How to *import* black and white adjustment *presets* in AfPhoto?

[jweitzel]

Hello out there!

As much as I welcome and support the whole Affinity Suite, I sometimes swear and shout at the search for a consistent user interface and logical connections in the menus and panels.

I have an urgent job - and have now been searching for 1 1/2 hours for the point where I can import presets for black&white adjustment downloaded from the internet! This is unbelievable!

If I *would* have LUT presets, I would have a cogwheel in the line of LUT presets in the "adjustments" panel to load additional presets.

This cogwheel is missing in the "Black & White..." adjustment and I can't get these presets imported into Affinity Photo. Bruahhhhh.

 

I would appreciate a hint and help!

Johannes

 

[walt.farrell]

What format files do you have that you'd like to import?

I think that In general you cannot import or export Adjustment Presets from files. LUTs are a special case, and so they have the cog.

[firstdefence]

Link to what you have downloaded would help.

[jweitzel]

Oh dear...
It is *not* the LUT adjustments, those I only cited as a positive example – I do mean the *black&white" adjustments.

I did 2 screenshots:
– the folder with a lot of downloaded presets (a part from PhotoWhoa)  containing a lot of presets for all kinds of adjustments. There are .cube files and two .3dl files.
– sceenshot of my adjustments panel (German) with "black&white" open and with 3 presets, *which come original with AfPhoto*. THERE I do want to add the further, downloaded presets.
(But also I want to import the other presets in the file list for OTHER adjustments.)

 

 

(I can't understand, how programmers can make such a common and "easy" job so complicated! I have some routine jobs to do with a software. I svae the adjustment as a preset. I import presets for adjustments from other users.)

Many thanks for help.
A happy (particularly peaceful ...) new year 2024 nevertheless!

Johannes

 

 

 

[Old Bruce]

To the best of my knowledge we cannot Export or import Presets from the Adjustments. There is a .propcol file that might be where they are stored but that would most likely be all of them. All of them meaning each and every preset for each and every Adjustment.  My advice is to not mess with this.

/Users/YOUR_NAME-GOES-HERE/Library/Group Containers/6LVTQB9699.com.seriflabs/v2/user/adjustments.propcol

6LVTQB9699.com.seriflabs The bold bit may be different on your machine. My advice is to not mess with this.

The files you downloaded are perhaps for the LUTs. So you would need to navigate to them from the LUT adjustment panel. This is from the website's page

https://www.photowhoa.com/deals/affinity-photo-presets-bundle/

[jweitzel]

Hey Bruce, happy to meet you again!

Your answer I do not get: How can shops and customers offer "Affinity Photo adjustments presets" in the internet, even for money, if there are no means to export and afterwards import them (like very easy in PSD... :-(  in Affinity Photo ?

You showed a web site with tutorial for importing LUTs. And the LUT adjustment is the only one, which shows the cogwheel and the menue for import/export presets ... (I add two further screenshots).

 

I had a look inside those downloaded preset .cube files with an ASCII editor. And as you can read they start with comment "#created by Affinity Photo" (a line later with typo!...) Where do they come from? Where they ought to go?

I think, it is really *very* common, to save and export presets of a certain tool - and to import them at an other workspace. I do not understand that AfPhoto (resp. the whole suite) does not support that.

Best wishes!

Johannes

 

 

 

 

 

[Old Bruce]

4 minutes ago, jweitzel said:

You showed a web site with tutorial for importing LUTs.

 

1 hour ago, jweitzel said:

– the folder with a lot of downloaded presets (a part from PhotoWhoa) 

I did a simple DuckDuckGo search for PhotoWhoa and found the tutorial on their website. I searched for PhotoWhoa because of your mention of it.

It is sad that PhotoWhoa have chosen to not use the more accurate and correct term LUT for what they are selling. To use them you have to choose one of the presets in the LUT Adjustment and then hit the button Load LUT...

and navigate to where you have your various files from that company. The ones in the folder B&W are most likely going to give you some sort of Black and White look.

[NotMyFault]

Almost all adjustment layers modify color channels in a way which can be „exported“ as LUT. The functionality is build in to Photo.

So those websites cheat a little bit. They don’t sell presets, but LUTs which mimics the same adjustment results without using the adjustment layers.

This means you can’t use them as e.g. slider presets which can be fine-tuned in the original adjustments.

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, jweitzel said:

I did 2 screenshots:
– the folder with a lot of downloaded presets (a part from PhotoWhoa)  containing a lot of presets for all kinds of adjustments. There are .cube files and two .3dl files.

