it is already defined in the fill/color panel, but it will also "highlight" in the swatches panel. Admittedly, it is harder to see which one that is at smaller swatch sizes (I scaled up the panel in example)...

You can also find all the objects with the same color using Select > Select Same > Fill Color, Stroke Color, etc...

Quote

- because Serif don't really get colour -

My impression has always been they tended to add features according to what was most feasible at the time - developmentally speaking. If you read staff messages here, it's easy to tell most of the responses are being filtered through a developer's lens rather than with a design eye. That doesn't necessarily mean they don't have the correct crowd behind them with which to inform them on the craft. On forum it creates tension needlessly between two totally different mindsets and that is plain as day. So I can only imagine what that must be like behind the scenes...

[debraspicher]

Re: History Panel, it may make more sense to a color designer by trade since they're much more likely to hyper micromanage their selections than say a "seat of the pants" design process... I use it in CSP sparingly, but when I do, CSP allows us to tab the entire panel to the side of the document. What's useful about it is I can tell if I'm setting myself up for crazy-making later on if I'm skewing too far one way... for example, judicious use of warm/saturated tones, not enough contrast, way too similar values, etc... things like that... It would be possible to manage that on a physical palette but clearly that's not an option digitally.

[AllAppsUser]

I really appreciate you both trying to help, I really do, but we're just ending up down a rabbit hole.

This is because my post was about how I beleive serif don't 'get' colour (and I'm not the only one highlighting it). My post was NOT about a specific problem I wanted a solution to. The scenario included in my post was an illustration, not a request for help.

This is a forum where people come to help, so of course you've valiantly dived-in, trying to help based on next to no useful information. Thank you.
------

For interest - Serif released apps without the highlighting feature being asked about below. They left the omission in the app for 10 updates that I know of, despite people reporting it as a bug, and asking for the feature. Clearly, being able to see the colour you've just applied highlighted was not understood as needing to be high on the 'important' list.

 

[debraspicher]

4 minutes ago, ProDesigner said:

I really appreciate you both trying to help, I really do, but we're just ending up down a rabbit hole.

This is because my post was about how I beleive serif don't 'get' colour (and I'm not the only one highlighting it). My post was NOT about a specific problem I wanted a solution to. The scenario included in my post was an illustration, not a request for help.

This is a forum where people come to help, so of course you've valiantly dived-in, trying to help based on next to no useful information. Thank you.
------

For interest - Serif released apps without the highlighting feature being asked about below. They left the omission in the app for 10 updates that I know of, despite people reporting it as a bug, and asking for the feature. Clearly, being able to see the colour you've just applied highlighted was not understood as needing to be high on the 'important' list.

 

Eww, no. I don't want that credit lol

I think it's more that it kept getting repeated in commentary so I started to think it was a question rather than a conversation. It was a decent conversation just to follow/lurk/scan-read. Thanks.

[ChopperNova]

V2 is just disheartening. It's like coming from the great, original Star Wars Theatrical, being sold tickets to Empire Strikes Back, and forced to watch A New Hope: Special Edition -- the vast bulk of features are a hodge-podge of stuff the maker wanted, neither understanding nor caring what the audience wanted -- while being 99% the original. Serif could also learn from the various Death Stars down through the ages, it doesn't matter how numerous or fancy the features, if it keeps blowing up.

It's not so much that V2 isn't an Adobe killer now, it's that at this rate, it's so amply clear that it will never even be a contender. There's just so much wasted potential and time, so much missed opportunity, I'll likely just go back to an old Photoshop when my V2 trial expires.

And don't get me started on those of us with the MSIX bug being forced to watch Star Wars: Holiday Special, Clockwork Orange style.

[deeds]

5 hours ago, ChopperNova said:

V2 is just disheartening. It's like coming from the great, original Star Wars Theatrical, being sold tickets to Empire Strikes Back, and forced to watch A New Hope: Special Edition -- the vast bulk of features are a hodge-podge of stuff the maker wanted, neither understanding nor caring what the audience wanted -- while being 99% the original. Serif could also learn from the various Death Stars down through the ages, it doesn't matter how numerous or fancy the features, if it keeps blowing up.

It's not so much that V2 isn't an Adobe killer now, it's that at this rate, it's so amply clear that it will never even be a contender. There's just so much wasted potential and time, so much missed opportunity, I'll likely just go back to an old Photoshop when my V2 trial expires.

And don't get me started on those of us with the MSIX bug being forced to watch Star Wars: Holiday Special, Clockwork Orange style.

Well said.

Giving off increasingly strong The Matrix sequels (all of them) vibes.

