manual?

[dizeyner]

IM having the hardest time trying to decipher how affinity does things. and the videos are not helpful if you have to keep going back and watching the whole thing just to find the one thing you forgot...and the HELP in the app never seems to return my search terms. this is probably cultural difference in terminology. maybe.

so Im hoping there is some manual that I could flip open and scan or search with my PDF reader, ANYTHING??? it does nothing the same as my previous adobe tools with regard to UI placement of tools or keywords. Im okay with that totally...but its becoming painful trying to guess what things are called.

 

Right now I cant figure out how to edit a point on a vector. IN adobe you click the point you want to edit and if you hold down a certain key you can pull out the strings or bars that allow you to adjust the curve related to that point.

I cant figure it out. HeLp please point me to a good guide. thank you.

[Hokusai]

dizeyner,

 

It has been mentioned that Affinity will eventually release a PDF manual (or some kind of digital manual) but they didn't say when. To edit points on a vector use the Node tool (the white arrow tip looking tool) and then simply click the node you want to edit and the "strings" will appear so you can adjust the curve. If no strings appear then select the node you want to edit with the node tool and then click the "smooth" option on the context tool bar (there are three icons shown next to the title of "convert") and strings will appear. 

 

Hokusai

[deeds]

IM having the hardest time trying to decipher how affinity does things. and the videos are not helpful if you have to keep going back and watching the whole thing just to find the one thing you forgot...and the HELP in the app never seems to return my search terms. this is probably cultural difference in terminology. maybe.

 

 its becoming painful trying to guess what things are called.

 

This is an actual problem with the app and its designers. They've been stubborn in resisting acknowledgement of "muscle memory" AND commonly held and understood conventions of use.

 

Often they've (seemingly) deliberately gone against existing paradigms of process in other creative apps just to be different, with no benefit.

The colour sampler tool is a good example of this. It's mind bendingly clunky.

 

Layer management is also peculiar, in the extreme.

 

I'm not sure why they do things like this. 

 

I'm not going to suggest Adobe gets things right all the time, nor that they're any bastion of usability (at all) but after decades dominating the field, there's some aspects of what they do we've all come to accept as lore.

 

Adobe's use of the "i" shortcut for "eye dropper" sampling and applying of colour, for instance, is a terrible key choice. "s" for "sample" would be way better, and is where the left hand is already positioned for this incredibly commonly required functionality.

 

There is NO shortcut for this feature in Affinity Designer, and it's a 3 step process. Pick tool, pick colour, apply colour, and the pick tool and apply require using a tiny section of the screen. Quite ridiculous.

 

 

But there's hope. They've recently added keyboard shortcuts for menu items. Hopefully they'll soon extend this to all operations and functions the software can perform and we'll be able to setup our own magic user-ability. 

[Asha]

You can invoke the eyedropper while painting by holding down the alt key and clicking the color you want. Then release the alt key and return to painting.

[deeds]

You can invoke the eyedropper while painting by holding down the alt key and clicking the color you want. Then release the alt key and return to painting.

 

Exactly, only while painting. Or when a drawing tool is selected. Not while a selection tool is active. But it only samples the colour, it doesn't apply it. That's another step.

 

If you're currently using a selection tool:

 

Pick a drawing or painting tool = small area of screen or a tool shortcut on the keyboard. Now hold down alt, and sample a colour. Now apply it by... clicking on another small tool, the apply button, with is that tiny little button above the colour wheel/triangle, next to the syringe icon.

 

Just for fun, one more step (for a total of four) to return to the selection tool you were previously using.

 

Whoever came up with using the [alt] key for colour picking wasn't thinking about the user experience, at all. 

[R C-R]

deeds, maybe I'm missing something, but why would you want or need to pick a color while using the selection tools?

[deeds]

Oh. I don't know. Perhaps I didn't conceive of what colour something would be until, could be, should be, or would look best until I'd drawn more than one object. 

 

Are you serious?

[tybaltstone]

Although the alt key works to pick up a colour when using the paintbrush, it doesn't work when using the fill/paint bucket tool, which I think does seem a bit inconsistent. 

 

I use the fill tool a lot in various projects and have to change colour regularly, so it is a bit of a process.

[Madame]

I'm very new to all this, but working with swatches seem very interesting to me.

With one click you can fill an object, and you can make a "palette" of the colours in your document, but that was perhaps not what you had in mind?

[R C-R]

It also seems inconsistent to me that the paint bucket flood fill tool doesn't support the alt-drag shortcut like the paint brushes do.

 

I have started using the swatches panel, usually dragged out of the Studio into the workspace, & a variety of saved document & application pallets as a quick way to pick colors. That takes a while to set up but I find it to be a good way to limit the document colors to a manageable number & to create a consistent look for groups of documents.

 

It is much faster than using the eyedropper (& it works with selection tools, too).

[tybaltstone]

I've just noticed the 'Recent' section in the Swatches tab - that'll be very useful.

 

(I've played around with Photo but haven't yet used it within my normal workflow - am just about to with a new project, so my education into Photo's characteristics and features will no doubt go up a few notches!)

[deeds]

This functionality, when viewed from a height, is the sampling and application of attributes from one object to another.

