What i miss from photoshop back in the days: More filters/effects

[saint77]

I have purchased filter forge but its buggy on mac. So i decide to request more filters and effects, especially 2 i miss from adobe photoshop which i used to quickly create graphics (which was excellent for covers, movie posters etc) already 25 years ago: Plastic wrap and frost. I could make plastic wrap look like everything from spider web to patches of ice. I could also add frost effect to plastic wrap and make some interesting designs. The ones in filter forge dont do this as well as the ones in photoshop. Then theres the filter photoshop didnt have but i find in filter forge which is making a layer look like its on fire/burning, some of these filters in filter forge looks very realistic, this would also be very useful as a filter for general use in graphics design in affinity if its well made. So plastic wrap, frost and fire, these 3 filters would be 3 very useful filters for general use.

To my knowledge this shouldnt be too hard to make for affinity but it would lift up the graphics design part of affinity alot and make it even more attractive for buyers since these are very simple tools to use to make cool effects for example for text or objects.

[loukash]

54 minutes ago, saint77 said:

already 25 years ago: Plastic wrap

Yeah, I've been occasionally using it as well.

However, it took me about 30 seconds to find an easy a straightforward tutorial how to quickly achive the same effect in Affinity: 

 

[saint77]

22 minutes ago, loukash said:

Yeah, I've been occasionally using it as well.

However, it took me about 30 seconds to find an easy a straightforward tutorial how to quickly achive the same effect in Affinity: 

 

It looks similar but its not the same effect.

[loukash]

24 minutes ago, saint77 said:

It looks similar but its not the same effect.

It surely requires some refining and sweating out the details to find the right balance of all necessary steps, but the tutorial above points in the right direction:

^ Here I really just made a very quick approximation based on the tutorial, using a few layer effects.

To mimic the exact appearance of the above PS effect, a few additional steps are surely needed.
That all can then be saved as an interactive macro. (I'm not very experienced with building Affinity macros, so I'll leave it up to someone else… )

[Twolane]

I had a quick look at this. It would appear as though the steps could be applied to Affinity. Whether it's applicable to your requirement, I have no idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEt4a3ue7_M

 

[saint77]

5 hours ago, Twolane said:

I had a quick look at this. It would appear as though the steps could be applied to Affinity. Whether it's applicable to your requirement, I have no idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEt4a3ue7_M

 

No, this is also not the same. Apriciate you trying to help but ive been unable to find any that are able to replicate the way photoshops plastic wrap filter works over text etc. Let me remind you i have filterforge with several plastic wrap plugins, while a few do a fairly descent job none of them works as well as photoshops either. Frozen filter there works better, and the fire filters works great. But filter forge is buggy on mac and the problem seems to be at their side. Affinity could dent their sales and force them to start developing better support for mac if they got their own cathegory of artistic filters like ive explained here since we would be covered with the basic tools which makes people like me go and pay for filter force despite their crappy support for mac. Lightrays is another interesting filter affinity team could look at btw, you can make a figure or text and it "shines" lightrays out in a specified direction, you can adjust spread etc. Would be amazing to have this shipped with affinity as standard and it would do miracles for graphics designers.

Luminar neo has some impressive sets of tools aswell which would lift affinity to a higher level, like changing skies, moving for example sunlight behind trees in a picture of a forest and sunrays etc shines where they should etc using AI, extremely impressive. But this is probably hard to do, the filters i mentioned over here would be easy.
 

[saint77]

5 hours ago, loukash said:

It surely requires some refining and sweating out the details to find the right balance of all necessary steps, but the tutorial above points in the right direction:

^ Here I really just made a very quick approximation based on the tutorial, using a few layer effects.

To mimic the exact appearance of the above PS effect, a few additional steps are surely needed.
That all can then be saved as an interactive macro. (I'm not very experienced with building Affinity macros, so I'll leave it up to someone else… )

Sure but heres the catch: You need to know quite a bit of how to use advanced features in affinity for this.

How many 10 year olds that want a program where they can make an impressive invite to their birthday party know how to do this? But with a nice set of artistic filters they could. That means dad needs to buy affinity, because he knows from his friends thats easy to do there, plus its popular among professionals too and he wants his kid to learn something useful for later in life.

Thats part of the reason photoshop got to where they are now. Many pirated them though, with the price of affinity, its cost is low enough so people like that would rather just buy it.

[2ddpainter]

The Example in the Video looks a bit ugly too me.

So here a few Examples from the Filterforge Filter Library
i like the Plastic Wrap from Redcap

https://www.filterforge.com/filters/search.html?q=plastic+effect&h=r

Btw Filterforge works quit nice on Win 10

[loukash]

1 hour ago, saint77 said:

You need to know quite a bit of how to use advanced features in affinity for this.

Sure.

1 hour ago, saint77 said:

How many 10 year olds that want a program where they can make an impressive invite to their birthday party know how to do this?

*face palm* 
Thanks for the laugh.  

