Designer: Feature Request - Destructive Color Editing

[TonyO]

This has been on my silent wishlist for Designer for ages, finally getting around to requesting it.

Illustrator has a set of color adjustment tools similar to the kind you'd find in the adjustments of Photoshop, typical things like color balance, convert to RBG/CMYK, black and white, etc. These adjustments are destructive and change the set color values of fills, outlines, and gradient points on vector objects.

I use this alot when doing slight warming or cooling adjustments to my vector illustrations before posting to adobe stock. Affinity Photo has color adjustment tools, but they create non-destructive adjustments layers, which are stripped away when exporting to SVG or EPS for stock use. 

It would be super convenient to have really simple color adjustment tools in Designer to edit vector color values.
My wishlist for color adjustments would include:
- Simple RGB/CMYK balance sliders
- Whitepoint/Temperature adjustment (to cool down or warm up colors overall)
- Black and White conversion with color sliders (so you could make yellows into lighter grays, reds into darker grays, etc.)
- Convert to RGB/CMYK (to quick remove mixed color values that may be present from pasting between files)
- Saturation slider
- Convert to Tone (pick a color tone to change all selected objects to the same color value while maintaining light/dark tone variations)

A bit of a niche use case, but i feel like it would be useful to alot of designers to have permanent color adjustment as an option. It's hard to adjust vector colors in Designer on complicated images in a way that keeps them compatible with stock imagery creation. 

 

[fde101]

It would also be nice to have the option to apply them to global colors directly without breaking the link between the global colors and the objects they are applied to.

Obviously this would mean that all objects using those global colors would be impacted - but that is kind of the whole point of them, so that makes sense.

[Bit Disappointed]

On 4/4/2024 at 6:26 PM, TonyO said:

This has been on my silent wishlist for Designer for ages, finally getting around to requesting it.

Illustrator has a set of color adjustment tools similar to the kind you'd find in the adjustments of Photoshop, typical things like color balance, convert to RBG/CMYK, black and white, etc. These adjustments are destructive and change the set color values of fills, outlines, and gradient points on vector objects.

I use this alot when doing slight warming or cooling adjustments to my vector illustrations before posting to adobe stock. Affinity Photo has color adjustment tools, but they create non-destructive adjustments layers, which are stripped away when exporting to SVG or EPS for stock use. 

It would be super convenient to have really simple color adjustment tools in Designer to edit vector color values.
My wishlist for color adjustments would include:
- Simple RGB/CMYK balance sliders
- Whitepoint/Temperature adjustment (to cool down or warm up colors overall)
- Black and White conversion with color sliders (so you could make yellows into lighter grays, reds into darker grays, etc.)
- Convert to RGB/CMYK (to quick remove mixed color values that may be present from pasting between files)
- Saturation slider
- Convert to Tone (pick a color tone to change all selected objects to the same color value while maintaining light/dark tone variations)

A bit of a niche use case, but i feel like it would be useful to alot of designers to have permanent color adjustment as an option. It's hard to adjust vector colors in Designer on complicated images in a way that keeps them compatible with stock imagery creation.

Agree with all of it, I think. And not as niche as you imagine, it's just as common in a design that I want to change colors or tonality or something else permanently as it is in Photoshop with a photo. And wanting impact in all gradients, strokes, fills, whatever, permanently or for a variation of vector:

If I have to export a change of something complicated to vector, for example white balance adjustment of a vector illustration, then a non-destructive adjustment layer in Designer will force rasterization upon export, which I would call hopelessly destructive and professionally useless.

Good that you remind me that I can do it in Adobe Illustrator, which is in the process of making a major comeback in several graphic genres on my machines. I would even almost call it a revolution.

[TonyO]

I frankly hate illustrator, if I was forced to switch from affinity to a different design app, I’d go back to Corel Draw, it’s far far superior to illustrator. Hell, the design tools in Inkscape are better than illustrator. 

[debraspicher]

3 hours ago, TonyO said:

I frankly hate illustrator, if I was forced to switch from affinity to a different design app, I’d go back to Corel Draw, it’s far far superior to illustrator. Hell, the design tools in Inkscape are better than illustrator. 

This post warms my heart so much. I have both CorelDraw and Vectorstyler on trial atm.

[Boldlinedesign]

@TonyO I used illustrator for years until it went to subscription. I still have my cs6 suite on an old computer for occasional use as the need arises. Have you tried out vectorstyler? For me, it's been my go to professional vector app for the last couple years. It's superior to illustrator in my book. It's also half off until the middle of April. It's a standalone app and only available for desktop at this time. 

