Affinity photo 2 plugin for generative fill/object selection tool.

[Granddaddy]

Thanks @Dave.Kelly for alerting us to the free On1 Effects 2023 offer. It was a revelation to me, especially the Super Select AI that works on objects and types of objects. It's quite remarkable. Now I understand all the requests for some AI in APhoto.

Also, It was helpful to learn that Serif is not the only company with a dysfunctional UI. On1 might even be worse. But I now have several years practice struggling through that.

The Super Select AI is far from perfect, frequently leaving out areas that should be selected. On1's tutorials were very amusing when they simply ignore those areas and go on as if nothing is wrong.

[R C-R]

20 minutes ago, Granddaddy said:

Also, It was helpful to learn that Serif is not the only company with a dysfunctional UI. On1 might even be worse.

FWIW, although I would not describe either UI as dysfunctional, I find the ON 1 Effects one much, much worse than the Affinity one, that a number of features are not working as designed, & that the UI can be so sluggish that it is often hard to tell if something is working or not.

25 minutes ago, Granddaddy said:

The Super Select AI is far from perfect, frequently leaving out areas that should be selected.

In all fairness, it often works reasonably well but when it does not it can take a huge amount of fiddling with the other tools to make the selections better.

[blureogroup]

I use Luminar Neo (paid solution) as a plugin to Photo for that sort of thing, although it launches separately which is inconvenient, the results are amazing!

[v_kyr]

It will always depend on what one does and through on the tools. Here's a last years test for Firefly (in german, use a translater for other languages).

• Generative Fill – Die Adobe KI im Test

Though to be fair, the AI tools also do get better and better over time, as they learn too to some degree. - I sometimes play with several online AI tools like these here (there are some different purpose AI tools to select from there) in order to see how they evolve.

[firstdefence]

I have had experience of On1 Effects and the UI is dire and not at all intuitive, you literally have to force yourself to learn it and that is a frustrating experience in itself, in the end I just gave up because the fancy pants features just didn't work reliably.

This topic has gone very quickly from Generative fill, e.g to resize an image and fill and extend that empty space with content to look like an extension of the original image, to selections that either don't work properly, can't be worked out to work or just plain doesn't work lol!

[Dave.Kelly]

I think that part of the issue with the UI  in On1 is that it is not a part of a desktop publisher like Affinity and as such the procedures are different to Photoshop/Affinity. If you want to do composites then Affinity is a better tool. I have been using On1 for several years now, because Serif dont seem interested in a DAM/Raw editor and my main interest is managing/editing photos. Sometimes I use Affinity Photo and I dont find the UI intuitive because it is not what I am used to. To me the masking/layers and procedures seem very complicated in Affinity, what with 4 different layer types.

[R C-R]

@Dave.Kelly, I'm not sure why you mentioned using ON 1 for years or a DAM/RAW editor but here we are talking specifically about the UI of the ON 1 Effects 2023 product & its several AI powered features, both as a standalone app & with AP as a plugin.

Among the things I found counter-intuitive with it are how the AI-powered "Super" select tool works. Selecting parts of an image with it are usually straightforward enough but without watching a video or reading through the huge manual, it is far from obvious that to do anything with the selection you have to right-click to pop up the adjustment & filter selection menu. Another is that when opened for the first time, the Layers item on the left where one adds or modifies layers is collapsed & there is no indication at all that it can be clicked on to reveal those options.

Several of the other various AI-powered masking features are not exactly straightforward or intuitive to use. For example, once you find where it is hiding in the UI it is easy enough to use the AI Quick Mask tool to mask part of an image, but like several other tools you would not even know it exists without referring to the manual or just clicking on each of the tool icons on the left & then hovering the pointer over each of the icons along the top of the window (sort of an overly complicated version of the Affinity context toolbar).

Then there are the things that simply do not work, like the search field in the Add Filter window or that the Crop Tool is unavailable when the app is called as a plugin from AP, or that in the startup screen Recent Photos section the right-click Show in Finder switches to the Finder but does not open a Finder window where that photo is stored.

There is much more but like @firstdefence mentioned above, I really have had to force myself to spend a huge amount of time to learning its quirks to do much with it.