What is appropriate to post in the Share your work forum please?

[William Overington]

I prepared and posted a new thread in Share your work.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/196901-using-affinity-designer-to-prepare-a-jpg-image-produced-by-bing-chat-ai-for-printing

I included a png and a PDF document in the thread.

Within a few minutes the thread was locked and I was referred to the Sharing Guidelines. As far as I aware I have not breached the sharing guidelines.

I am rather concerned that I have been told "Please do not abuse the Share Your Work forum" as I consider that I have not done so and locking the thread means that I cannot reply to that in the thread.

I posted an image that was not produced in Serif software - people post photographs - yet I used Affinity Designer to be able to produce an A4 size PDF document, the process including enlarging the image with pixel precision.

I recognize that my input to the generation of the image was one sentence of text and in this particular use by me of Affinity Designer I have not used any drawing or painting tool that Affinity Designer provides, but I have used Affinity Designer facilities to be able to make an A4 PDF document so that I can get some prints printed - just a few.

I am grateful to Patrick for not deleting the thread. The thread, clearly labelled as to what it is about has already had 25 views.

I feel that I used Affinity Designer as a tool to get a result for something I wanted to achieve.

William

 

[William Overington]

35 views of the thread and Patrick has got a Like for his post in the thread.

Nil points for my post at the moment though!

William

 

[walt.farrell]

13 minutes ago, William Overington said:

people post photographs

Speaking as a user of these forums: People post photographs that they created, and then adjusted or modified using the Affinity applications. They don't just point their phone or camera at something, snap a picture, and put the picture into an Affinity document unmodified, and say they made it with Affinity. We expect the Affinity application to be involved in a significant aspect of the creative process. 

 

[v_kyr]

Sadly again the same procedure as every time. - The forum and forums section rules are usually clearly defined and pretty much every one understands those ... instead of you as it seems. I don't know why you do always speak against everything people tell (and already have told) you here and do always question every one of the forum rules. - In addition, you always overtax the general patience of Affinity forum members.

23 minutes ago, William Overington said:

35 views of the thread and Patrick has got a Like for his post in the thread.

Nil points for my post at the moment though!

• Clickbait  (and NO, this is no Bing AI generated link)

 

[William Overington]

The thread has now had 73 views.

Perhaps because the most recent post in it is listed as by Patrick Connor and people are viewing the thread to read what Patrick wrote rather than what I wrote.

Well, in fairness it does state

Share your work

Post your fantastic designs for all to see.

and what I posted cannot be reasonably described as "my ... design".

At best I sort of commissioned for free a virtual artist to produce a picture for me based on my general wishes of what I wanted and left most of the decisions to the artist.

It just seemed to me that as I had used Affinity Designer to go from a 1024 pixel by 1024 pixel image to having an A4 PDF document ready for printing and then being able to frame a print that that process would be of interest to some readers.

I am not one for self-knocking of my abilities but artistic talents vary and Serif does not require a level of artistic talent to be able to purchase a licence for Affinity Designer. Well, they don't do they!

I tend to think that as there is no obvious limit on the number of threads and the post that I made is not unsuitable for family viewing as they say, and people have a variety of levels of talent, why is there such indignation over what is basically a harmless post in what is supposed to be a community of users of Affinity software.

If the thread had not been locked there could have been a discussion.

I just do not understand the indignation of some people who are talented artists and expert users of Affinity products.

82 views for the thread now, 3 likes for Patrick's post and still nil points of likes for my post!

William

 

 

 

[Patrick Connor]

That thread is hidden now you have seen my reply

[PaulEC]

Why are you so obsessed with how many views a thread you start gets? Just because people look at a thread it does not mean that they agree with you, or even that they are interested in it. I'm sure that many people, like myself, look at many threads, but having seen the content, then decide that they are actually of no interest!

[debraspicher]

Some of us are following Patrick or other staff members so we can stay up to date with less hassle because it's so much faster to keep up with development talk than digging through individual forums. I don't follow the "Share Your Work" area because I use topic listing mode to check the forums and I curate what I read (turn off what's not relevant to me atm). Between staff member discussion(s) and those forums I use the most, I have plenty to read and it's ordered chronologically. So if you're seeing additional views, it's a high likelihood it's because they see people they are following posting and follow them from there. Especially today as a beta just dropped and people are more attentive to what's being posted more "officially".

