Bug: Resize Canvas alignment fails if image has been cropped

[carlseibert]

Given that I can't think of a workaround, this is a nasty bug.

Steps to reproduce:

Open image.

Crop image, more or less proportionately.

Resize image by typing new width in Resize Image dialog, then clicking into depth field to load the calculated depth. (With link proportions ON)

Choose centered in the alignment graphic.

Apply.

Image will now be displaced down and to the right on canvas. Slight rightward displacement, with the bottom at or near the bottom of canvas.

Do it five times and you will get five different vertical displacements.

 

Now try the same image with no crop. Image will be centered on canvas. 

The only workaround I can quickly think of is pretty ugly - Export a flattened copy. Select all, copy pixels, resize document, delete all pixels, paste pixels, align center. Which costs you all live adjustments. Make that really ugly. 

Version 2.5.5  on Windows 11

I have a video of steps if you need it.

[GarryP]

9 hours ago, carlseibert said:

Resize image by typing new width in Resize Image dialog, then clicking into depth field to load the calculated depth.

How do you get to the “Resize Image dialog”?

In Photo, I can see menu items in the Document menu for ‘Resize Document’ and ‘Resize Canvas’, but not “Resize Image”, and neither of those has a “depth field”.

Can you show us a full-screen (whole application UI) screenshot just before you press the OK button (or whatever applies the change that isn’t working for you)?

A detailed step-by-step workflow would also be useful for anyone wanting to try and reproduce this.

[carlseibert]

Sorry. It's "resize image" in Photoshop. In AP, it's resize document or resize canvas. I meant resize canvas and misspoke. 

In the resize dialogs there is a field for each dimension of the output, one for width and one for height, or "depth"

I'm attaching a video that shows the issue.

 

 

[GarryP]

Thanks for the clarifications.

I think I’m seeing the same behaviour as you but I don’t know how that functionality is supposed to work with cropped documents.
For instance, I don’t know if resizing the canvas is supposed to take the crop into account (and if so, in what way), or not.

Hopefully someone with a better knowledge of that area of the software will see this and give us some insight.

[walt.farrell]

Cropping in Affinity Photo is non-destructive. Therefore, if you have not done a Rasterize & Trim after Cropping in Affinity Photo, a subsequent enlargement of the canvas will make the previously cropped portions visible again.

Perhaps that is what is happening for you, and all you need to do is the Rasterize & Trim step.

[carlseibert]

Ah! That seems to be the issue. Is this because "delete cropped pixels" is not a preference value in Affinity? I've been setting that so long in, ahem, another program that I basically forgot that was a thing.

And I notice that "Rasterize and Trim..." has an ellipsis, which would indicate a modal should pop up. What's up with that? (I just selected the base layer and right-clicked and trimming happened silently)

.....While I have you, what is the correct procedure here for bugs? As a beginner to Affinity, I'm not really able to file authoritative bug reports. Sometimes, I'll be seeing things like this that are not bugs, but user learning curve errors. Other times, I'll be trying to get something done and in user-facing-an-unwanted-distraction-mode rather than profressional-on-a-bug-hunt-mode. 

Will volunteers here vet the proposed bug and pass it on to QC or the developers? Is there a user-facing BugTrac to file the bug in if it passes muster here? Is there feedback when the bug is addressed and squashed? Do Serif employees monitor this forum?

It's enormously helpful if the user is rewarded with "Yes, we reproduced it and it will be fixed in the  n.xx dot release next month", or what you did here. That kind of stuff goes a long way, especially for a young program.  

(I'm thinking here of, ahem, another company that may matter to you, where users report bugs, or very unfortunate design decisions, and three or four years later the issues are still coming up in the forums, unaddressed by the company.)       

  -Carl

[walt.farrell]

55 minutes ago, carlseibert said:

And I notice that "Rasterize and Trim..." has an ellipsis, which would indicate a modal should pop up. What's up with that? (I just selected the base layer and right-clicked and trimming happened silently)

In Affinity the ... indicates that an additional dialog may appear, but sometimes it's not needed, depending on the exact circumstances. Others have suggested that it would be nice if the application adjusted the menu wording to only have the ... if the additional dialog will definitely appear. 

58 minutes ago, carlseibert said:

Will volunteers here vet the proposed bug and pass it on to QC or the developers?

Serif may pick it up from here, but usually they only do that in the Questions forum and the Bugs forum. Or one of us users may report it as a Bug.

1 hour ago, carlseibert said:

Is there a user-facing BugTrac to file the bug in if it passes muster here? Is there feedback when the bug is addressed and squashed? Do Serif employees monitor this forum?

No user-facing tracker. However, when one of the Serif staff logs the bug they will tag the topic with the big tracking number, and when the bug is resolved the Affinity Info Bot will post in the tagged topic with the resolution.

Yes, Serif monitors the forums, but I can't say which ones monitor Feedback vs Questions vs Bugs. Feedback is generally for the users to post suggestions to the Developers and planners, who read this forum but generally do not respond. 

So it's more common to see Serif staff in Questions and in Bugs, I think, as that is where QA and Support are expected to interact with the users. But they do appear in Feedback sometimes, too.

1 hour ago, carlseibert said:

It's enormously helpful if the user is rewarded with "Yes, we reproduced it and it will be fixed in the  n.xx dot release next month"

That seldom happens, and only for very high severity issues. Mainly, the QA/Support teams log it if they can reproduce it, and then only the Developers know when something might be fixed and they do not tell anyone anything about what is scheduled. We find out when the Info Bot posts that it's been fixed. 

 

[carlseibert]

Thanks. That's helpful.

I paid a visit to the bugs forum to see how things work there.

For me, if I suspect a bug I'll bring it up here first. As I said, when somebody is a new users or they are being distracted from what they need to be doing, they will tend to have rambling, less than well-formed complaints that might need a tad of discussion or might simply be misunderstanding the operation of the program. As was the case here.