Photo & Publisher: Un-Clip To Canvas

[TrentL]

A feature I love in Affinity Designer is the ability to view objects off canvas by changing the view mode (I guess this is called "unclipping to canvas"?). I use this feature in literally everything I do with Designer. It is great for reference photos and staging assets that I may or may not use.

It would be great if Affinity Photo and Publisher supported this too. I see that you can place objects off canvas, but they aren't visible there.

 

[walt.farrell]

Publisher already supports it, but each document spread has its own pasteboard area, located to the right or left of the spread (not above or below).

 

[loukash]

12 minutes ago, TrentL said:

It would be great if Affinity Photo and Publisher supported this too.

Photo doesn't support this "by design" because its focus is on image editing, not layout work.
But you can temporarily view everything outside your defined canvas by activating the Crop tool with the Reveal checkbox on.

[loukash]

25 minutes ago, TrentL said:

you can place objects off canvas, but they aren't visible there.

You can also do File > Edit In Designer if you need to rearrange or edit objects outside the canvas without changing the canvas (=page) size

[walt.farrell]

37 minutes ago, N.P.M. said:

Or put an item to the left and/or right of an pixel/image layer and then use Document>unclip canvas.

Yes, but that actually changes the canvas/document size, unlike in Designer or Publisher.

[loukash]

Before unclipping canvas, you can draw guides that snap to spread (=canvas), to mark your original canvas size and position.
In the end simply crop back by snapping to these guides.

[TrentL]

2 hours ago, loukash said:

Photo doesn't support this "by design" because its focus is on image editing, not layout work.
But you can temporarily view everything outside your defined canvas by activating the Crop tool with the Reveal checkbox on.

This seems like the option that most closely resembles Designer's behavior, although it still feels a little awkward because you can't actually move objects around while viewing.

Even though Photo may be intended for image editing, I think many people still import additional assets that they want to play around with and arrange. It seems like all the building blocks are there for this feature to be implemented relatively easily (especially with "reveal" mentioned above). It would provide a more common user experience across the suite of programs. 

Thanks for the suggestions everyone!

 

[loukash]

32 minutes ago, TrentL said:

It seems like all the building blocks are there for this feature to be implemented relatively easily

It's actually vice versa: Of course the feature is in there because under the hood, the "three" Affinity apps are in fact just one app. But many features have been deliberately hidden to keep each of the three apps focused. As I said, this is literally "by design".