The others are probably just guests/bots/etc scanning the index page for the last updated thread and seeing what's current. When I used to use the index page a lot, I did the same thing and I find it's an inefficient way to stay up-to-date. (It becomes a bad habit after a while)

Unsolicited recommendation for thread watchers:

Spoiler

I humbly recommend to those who frequent for a similar purpose, try this mode because I have benefited. If you balance your slower forums, etc with "fast" forums, it'll keep up-to-date/relevant stuff to you at the top of the stack, but you'll still have plenty to read and stay abreast. You'll miss a lot of things like this as well this as you won't see it constantly on the index page and get back to more productive browsing as up-to-date posts will show up first. It's very user friendly. Something has to be an exceedingly popular thread on the forum for anything to stay at the top, so I find it's helpful also for finding relevant threads that way. I still use index from time to time to check Resources, etc, but it's a leisurely thing...

*The little arrows pointing to the forums are just showing which forums I have toggled so it can be seen how the list is generated.

Add in a few staff follows and it's a very powerful feature, imho. It's also available on mobile. I toggle on/off forums as I do different things depending on my time.

[William Overington]

14 hours ago, Patrick Connor said:

That thread is hidden now you have seen my reply

In which case you could have hidden it straightaway and written to me privately.

I used Affinity Designer to get a result. I have no other way to get that result.

(For completeness, I add that I could have used Affinity Publisher. I have Affinity Photo but have hardly used it so I do not know at present whether I could have used Affinity Photo to produce the A4 size PDF document. I had the goal of producing the A4 PDF document so I used Affinity Designer as I knew how to achieve the result using Affinity Designer.)

Affinity Designer produced a good result.

Certainly the artwork was not produced nor modified in any artistic way using an Affinity product.

It was a splendid, beautiful thread.

William

 

 

 

 

Edited January 10, 2024 by William Overington
Edited the next day to mention that I could have used Affinity Publisher

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, PaulEC said:

Why are you so obsessed with how many views a thread you start gets?

Not obsessed, just interested.

1 hour ago, PaulEC said:

Just because people look at a thread it does not mean that they agree with you, or even that they are interested in it.

True.

1 hour ago, PaulEC said:

I'm sure that many people, like myself, look at many threads, but having seen the content, then decide that they are actually of no interest!

The thread had a clear title as to its content. The fact that there was a prominent note that the thread included a post by Patrick Connor may have increased the view count greatly.

Serif provides a view count for threads, why be whatever that I look at the view count that Serif provides.

William

 

[GarryP]

15 hours ago, William Overington said:

35 views of the thread

14 hours ago, William Overington said:

The thread has now had 73 views.

14 hours ago, William Overington said:

82 views for the thread now,

The number of views a thread has received cannot be taken, by any reasonable person, as a measure of popularity, intent of participation, or even interest in the subject of that thread.

Just because a traffic accident happens near someone as they were out walking doesn’t mean they were wanting/expecting to see it.

Just because lots of people will watch footage of a disaster on the evening TV news doesn’t mean that they want to be part of it.

Just because a CCTV system records footage of a dog playing with a ball doesn’t mean that the CCTV system was installed to record footage of dogs playing with balls.

Since you have no knowledge of who, or what, is accessing a thread, or why they/it are doing so, it would be foolish to infer any intent/interest from that action.

Without context, the number of views is just a number, no more than that.

[William Overington]

So, as in the title of this thread

What is appropriate to post in the Share your work forum please?

What is the threshold of what needs to be done using an Affinity product for an item to qualify as acceptable?

Both to the moderator and to others.

As far as I am aware I did not break any forum sharing guidelines or any other forum guidelines that existed at the time.

I used Affinity Designer to get a result. The software did not object that I did not use any of the drawing or painting tools.

The thread was locked within a few minutes. If that had not happened, if the moderator had not criticised, then there might have been an interesting discussion.

What is appropriate to post in the Share your work forum please?

What is the threshold of what needs to be done using an Affinity product for an item to qualify as acceptable?

William

 

 

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, William Overington said:

The thread was locked within a few minutes. If that had not happened, if the moderator had not criticised, then there might have been an interesting discussion.

But an interesting discussion of what?

There's not much interesting in putting an image onto a larger page, and producing a PDF.

If you were wanting a discussion of your AI-generated art, that is not something that is related to the Affinity applications, and not really appropriate here.

[William Overington]

36 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

But an interesting discussion of what?

There's not much interesting in putting an image onto a larger page, and producing a PDF.