Those are LUT adjustments, and you can import them into the LUT category of the Adjustments panel using the Cog icon there:

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Old Bruce said:

/Users/YOUR_NAME-GOES-HERE/Library/Group Containers/6LVTQB9699.com.seriflabs/v2/user/adjustments.propcol

6LVTQB9699.com.seriflabs The bold bit may be different on your machine.

FWIW, 6LVTQB9699 is the Apple Developer ID for Serif & should be the same on all Mac installations.

[jweitzel]

As far as I can see that "case" can looked at to be "solved". I'ver learned, that at the moment AfPhoto does not support the export/import of presets in the adjustments panel – exept the LUT adjustments.

For I think, that feature may be very usefull in many aspects (for own work, for coworking, for compynies to sell ...), I thinks that aspect may be a case for the "feature request" forum here. This may include a rearrange of the momentan solution i.e. storing all presets in a single file – further on per each in a separate file.

Am I'm right?

As has often been the case here in the past, I have the impression that the programmers are not necessarily practitioners who have to earn their money by working with these graphic softwares: working quickly, collaboratively and effectively. But I am confident that, update by update, the suite will develop into an increasingly powerful tool.

I thank you very much for your help and hints!

Johannes

[dominik]

27 minutes ago, jweitzel said:

For I think, that feature may be very usefull in many aspects (for own work, for coworking, for compynies to sell ...), I thinks that aspect may be a case for the "feature request" forum here. This may include a rearrange of the momentan solution i.e. storing all presets in a single file – further on per each in a separate file.

Even though my suggestion is just a workaround it is possible to copy any adjustment layer from one file to another. Thus one could keep a special file just for collecting and storing adjustment layers with their settings. Naming the layers would be the equivalent to preset names.

I think adjustment layers also can be stored in the asset panel which is perhaps even more effective (I'm not at my Affinity computer right now so I can't confirm this).

d.

[firstdefence]

52 minutes ago, dominik said:

I think adjustment layers also can be stored in the asset panel

Just tried this and while it does store the adjustment layer; shows as a red square and is named as the adjustment filter, when dragged back onto the workspace, the adjustment layer appears and the settings are registered in the filter but the adjustment isn't applied, but, if you go to Blend Options and nudge either of the ranges in or out to 99% the adjustment is applied and obviously only 99% of it is applied and anything below that is a percentage overlay of the filter. Duplicating the asset'ed filter maintains this anomaly. 

Grouping multiple adjustment filters to asset as a collective adjustment, when dragged back doesn't apply any of the filters, the Blend Options trick doesn't work so you have to ungroup and then apply the Blend Options trick.

Makes me think this might be an obscure bug.

[jweitzel]

Both of you and your contributions are welcome! Thank you very much. Of course I also work with workarounds from time to time. But doing so, it's an "emergency solution". And when Serif has integrated export and import in the next version of the Affinity Suite – then I'll start looking for all the workarounds and setting them up again from scratch.

I remember that in (unfortunately) PSD there were buttons in all these settings dialogs to save and load adjustments as presets ...

My issue is that I actually need to do black and white conversions (or to be more precise, I'm done with it by now, ha ha) . And since I want to be a bit "artistic", I thought: There are presets that I only need to search for on the net and download.

But I was wildly mistaken. The programmers at Serif chose "the dead end" in this case.

I think that's enough on this subject. Let's wait and see with patience.

Johannes

[firstdefence]

Just one more note on Adjustments from Photoshop. Each adjustment preset has it's own extension, so in the case of the Black and White Adjustment preset the extension is .blw, for Levels it's .alv and for Hue and Saturation it's .ahu etc, etc.

None of these preset file formats will be interpretable by Affinity because it is likely to be proprietary code and Affinity will have no access to these preset files, consequently the chances of Affinity ever being able to import Photoshop adjustment presets is slim but never zero, much the same as: https://americasbestpics.com/video/the-chances-of-getting-killed-by-a-chicken-are-slim-Akob77KMA?s=cl

[NotMyFault]

2 hours ago, firstdefence said:

Just tried this and while it does store the adjustment layer; shows as a red square and is named as the adjustment filter, when dragged back onto the workspace, the adjustment layer appears and the settings are registered in the filter but the adjustment isn't applied, but, if you go to Blend Options and nudge either of the ranges in or out to 99% the adjustment is applied and obviously only 99% of it is applied and anything below that is a percentage overlay of the filter. Duplicating the asset'ed filter maintains this anomaly. 

Grouping multiple adjustment filters to asset as a collective adjustment, when dragged back doesn't apply any of the filters, the Blend Options trick doesn't work so you have to ungroup and then apply the Blend Options trick.

Makes me think this might be an obscure bug.