[chirpy]

On 11/26/2022 at 6:56 AM, tatanka said:

A bit hard to construct the test documents for the report, as Publisher kept crashing over and over. Sometimes the placed EPS would be missing from the file on re-opening. That also happened in other documents. Hope they got the crash reports. 

I will say that you (and everyone else) should stop using EPS files. They are an old format that should be retired. If you need to place something other than a native Affinity file, you should make a PDF and place that instead of EPS. I know EPS will never go away, as there are too many of those files floating around "out there", but nowadays nothing should be saved as EPS to give to someone else unless they are unable to use any other format.

[JohnDK]

21 hours ago, ChopperNova said:

It's not so much that V2 isn't an Adobe killer now, it's that at this rate, it's so amply clear that it will never even be a contender.

This is very sad but also very true. 

I really liked V1 and thought there was great potential, but V2 of Photo is such a let down.  There were so many basic things that needed tidying up in V1 but they have just been ignored for V2.  Seems to me that pretty much everything new is graphic based and of little use in photography work.  I've decided not to buy V2 and will stick with V1 altough these days I pretty much just use it from my old copy of lightroom for cloning and the inpainting brush.

I was really hoping V2 would have a new app to replace Lightroom.  Sadly not the case

[kirk23]

On 11/14/2022 at 3:28 PM, Kal said:

V2 may have brought some cool new features, but it has only brought modest improvements to a few of the features which matter to me the most, while other issues have been overlooked completely. Having waited so many years for the first major update, I have to say, I'm pretty disappointed.

 v2 is a nice step forward indeed  and in the right direction.  The problem  it's  not big enough step. With that pace we would have to wait our whole lifetime before we get truly modern non-destructive image editor.    Non-destructiveness is what I need for the first hand  and we still can't link pixel content without  rasterizing bitmap first killing  its link to its original source.  

Procedural filter is still in a baby stage , no sampling  other layers except beneath one  , nothing  truly helpful beyond noise texture.

I just hope Affinity wouldn't stop to develop the program itself and do only AI filters  like Photoshop seems  to per-occupied now.    I am so much more disappointed  by recent   Photoshop release.  

For simple like 2x2 image compositing   we still have to buy Nuke and deal with  this typical node puzzles    even if we don't need any animation at all .  

 

 

[AllAppsUser]

On 11/27/2022 at 1:56 AM, ChopperNova said:

It's not so much that V2 isn't an Adobe killer now, it's that at this rate, it's so amply clear that it will never even be a contender.

Exactly my feelings. I'm backtracking on paying for version 2 at the moment. I'm out there conducting a serious review of the alternatives before I do so, and it shouldn't be like that.

I'd advise this company to develop a robust process for gathering 'professional workflow' knowledge (Forums are not it), and clarify really diligently who their target market is, or it's never going to reach the heights it set out to at the beginning. It's THE critical thing for their future right now (I've 10+ years experience helping big brands grow bigger, btw).

I'd love to know how sales of version 2 are doing, and whether they're on target with expectations. I'll be surprised if they are. They'll be blaming cost-of-living which will be wrong.

Here's how wide they are - I use ProCreate on the iPad for the quick n dirty photo work - cut-outs, basic adjustments, simple montages. Five minutes and I'm done. Affinity Photo comes nowhere near. And let's face it, quick n dirty photo work is the bulk of photo activity for design professionals who buy the full suite.

[chessboard]

After reading your other post @ProDesigner (about the missing highlighting of the selected recent colour on iPad) I think I now understand, what your criticism is directed to.

I must say, I have been a big fan of V2 at first. I like the new features like the shape builder tool, the warp tools, multiple masks in Photo, "hide others", the new export dialogs and some more. But the more I try to work with it, the more I am disillusioned (and therefore disappointed). Still no simplify path tool, for example!

What I miss the most of all is stability. I could live with questionable UI/UX design decisions like locked layers that are not locked, preserved transparency not as layer options, but only for painting tools, an almost useless contour tool and so on. But I can't do my daily work with software that starts lagging to or freeze after using it some minutes.
I'm glad I don't have to rely on Affintiy Suite and have enough alternatives to get my work done. You will laugh, but for a children's non-fiction book I now used instead of Affintiy Publisher, which started crashing when I was almost ready with the layout, guess what: ... Photoline. This absolutely underrated gem had all the features I needed and used before in Affintiy Publisher: multi pages (of course), virtual duplicates of layers and layergroups (a combintation of linked shapes and symbols in Affinity), vector shapes with multi contours, vector shapes as layer masks, typografic adjustments that filled my needs and so on. And it is stable as a rock!

