Affinity Photo v2 on iPad Pro: "Merge down" and "Merge selected" freezes the app

[Hunternif]

I am using Affinity Photo v2.5.4 on iPad Pro 2020 12.9". I have a few Pixel layers in my project. Sometimes I want to merge 2 layers into one, for simplicity, as you would do in Photoshop. Doing it either via "Merge Down" or via "Merge Selected" takes a surprisingly long time, even on small documents. Sometimes it freezes the app in the process, up to 5 minutes at a time. This doesn't lead to a crash, but it makes the app effectively unusable at the time, so I have to start over.

Update: this seems to happen when my layer extends beyond than edges of the canvas (or the artboard). If I do "Rasterize and Trim" first, it works quickly.

Edited August 22, 2024 by Hunternif

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Affinity forums.

I haven't seen that myself. Can you share a .afphoto document that exhibits this problem for you?

[Hunternif]

Hi @walt.farrell, thank you for your quick response.

Here is my document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14utYklO2W3maE4qBCL83MSBIhknV3j6E/view?usp=sharing

I realized a few things that may be important about this document and about this issue:

• My "main" document is actually quite large: it's 9000 x 50000 pixels. It contains 13 pages of a comic chapter, each within its own Artboard of 4460 x 6400 pixels (created in Affinity Designer).
• Because merging pixel layers is slow in my "main" document, I would copy the layers to Clipboard and create a New Document From Clipboard, in hopes that merging would work faster there. The link above is one such example, with 2 layers copied from the large "main" document.
• Apparently merging is still slow even when the 2 layers are copied and isolated to a separate smaller document.
• If I do "Rasterise and Trim" on this temporary document, merging is quick after that. If I do the same on the large "main" document, merging is still slow.

My guess is that the full size of the canvas plays a role here. Maybe each pixel layer implicitly contains some empty space that's big enough to fill the entire canvas, not just the Artboard. And when I copied my pixel layers to a small document, that empty space was copied as well. When I try to merge these layers, the program checks every pixel of the empty space, i.e. all 9000 x 50000 of them. That's why merging these layers is still slow on the smaller document, until I "trim" them.

If my guess is correct, I would request a fix, such that a pixel layer should not extend too far beyond the edges of its parent Artboard.

 

PS. As a side note, I would appreciate tips for how to better organize my comic project . Does it make sense to put multiple pages of a chapter into the same document as artboards? It seems pretty convenient so far, as I can see everything at a glance, and export all pages of a chapter as a single PDF file.

[walt.farrell]

Thanks for the document. I'll take a look later, but two comments for now:

1 hour ago, Hunternif said:

My guess is that the full size of the canvas plays a role here. Maybe each pixel layer implicitly contains some empty space that's big enough to fill the entire canvas, not just the Artboard.

Terminology: You can have either a Canvas, or Artboards, but not both. For clarity it can be important for us to know, and for you to understand the behavior differences between documents that have a Canvas and documents that have Artboards.

Also, Photo does not usually use Artboards. It can use them, if they are created elsewhere (Designer, Publisher) or via some odd tricks in Photo itself. But it is an unusual enough environment that using multiple Artboards in Photo is likely to expose issues as I suspect it is not as strongly tested by Serif. That may play into whatever we find is going wrong with your document. (Note: Those same issues would probably occur in Designer, using multiple Artboards, and functions of the Pixel Persona. But as there are functions in Photo (such as Filters, Macros, etc.) that don't exist in Designer I think it can be easier to expose some of the issues when using Photo than when using Designer.

More later...

[walt.farrell]

I'm not sure what's happening, @Hunternif.

I can confirm that with your sample document, on either my iPad or my Mac, Merge Down takes about 9-10 seconds. But if I select the layers and use Rasterize & Trim before the Merge Down, it's almost instantaneous.

As far as I know this shouldn't be anything to do with the pixel layers having something hidden, as I would expect the Transform panel to show their accurate sizes. And the sizes didn't change when using Rasterize & Trim.

But I have no other ideas. Perhaps another user will know, or the Serif staff will be able to figure out something when they get to this topic.