an evening with photo 2.1

[T R E N T R E K E R]

hey folks, thank you for checking this out.  first, i'm a noob trying to break free of adobe after 35 years.  managed to do so with a.designer & a.publisher but a.photo is another thing.

i go off on that below.

 

i'm always the guy that finds out what's wrong with something.  if i worked in QA, i'd be king of the world but...  yeech.  i'm enough of an angry old man already, thank you.

anyway, thanks again for your validation.  i'm not looking for answers as much as hoping my troubles translate into something good for many others.

peace out!

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AFFINITY PHOTO:

first thing i do is move the tools and tool windows from the big monitor to the macbook.  but once pulled out from their position docked at the right, they're impossibly long.  trying to shorten them was a very time consuming and problematic act.  one that should take a second or two takes minutes as i struggled to hook into the fraction-of-a-pixel-magic-spot where the up & down arrow exists to shorten the tool window.

the entire time i have a hand-shaped cursor which wants to move the file around and NEVER lets me change the size of the damned tool window.

i later figured out one must try a CORNER and then it's far easier to grab, but why not the first and logical choice from the bottom?  why is one way easy and the other rather impossible?

can we make the ability to customize tool box sizes more intuitive and far less of a pain in the ass?
 
thank you.

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is there a way to tap into one's v2 settings (studio, brushes, etc.) instead of having to re-install and set up for an hour?  is this what users will experience when v2.1 is ready to download?  if so, it's not cool.

forgive me if i should know this from v1 updates but i never used v1 to know.  i'm a noob using all the affinity v2 progs for only two months.  thank you.

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why can't i simply right-click to "unchain" and move brush categories into customized groups?  it's easy to create & name a new group but getting actual brushes into it is far from intuitive. i have yet to figure out how to actually move entire brush categories into it.  i can only move one brush at a time.

i have a couple thousand.

this is so lame it's wearing a cape.

it's an issue i have with a lot of affinity workflow; click hold click click scroll click click click repeat 1000 times and then click/scroll just one more time.  jesus.  when i was a UI designer, clicks were bad.  we were to make the fewest clicks possible to get a user where they wanted to go.  what happened to that?

how does one unlock the folders?  there is no menu option on the burger in the brush window.  is there a way to move entire brush folders into other folders that i'm unable to find?  and again, why is this so lacking in intuitiveness?  why must a noob struggle to do simple operations like categorizing brushes?

thank you.

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you know what would be more cool than a naked supermodel at your door sporting a bleached mullet?  the ability to import .pat and .atn files to gain patterns and to use as action/macros in affinity progs.  

the supermodel says "HELL YEAH DUDE!"

that would surely require a far more robust "macros" capability than i've seen so far.  one would think with v2 something like this, which many have commented on over the years, would've been addressed.  if affinity could boost this aspect of their programs, it would be the most important thing which keeps many from coming over.

it's why i never did until $99 for all three.

adobe creative cloud is obviously still making it and probably always will, but i've moved away from indesign and illustrator to fully use publisher & designer.

photo is another thing, though.

if i could do with affinity photo what i do in photoshop, all i'd need is $5/mo incopy subscription to be able to use their fonts.  but i find so many things lacking, #1 being the "actions," that i cannot fully commit to photo.  and that's a darned shame because it does a lot of nifty stuff.

so i open in photo, do a few tricks, save as a psd and finish in p-shop.

now the supermodel is crying.  good job.

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once a tool window attaches to the side or top or bottom of another, how does one free it?

________

i cannot state more emphatically my frustration at the lack of intuitiveness with photo.  the other two a progs were a cinch to get a hang of. 

at this moment i create a circular path.  i click on the bottom inside to add text.  i paste my text and it changes the paragraph to "justified all" when i had "center align" chosen.  so i re-choose center align and. . . .

nothing.

meanwhile, a short sentence is wildly spaced on both sides of the circle and nothing will make it change.

back to photoshop i go for the night.  i struggled to do ANYTHING in a.photo and spent two hours importing brushes and swatches, organizing my studio (all which should've been auto created off my v2) and writing these notes.  i hope this changes things for the better because i can't spend so much time to get nothing done again.

thank you.

 

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, T R E N T R E K E R said:

can we make the ability to customize tool box sizes more intuitive and far less of a pain in the ass?

View > Customize Tools is how you configure the Tools. You probably need to increase the number of columns.

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, T R E N T R E K E R said:

is there a way to tap into one's v2 settings (studio, brushes, etc.) instead of having to re-install and set up for an hour?  is this what users will experience when v2.1 is ready to download?  if so, it's not cool.

2.1 retail will use the 2.0 retail settings.

I'm not sure if you can safely copy the 2.0 settings to the 2.1 beta, nor how you would do that.

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, T R E N T R E K E R said:

once a tool window attaches to the side or top or bottom of another, how does one free it?

Grab its header and drag it, just as in V1.