There is if one does not yet know how to do it and would like the chance to learn.

A gentle discussion in a forum thread can be a good way to learn.

37 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

If you were wanting a discussion of your AI-generated art, that is not something that is related to the Affinity applications, and not really appropriate here.

Well, how is the discussion determined to be related to the Affinity applications or not until the discussion gets going? People post photographs and adapt them using Affinity products, so maybe some people might have ideas of how to adapt AI produced images using Affinity products. Not everybody can get out and about with a camera. Is this experts in art and using Affinity products "pulling up the ladder" and raising the bar?

The thread that I started in the Share your work forum was a good thread, but it got locked, the author criticised publicly, then the thread was later hidden.

In my opinion as there is no obvious limit on the number of threads it was an unnecessary removal and public criticism of a harmless thread that had been produced and posted by someone who had used Affinity Designer to get a result.

William

 

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, William Overington said:

A gentle discussion in a forum thread can be a good way to learn.

As far as the whole is really Affinity software related at all and not something trivial taken out of context, as sadly most of your postings in this forum are.

For learning Affinity software handlings, howto's, tips & tricks, tutorials etc. there are much more valuable forum threads here than that Ai (pre)generated text or image stuff you always did present lately here. - So why don't you take the time and instead do learn the Affinity software and then create something overall much more valuable with the Affinity apps (maybe then reusable) for others in the community here?

----

BTW and since you seem to be so much thrilled and interested in/with/by Ai chatbot generated stuff lately, you can also gently discuss such boring off topic things then first with some old fashioned Ai progs, in repetitive/fruitless/endless conversations, instead of forum threads here ...

... or alternatively this Emacs editor mode ...

... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

[William Overington]

Actually I had a go at using the Eliza program in the 1970s on a terminal attached to a mainframe computer.

The thing is, I use Affinity products as tools to progress other things. Previously the same with some of the Serif Plus software products.

For example I have framed prints of various artworks that I have produced, where the image is not about Affinity products at all, yet I have used Affinity products to produce the necessary files to upload to websites so that prints are made and sent to me by Royal Mail. Sometimes a jpg graphics file, sometimes a PDF document.

We, as people, are each as we are, some people delight in learning all the details of Affinity software. Each to his or her own choice and situation.

You mention trivial, there is no statement by the management on what is the threshold level of application of the Affinity products for acceptability for posting in the Share your work forum, unless they need to be "fantastic", as in

> Share your work

> Post your fantastic designs for all to see.

Maybe the image of the lady in a long green dress feeding an okapi is fantastic.

Hello @Alfred I am glad that you are participating in this thread.

I would value your opinion on this topic please, valued regardless of what is that opinion.

William

 

[William Overington]

If anyone would like to have a look at the image that was used in the presently hidden Share your work forum post, the image is in the twelfth post of the following thread.

https://punster.me/serif/viewtopic.php?id=526

The impressionist style image, rather beautiful in my opinion.

William

 

[William Overington]

After writing the above I went back to having a go at producing images using Bing Chat Ai.

Eventually, in a sequence that I hope to describe elsewhere, I did a restart and asked the following.

Please produce an original impressionist painting of the 1813 British locomotive named "Puffing Billy".

In the event it produced four pictures, none of which are of Puffing Billy, all of locomotives from, at a guess, about 1870 or so.

One of them though is rather splendid in its own right as an impressionist painting.

BUT

upon close inspection there is something that looks like a wheel and tyre from a 1960s type scooter, a sort of small motorbike up near the front of the locomotive, at track level.

AND

There is something peculiar on the boiler between the chimney and the brass dome

Can Affinity Designer be used to remove that wheel and tyre the peculiar thing on the boiler and blend in the background so that the picture looks better please?

If so, how please?

William

 

[v_kyr]

You better try to use APh for that job on strange objs generated Ai pixel images.

• impressionist-locomotive-aph.afphoto

[Alfred]

5 hours ago, William Overington said:

Hello @Alfred I am glad that you are participating in this thread.

I would value your opinion on this topic please, valued regardless of what is that opinion.

Until now, my participation in this thread consisted of nothing more than ‘liking’ a thread; I don’t consider myself to have participated unless and until I’ve made a post. Since you ask, this topic doesn’t seem to address the use of any Affinity features such as tools, filters, or layer manipulation, so I’m inclined to agree with those who have suggested that it doesn’t belong on these forums.

