Two lightweight raster tools that would streamline Designer's workflow

[gencris]

Hi Affinity team 👋

First of all, thank you for building such a powerful and smooth tool. I use Affinity Designer daily and really enjoy working with it. That said, there are a couple of small things that regularly interrupt my workflow and force me to open Affinity Photo — which uses up precious RAM — even when I only need to make very light edits.

One of the things I often need is a basic clone tool (like a duplication stamp) to quickly fix or clean up a raster image inside a Designer document. Right now, even the simplest touch-up requires me to switch to Photo.

Also, while I can easily distort and transform vector shapes in Designer — which is great — there’s no equivalent for pixel-based images. Sometimes I need to apply quick perspective or warp adjustments to a raster element, but again, I have to move the file over to Photo for that.

I understand that Designer is primarily focused on vector work, but having these two simple raster editing tools directly available would really streamline the workflow and avoid app switching for small tasks.

Thanks for considering this, and congrats again on the amazing work so far 🙌

[GarryP]

I can’t comment on the first point about the Clone Tool but, as for raster warping, you can already do that in Designer’s Pixel Persona via the menu “Layer → New Live Filter Layer → <choose option>”. These options are non-destructive Live Filters like the ones in Photo.

[RE4LLY]

You can easily warp raster images directly in Desiger.
Switch over to the Pixel Persona and the go to Layer -> New Live Filter Layer -> Perspective / Mesh Warp.

[gencris]

Oh my goodness... why isn't there an icon for this tool like the vector icon for Designer Persona?
So embarrassing, I've been switching between the two apps for years for this, lol.

Thank for the tip.

[GarryP]

Those functionalities were added to Designer not very long ago (maybe start of V2, maybe later).

I think it would make sense if there were a ‘limited scope’ Live Filter icon+menu in Designer’s Pixel Persona Layers Panel, like there is in Photo’s Photo Persona.

[thomaso]

57 minutes ago, gencris said:

force me to open Affinity Photo — which uses up precious RAM — even when I only need to make very light edits.

One of the things I often need is a basic clone tool (like a duplication stamp) to quickly fix or clean up a raster image inside a Designer document. Right now, even the simplest touch-up requires me to switch to Photo.

It appears you don't make use yet of vector editing with nested pixel content, which, additionally, is non-destructive and less demanding as long you don't rasterize a layer of type image. It works well especially for your mentioned "light edits" (or quick layout quality), like cloning or removing an object or increasing a background for instance. In this workflow you use a vector shape or curve object as mask for a certain pixel detail of an image layer (or nested vice versa), for smoothing edges a blur effect is applied. In the two examples below (original: bottom, edited: top) there is no "pixel" layer and nothing is rasterized:

[gencris]

Thanks Thomaso, I've had this mastered for a long time, it's fine. This post was just to point out my need to make a simple quick perspective with a raster image for a model for example.