Can confirm this bug on iPad.

instead of blend range, you may use gamma slider. Effect vanishes for default gamma 2.2 but becomes effective for any other value.

please keep in mind that sliders for numeric have another bug. For many you can mircro-adjust the value to a bit higher / lower, but the displayed value remains unchanged. So you often have 3 numeric values all giving the same UI value, e.g. color or opacity sliders.

[jweitzel]

Sorry, I *never* said and *never* wantedand never suggested to import presets from PSD! That wouldn't be the right way. No Adobe. No clones, no "same, same, but different".

J.

[firstdefence]

2 minutes ago, jweitzel said:

Sorry, I *never* said and *never* wantedand never suggested to import presets from PSD! That wouldn't be the right way. No Adobe. No clones, no "same, same, but different".

J.

You may have personally signed off on this post but sometimes what we do is document information as reference, it's not necessarily to reply to a post, just a detail that may help others understand if they have a similar question and potentially help devs solve issues in the future. As part of our curiosity, we try different things and will occasionally find bugs by doing so, I was curious about being able to create Affinity Adjustment filter Assets, both singular and as a group because I think it's a great method to store simple and complex adjustment formats, I have also worked out how to get rid of the generic red icon that is used in the assets panel to represent an adjustment filter assets by using the icons that adjustments use individually and also the generic adjustment filter icon for groups of adjustment filters. All of that could be followed on if say you wanted to apply an Asset to a batch job, much like they have the option to apply macro's to batch jobs.

Just something to think about and all borne out of curiosity. 

[Return]

Adjustment with a (filled)vectormask applied will work as asset.
Grouped adjustments with (filled)vectormask applied to the group and saved as asset.

All exportable,importable or saved/embedded with document.

[firstdefence]

17 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

Can confirm this bug on iPad.

instead of blend range, you may use gamma slider. Effect vanishes for default gamma 2.2 but becomes effective for any other value.

please keep in mind that sliders for numeric have another bug. For many you can mircro-adjust the value to a bit higher / lower, but the displayed value remains unchanged. So you often have 3 numeric values all giving the same UI value, e.g. color or opacity sliders.

gets curiouser...

• Add an adjustment layer and set it as you want.
• While the adjustment layer is still selected go to the assets panel and select add from selection.
• The asset is created and a red block is added, not sure why but probably just a placeholder icon instead of using the adjustment layer icon.
• Now you have an adjustment layer asset so go ahead and delete the adjustment layer you used to create the asset.
• Now use the asset - adjustment layer by dragging it onto the image... nothing happens!!!
• Create a pixel layer and drag it onto the adjustment layer to make it a child, the adjustment layer becomes active and the effect is shown.

[loukash]

I have a blank afphoto document with all my custom Adjustment presets as individual adjustment layers.
Looking at the file creation date, I made that obviously after v2 was released, so that I was able to move these presets from v1.
Then in v2 I opened each adjustment layer and re-saved as a preset.

So to share adjustment presets, simply share a blank document with the actual layers. It won't be larger than a few KB anyway. The layers can be easily copied between documents.

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, firstdefence said:

Grouping multiple adjustment filters to asset as a collective adjustment, when dragged back doesn't apply any of the filters, the Blend Options trick doesn't work so you have to ungroup and then apply the Blend Options trick.

Makes me think this might be an obscure bug.

Adjustments as assets have various issues reported, some got tagged, e.g. afp-3400 or AF-617, others just discussed. Although they may work "generally" (example) their use may differ and thus complicate the situation and occurring issues. For instance…

[firstdefence]

3 minutes ago, loukash said:

I have a blank afphoto document with all my custom Adjustment presets as individual adjustment layers.
Looking at the file creation date, I made that obviously after v2 was released, so that I was able to move these presets from v1.
Then in v2 I opened each adjustment layer and re-saved as a preset.

So to share adjustment presets, simply share a blank document with the actual layers. It won't be larger than a few KB anyway. The layers can be easily copied between documents.

Would be nice to have adjustment layers as assets though, and those assets use the adjustments icon to define it in the assets panel would be a cool feature.

[loukash]

2 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

Would be nice to have adjustment layers as assets though

It would be much nicer to simply save the presets as a preset file.  

In that sense, I fully agree with this:

On 1/13/2024 at 4:02 PM, jweitzel said:

I sometimes swear and shout at the search for a consistent user interface and logical connections in the menus and panels.

[firstdefence]

1 minute ago, thomaso said:

Adjustments as assets have various issues reported, some got tagged, e.g. afp-3400 or AF-617, others just discussed. Although they may work "generally" (example) their use may differ and thus complicate the situation and occurring issues. For instance…

Definitely needs work but if they can get them reliable/stable it would be a great asset to the apps. As a core feature I'd say it should take priority.