4 hours ago, William Overington said:

If anyone would like to have a look at the image that was used in the presently hidden Share your work forum post, the image is in the twelfth post of the following thread.

https://punster.me/serif/viewtopic.php?id=526

The impressionist style image, rather beautiful in my opinion.

If you want to encourage the reader to view content on another forum, it’s a good idea to provide a direct link instead of leaving them to do the legwork to get to the specified destination.

https://punster.me/serif/viewtopic.php?id=526#p3876

For what it’s worth, that image doesn’t really tick the ‘impressionist’ boxes for me. It’s not likely to be mistaken for a Monet, for example!

[William Overington]

23 minutes ago, Alfred said:

For what it’s worth, that image doesn’t really tick the ‘impressionist’ boxes for me. It’s not likely to be mistaken for a Monet, for example!

Well there's a challenge then isn't there! 😁

William

 

[v_kyr]

5 hours ago, William Overington said:

The thing is, I use Affinity products as tools to progress other things. ...

For example I have framed prints of various artworks that I have produced, where the image is not about Affinity products at all, yet I have used Affinity products to produce the necessary files to upload to websites so that prints are made and sent to me by Royal Mail.

That's what I generally call absolute trivial here, aka to just loading in some images produced by/with other software, or some Ai tools and then just hitting the PRINT or export as JPG/PNG button. What is artful on doing such trivia? Also just framing some print outs is nothing artful Affinity related, or no great achievement whatsoever at all here. - So all that is really not worth of any thread discussions (and communication) here in the Affinity forum.

[PaulEC]

OK, so, I ask a friend to paint a picture for me, because I'm a pretty useless artist myself. I say that I would like a picture of a woman, feeding a deer in a forest. he looks through his large library of books, finds several pictures of a woman, a deer and a forest, all by different people. He then uses these pictures, rearranging them and adding a few effects, to paint the picture I asked for. He gives me the picture, I scan it, open the scan in Affinity Photo, print it out, and put it in a cheap plastic frame. When someone else comes to visit and says that they like the picture, I proudly say that it is my artwork that I created using Affinity Photo. Am I being honest? All I did was describe what I wanted, my friend copied other peoples work to produce the picture, and I just used APhoto as a means to print it out!

[William Overington]

5 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

That's what I generally call absolute trivial here, aka to just loading in some images produced by/with other software, or some Ai tools and then just hitting the PRINT or export as JPG/PNG button. What is artful on doing such trivia? Also just framing some print outs is nothing artful, or no great achievement whatsoever at all here. - So all that is really not worth of any thread discussions (and communication) here in the Affinity forum.

Alas, I realize that what I wrote can be interpreted that way. What I was trying to convey was that I used Affinity tools to produce the artwork and the files, but I am not doing it to show my ability to apply some particular Affinity feature, I am using the Affinity tools to produce the artwork for what I am trying to express.

For some of my use of Affinity products I do use special purpose fonts that i have made using High-Logic FontCreator and then used those fonts in text frames in Affinity Designer.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/138654-artwork-for-greetings-cards/&do=findComment&comment=766058

In that artwork I used a special font in a text frame, filled shapes that if I remember correcly I used the Pen Tool, and a watercolour brush.

So Affinity tools used in that one.

In this one though

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/169391-language-independent-signs-for-art-galleries/ 

Well, in the light of your comments, I suppose I just used a special font that I had made using High-Logic FontCreator, a font not supplied by Serif for the exclamation marks and the digits and QR code images from elsewhere. I had thought of it as using Affinity Designer to make some signs to progress my research. In fact, one each of A3 colour prints on 350 gsm paper are on display here. And, they make me happy. Having Affinity Designer enabled me to get those prints. But, thinking about what you have written I suppose it is not Affinity Designer related in any sort of significant way for you and some others, but I had thought of it as artwork that I had produced using Affinity Designer. I suppose that I used some of the layout and output facilities of Affinity Designer to arrange artwork pieces generated elsewhere. I suppose that I could have generated the language-independent glyphs in Affinity Designer, but having them available in a font is more convenient for some uses.

i now understand what you mean by

> Also just framing some print outs is nothing artful, or no great achievement whatsoever at all here.

I suppose "here" is the key word in that.

Sort of like in the song. It might not be much in the world at large but for me it was significant.

 

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

For what it’s worth, that image doesn’t really tick the ‘impressionist’ boxes for me. It’s not likely to be mistaken for a Monet, for example!