I would really prefer to do my work in the Affintiy suite, because I like the combination of all three apps very much and without doubt, there are some ingenious solutions like clipping by nesting layers, combination of vector and raster, the export persona with slices and so on. But all in all the apps after all these years are still that immature ☹️. So many open ends, that could be connected or just finished. That often stopped half the way. What is a contour tool usefull for, if it can just shift the contour? If I want a contour shifted, I want some original shape that this contour is around. But by using the contour tool I loose the original shape. Thus I have to do the contour with a copy of that shape. But what if I change the original shape? The contour on the copy doesn't follow, because it is a copy and not linked. Of course I could switch to Photo and establish a link between them, get back into designer... forget it! I could do much better with multiple strokes on the original shape.

But as said before, I could live with all these shortcommings and with workarounds - if the apps would be rock solid and stable.

 

 

[Kal]

On 11/27/2022 at 2:00 AM, ProDesigner said:

While I was nodding along to the UI frustrations, the big thing I see Serif seem incapable of grasping is colour, which manifests most obviously in the management of swatches.

During the apps early development - as soon as they added the utterly useless 'recent' colour feature, I knew they had no clue how important colour is to designers...

Yep. Coming from Adobe, colour swatch management was the most jarring thing for me too.

To be fair, Adobe didn't get everything right IMO. Upon launching a new version of Illustrator, the first thing I would do is delete all the useless pre-made colours they put in the main Swatches panel, save over the default document templates (Basic RGB.ai, Print.ai, Web.ai) and set the panel to 'Small List View'. I did more logo than illustration work, so a blank canvas and a set of Pantone books was where I liked to start from. I found myself using the 'Select All Unused' and 'Add Used Colors' panel options a bit too. While the initial setup was a pain, I only had to do it once, then managing a set of global colours became fairly easy. 

Then I entered the world of Affinity, and like you say, swatch management seemed to be an afterthought.

Funnily enough though, I find myself using Affinity's recent colour feature! Not because it's a particularly great feature, but just because it puts swatches within reach without all the other gymnastics required to manage your own 'Document' (or 'Unnamed') palette. 😆

[Kal]

On 11/27/2022 at 2:11 AM, tatanka said:

The entire font industry is shifting to variable fonts. Soon there will be typefaces that will only be available as variable fonts, then what Affinity?

I'm assuming you can still use variable fonts in Affinity, but that you are just limited to a standard set of weights (normal, bold, etc). Or cannot you not use them at all? (I confess, I haven't tried.)

[Kal]

10 hours ago, ProDesigner said:

I'd advise this company to develop a robust process for gathering 'professional workflow' knowledge (Forums are not it), and clarify really diligently who their target market is, or it's never going to reach the heights it set out to at the beginning. It's THE critical thing for their future right now

I agree—they need to listen to the pros.

I'd say their 'target market' should actually be pretty broad, given that they're really going head-to-head with Adobe in offering an entire suite of graphics products—something no one else has been brave enough to do. This forum no-doubt reflects the diversity—I gather we have graphic designers (both print and digital), illustrators, photographers, animators, UI designers, etc. Get at least half-a-dozen professionals in each category, each with say 10+ years experience in their field, as well as some good UX designers, and listen carefully to what they tell you!

[Kal]

57 minutes ago, LondonSquirrel said:

And who are "the pros"? Each time I read a comment in the forums like that, it sounds like special pleading for exactly the features that certain people want. Maybe I am not a "pro" graphics user, but does that negate my needs or wishes? I am a customer too.

I didn't mean to sound pompous or condescending by referring to 'pros'. Neither did I meant to be divisive (us vs them). I acknowledge that there are many users who don't make a living from the software, but whose needs are still relevant. However, I think it's fair to say that people who do make a living from the software are naturally going to (a) push the software to its limits more frequently, and (b) be able to provide more insight into what certain industries require. I think it's also fair to say that Affinity has positioned itself as a competitor to Adobe and its Creative Cloud suite, and that software does target professional users.

Let me add that I believe pro software can be suitable for casual users when it is designed well. One principle of good UI/UX is progressive disclosure—where the core features and tools that everyone (pro or casual user) needs are front and centre, while more advanced tools are available, though not immediately obvious. If done well, this allows beginners to intuit how things work, while still providing advanced users the features they need. Apple software tends (though not always) to be a pretty good example of this principle. You might notice that I included 'good UX designers' in my comment that you took issue with. I didn't expand on that, but this is precisely why I said it. Good UI/UX benefits everyone—beginners and advanced users alike. Everyone wins.