In my workflow, when I use the affinity suite, it's primarily on my iPad and port things over to vectorstyler for final output. 

[Bit Disappointed]

16 hours ago, TonyO said:

I frankly hate illustrator, if I was forced to switch from affinity to a different design app, I’d go back to Corel Draw, it’s far far superior to illustrator. Hell, the design tools in Inkscape are better than illustrator. 

I have both the latest versions of Illustrator and CorelDRAW, and I don't hate either of them, but I find it disheartening that the interface for a large part of both programs remains stuck in the past. That's how it goes when you have a hundred million users who have decades of routines ingrained in muscle memory and from courses. Illustrator becomes better and more aesthetic, while Corel's interface gets uglier. And Corel as sellers are untrustworthy in a mail-order catalog kind of way. I don't like the company.

I don't think Adobe themselves are thrilled about being so tied to the past. It seems like Lightroom has been more open to improvements, and Photoshop here and there too. But Corel... I really don't know what they want.

That's probably where Serif has gained the most headwind, aside from the price, in their desktop versions, where the basic functions of the interface are much more pleasant to work with. Unfortunately, not in the iPad versions, which I can barely bring myself to use. And as for usability beyond the basic functions, it's not going well in the desktop versions either. Serif got some fundamental design right in 2014, but from there, the magic disappeared.

On the other hand, in Illustrator and CorelDRAW, I've rarely hit a wall or had to use as many workarounds as in Affinity Designer, and output-wise, I also have far fewer problems.

When Vectorstyler is developed and maintained by a real company, and when Inkscape is coded from scratch with a genuinely usable interface, then their potential will be realized. Only then.

The most important thing for me is that the journey from start to finish is as short as possible, that the output is state of the art, and I don't have correction tasks after delivery. With that approach, it's the tasks that define which product I should choose, not my opinions.

[TonyO]

On 4/8/2024 at 10:31 AM, Bit Disappointed said:

That's probably where Serif has gained the most headwind, aside from the price, in their desktop versions, where the basic functions of the interface are much more pleasant to work with. Unfortunately, not in the iPad versions, which I can barely bring myself to use. And as for usability beyond the basic functions, it's not going well in the desktop versions either. Serif got some fundamental design right in 2014, but from there, the magic disappeared.

When it comes to the desktop apps, I'm way less concerned with the design of the application versus how it's tools are setup for use. Illustrator has the most confusing and unintuitive selection, node editing and bezier tools of any vector editing application I've ever touched. The white arrow tool is a mess compared to the almost standardized dedicated node editing tool shared by Affinity, Inkscape and Corel. Illustrator needed a dedicated isolation mode on double click added a decade or so back because their selection tools were just that bad, a band-aid they've never bothered to take off (and it's frankly starting to smell). Corel draw's interface could look like windows 95, but the app will still be way more productive to work in than Illustrator. 

As for Affinity's ipad app... I use the iPad version of Designer just as much, if not more than the desktop version... but for completely different use cases. I'll use the desktop version for layout and design work since mouse and keyboard input just make more sense for graphic design, but for my illustration work and cartooning, nothing can beat the interface setup and the apple pencil functionality. I'll do full illustrations on iPad and never touch the desktop app a single time when working. After you get used to the placement of the functions on ipad and which icons mean what, it really is a fast and efficient setup, but i agree, there is definitely a learning curve since the menus use an icon-centric layout, some memorization is required for sure. 

[debraspicher]

There's something productivity-focused about CorelDraw. It is not interested in throwing UI at you (even when you expect it most) and seems to push you straight to work more quickly and it does indeed seem plausible to create things much quicker than in AI. However it could also be an InDesign replacement depending on the complexity of the document.

The problem I've had with AI is that it required subscription-based plugins to actually do most technically challenging things very quickly. So not only we would be paying for Adobe, but also the plugins. Vectorstyler in this respect seems to look at the most popular baseline programs and seeks to address these shortcomings.

[Alfred]

On 4/8/2024 at 3:31 PM, Bit Disappointed said:

That's probably where Serif has gained the most headwind, aside from the price, in their desktop versions, where the basic functions of the interface are much more pleasant to work with.

I think you mean tailwind! A headwind holds you back.

 

On 4/8/2024 at 3:31 PM, Bit Disappointed said:

When Vectorstyler is developed and maintained by a real company, and when Inkscape is coded from scratch with a genuinely usable interface, then their potential will be realized. Only then.

Every time I use Inkscape I’m reminded of how horrible its UI is for such a feature-rich application.

Vectorstyler is pretty amazing, given that it’s developed by a one-man band.