 

Let's call this hypothetical tool "The Sampler" because this is analogous to what it does. It's not "picking", and it's not limited in the way one conceives of an eyedropper tool. It's more. It samples the attributes of an object it clicks upon. A preview of those attributes being applied to the target (currently active selection) could be showed whilst hovering.

 

The attributes of an object sampled with the Sampler should be instantly applied to a currently selected object based on the qualities of that selection and/or cached into the "memory" of the sampler. The cache of attributes in the sampler can then be applied to any objects clicked whilst in an "apply" mode of the Sampler tool. Much like the eye dropper, it's now "loaded".

 

The Sampler should remember whatever it was previously loaded with, too. That'd be amazingly handy.

 

Default operation should be ALL pertinent attributes of the sampled object be instantly applied to the active selection upon sampling. Just one or logical pairs and restrictions of attribution application (like only fill, or just outline) is done via modifier keys being held down during the sample or application. Based on modifier keys and the current selection, the user can determine what's applied from the object sampled/cache of the Sampler tool.

 

For example, if the currently selected object is text, and the sampled object is also text, then the font, formatting, fill and outline should be sampled and applied to the the selection.

 

Holding down the [shift] key (just an example) with a text object as the current selection, and sampling from a text object, might reduce the application of attributes to colour of fill and outline only, maintaining existing text formatting and font attributes.

 

Modifier keys should only be used with the Sampler tool to adjust the extent of its application of attributes, not in the switch to and out of the Sampler tool. That should be the letter 's', a shortcut that's a switch in and out of the tool.

 

Anyone wondering why the Selection tools need attribute copy/paste should have just woken up. The selection is the context and mode setter for the attributes to sampled and applied.

 

It doesn't take an enormous leap into common sense to realise what this tool could be, and how it should work and how much it can rapidly increase the rate of creativity and iterative exploration and creation. But because common sense is something developers don't have, don't expect it in any great hurry.

 

Anyone with more patience than me (that's everyone), feel free to add this to feature requests -- if you see how this could and should work and how it will be of benefit to users. Obviously nobody at Serif has used the eyedropper tool in Adobe products and conceived of ways to improve upon its paradigms.

[R C-R]

This "Sampler" tool idea sounds good, but I wonder how it could cope with all the different possible AD object attributes without becoming too confusing to be useful for much.

 

For instance, strokes of simple curves in AD have 5 primary attributes (width, cap, join, align, & opacity) plus draw behind or in front of fill, scale with or without object, & sometimes variable widths (pressure or profile). Individual nodes can be sharp, smooth, or "smart." Then there are the special shapes (like polygons, gears, etc.) that are not curves & have their own set of one or more attributes.

 

Text is much more problematic because individual characters & paragraphs in a text block can have different font, leading, tracking, color, etc. attributes.

 

Beyond that, there is the issue of the limited number of available modifier & "hot" keys that already are used for other things, & how to retain the new key function reassignment feature without making it bewilderingly complicated.

 

It maybe should be noted here that there is already a very limited form of sampling in AD which I use often: if you select an object & copy it to the clipboard (like with Command + C) you can select another object & paste the copied "style" attributes to it using the Edit menu > Paste Style item (or with a keyboard shortcut, by default Shift-Command-V). It is an all or nothing option, but it is still sometimes a very useful timesaver.

[tybaltstone]

Thanks for the tip about 'Past Style' R C-R. I did use the sampler/eye-drop tool to pick up the style of an object or font and apply it to another quite a lot in Illustrator (thought I was on CS2) - it was useful.

[pruus]

I found this on the web:

 

Affinity Helpfile

You can use Calibre to create a PDF version of the help, but it will require you to experiment with the settings to get the best results. I've had good results converting the help to an EPUB file and using iBooks to read it. Try this:

Go to Applications

Right click Affinity Photo and click Show Package Contents

Go to Contents > Resources and right click AffinityPhoto.help and click Show Package Contents

Go to Contents > Resources and copy de.lproj & shared to your desktop

Open Calibre and drag index.html from the de.lproj folder into Calibre - this will add Affinity Photo Help: Get Started to the list of books

Right click Affinity Photo Help: Get Started and select Convert Books > Convert Individually

Make sure PDF is selected from the Output format drop down

Make any changes needs in the other sections and click OK

[R C-R]

pruus,

 

That is an interesting idea, but perhaps it should be mentioned that the de.lproj folder contains the German language version of the Help files. Users who want a different language version should choose the appropriate lproj folder, based on the abbreviation in the folder name. For example, use "en" for British English, "es" for Spanish, "ja" for Japanese, & so on.

 

If you just want a PDF version of one or a few help topics there is a simpler way to do that, at least in the most recent versions of OS X:

• Open the desired help topic in the normal way

• From the "Share" icon at the top of the window (looks like a box with an up arrow), choose "Print."

• At the bottom of the print sheet that drops down, click on the "PDF" button & choose "Save as PDF..."

• Choose where to save the file in the normal way (or choose one of the other options if that better suits your needs)

[pruus]

Found on this forum: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/15552-downloadable-affinity-photo-help-file-14-for-ibooks-epub/