OCIO Display Transform / Free Hand selection tool - Problems we face everyday at work

[Montalvo Machado]

Dear Forum Members,

I'm writing my first post here to share some of the issues I face while working on Affinity on a daily basis.

I have been working on Photoshop for over two decades, I have my working habits and adapting to a new application requires some time and effort on my part.

Learning new ways of doing things is a part of the process, but dealing with limitations, bugs, inconsistencies, and whatnot can be time-consuming and frustrating. 

I don't want to rant, but I hope to point out these problems to contribute to Affinity's development and improvement in future releases.

You have grown some high expectations on me for the 2.0 release, but it seems that there were other priorities, and I still struggle with the same problems I had before.

I work at a VFX house in Brazil, Affinity is our graphics choice for one reason: OCIO / 32 bit color space, which Photoshop can´t handle.

Every piece we work on enters and exits our pipeline as a 32 bit EXR file. 

However, we face an issue every time an EXR file is loaded on screen - we have to tick "OCIO Display Transform" in the 32-bit preview window, and that´s OK. The problem is that it won't stay locked, and if we access another image, the choice is ignored, and we have to select it again. And again, and again, and again, thousands of times a day, every day. 

There is no way to compare 2 or more images on the screen, since the OCIO option will be lost as soon as the other image is selected. Very annoying indeed, and not having this issue solved in 2.0 release was very disappointing.

Free Hand Selection Tool is another nightmare we have to face, every single day. Even having "Antialiasing" box checked, tracing anything with the stylus pen yields a jagged contour, not only on display, as the line is traced, but also on the resulting area, especially when working on masks. This is the kind of problem that should never exist, even in the early releases, but remains unsolved to this day.

The only way I can go around this, is working my masks in Photoshop and exporting a black and white image (PNG or EXR) back to Affinity, rasterizing it to mask and working on it in a reliable way.

These are not the only problems we face with Affinity, and I will post images in the future to show a few others. I hope that this post will become a subject matter for your software engineers, or we will have to wait for Photoshop to implement OCIO/32-bit color space sometime in the future.

Whatever comes first.

Thanks for your attention,

Montalvo Machado