A 10-years-old will dance a "funny dance" and share the selfie-video with their buddies over that "social" network that rhymes with Schtik-schtok or similar nonsense.

~~~

But don't get me wrong:
I'm definitely not against your feature request. I'm missing quite a few great features from the good ole Adobe CS5.5 suite myself.
I just wouldn't hold my breath that Serif will implement something like this in "three, two, one… finished!"

Hence if someone is looking for such features right now, it's always a Good Thing™ to share currently available options, be it 3rd party apps or plugins, or – admittedly – slightly more complex Affinity workflows. That's what the forums are for.  

[v_kyr]

A similar looking result to that plastic stuff can be created with a Relief Light filter from G'MIC (I've used it online).

[loukash]

49 minutes ago, 2ddpainter said:

a few Examples from the Filterforge Filter Library

9 hours ago, saint77 said:

filter forge but its buggy on mac

As it seems, Affinity on Mac isn't even officially supported, only on Windows: 
filterforge.com/download

You should definitely complain by them to make the plugins compatible!

[loukash]

11 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

A similar looking result to that plastic stuff can be created with a Relief Light filter from G'MIC (I've used it online).

Amazing!

[v_kyr]

[saint77]

2 hours ago, loukash said:

As it seems, Affinity on Mac isn't even officially supported, only on Windows: 
filterforge.com/download

You should definitely complain by them to make the plugins compatible!

I have. Its outrageous they dont officially support mac (other than photoshop).

[saint77]

2 hours ago, v_kyr said:

A similar looking result to that plastic stuff can be created with a Relief Light filter from G'MIC (I've used it online).

Too bad the same issue as with filter forge, its not officially supported for affinity photo on mac... i find no download for it.

[saint77]

Well, mac is THE platform for serious graphics designers and creative people, i find it strange mac of all platforms are not priority. Im so glad i changed from windows after the instability and bugs i had there and i cant imagine going back to that, compared to windows mac runs smooth as butter and m2 pro which i have is some serious computing power, cost vs effect i think it actually beats or atleast are around the same as a comparable pc for the price. That wasnt the case a few years ago, that means mac has to increase in percentage of users and if they dont support it, they will fall behind.

[loukash]

1 hour ago, saint77 said:

its not officially supported for affinity photo on mac

It's an online app. I find it amazing that you can do such things in your browser these days. (Well, technically it's the server, not the browser, but still…)

[saint77]

1 minute ago, loukash said:

It's an online app. I find it amazing that you can do such things in your browser these days. (Well, technically it's the server, not the browser, but still…)

Well yes, but it doesnt help since half the point is applying this to layers instead of the whole image, which means it needs to be a plugin launched from affinity photo on mac. Gmic is one of those sets of tools id wish i could get for affinity.

[loukash]

7 minutes ago, saint77 said:

half the point is applying this to layers instead of the whole image

Since it likely would have to be a destructive filter, the layer would be rasterized in place anyway. So now you can just as well temporarily export it, process it and place it back.

9 minutes ago, saint77 said:

Gmic is one of those sets of tools id wish i could get for affinity.

As a "Mac guy" since 35 years, I definitely agree. 

[saint77]

17 minutes ago, loukash said:

Since it likely would have to be a destructive filter, the layer would be rasterized in place anyway. So now you can just as well temporarily export it, process it and place it back.

As a "Mac guy" since 35 years, I definitely agree. 

I guess, if someone, even say affinity, helped develop support for gmic on mac that could maybe make filterforge realize they are losing their mac customer base and maybe do something about it.

Going back to windows isnt an option for me. I started to get a hunch its time to change platform when i got dad to move from windows to mac after all the computersupport i had to do for him for free, windows was almost unusable, but now after 2018 that he got his mac mini i rarely ever hear anything except for a few details like hes looking for a file i have to search up and things like that. I get why mac is the OS for designers etc that want to focus on creative work instead of being bothered by annoying upkeep on windows, i just want my computers to work and finally i have the os that does that.

And linux? i tried to install it on my old intel nuc a year or so ago, it worked a couple of months and then it broke and wouldnt boot, that was supposedly the extremely userfriendly linux mint on very standard intel hardware which should be well supported. Its been even worse than windows for me. I think an update did it.

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, saint77 said:

Too bad the same issue as with filter forge, its not officially supported for affinity photo on mac... i find no download for it.

It's nowadays difficult to (re)build it for macOS systems as a PS plugin out of the box (in contrast to Windows), in past times there once was such a macOS plugin of G'Mic, but I doubt either way that it was (re)usable in APh.

So what one can do under macOS is install GMIC via ...

• gmic - Homebrew
• gmic gimp-plugin - MacPorts  (for GIMP)

... or use it Online, as I do instead ...

• G'MIC Online

[saint77]

30 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

It's nowadays difficult to (re)build it for macOS systems as a PS plugin out of the box (in contrast to Windows), in past times there once was such a macOS plugin of G'Mic, but I doubt either way that it was (re)usable in APh.

So what one can do under macOS is install GMIC via ...

• gmic - Homebrew
• gmic gimp-plugin - MacPorts  (for GIMP)

... or use it Online, as I do instead ...

• G'MIC Online

Is it the apple silicon switch they made?

it kind of ruins it regarding graphics creation for me, which is what i used to do on photoshop, it would be fun if i could continue using the old tricks in affinity, but i guess not. But im going to be focusing more on photo work ahead anyway so i still have use for affinity without the filters and the ability to make graphics i could have had if these filters worked.

doubt ill be using it online since i spend alot of time on filters adjusting, seeing how it looks with other layers, maybe re-applying many times over until it looks good. plus its slow doing it online. But thanks for the tip, it might come handy.

[2ddpainter]

@saint77

Apart from the Work, one reason why there are more plugins for Windows
is probably the number of Users and therefore the larger Buyer Base.
I found these numbers here: ca 73% use Windows and ca 16% use MacOS.

I'll leave it uncommented that only MacOS are ... THE platform for serious graphics
designers and creative people ...

But it leaves the question why the Affinity Suite is also available for Windows.

[Alfred]

2 hours ago, 2ddpainter said:

I found these numbers here: ca 73% use Windows and ca 16% use MacOS.

So, 11% other? Really??

[2ddpainter]

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

So, 11% other? Really??

the numbers are from wikipedia
CromeOS 1.76 %
Linux 3.77 %

they may not really exact while from 2019
but windows is 2023 worldwide still at ca 70 %
and in the US ca 57 %, macOS are ca 29.62 % in the US