(Designer is) Missing some features from DrawPlus [moved]

[DavidSilverSteel]

As a user of DrawPlus from DrawPlus5 to DrawPlusX8 I think that Affinity Designer is fantastic. I love the way there are Pixel tools as well as Vector tools.  I find the ability to add noise as a texture gives far greater scope. I use DP X8 often for making cards and find that Affinity designer does not have some of the features that were useful in DrawPlus.

 

1. In DP it is possible to choose a page format of a folded card, where front and back can be printed together as one sheet, but each is treated as a separate page when designing the card. In Affinity designer I can overcome this omission by using a page consisting of two artboards side by side, each representing front / back. However I have found it necessary to use a separate file for the "inside page" also with two artboards. I cannot see a way of organising four artboards to represent two pages that can be printed separately, but maybe I am missing something.

 

2. I seriously miss both a "Trace" facility and also a "cutout" facility when starting with a pixel image and creating a vector image. I finish up going back to either Draw PlusX8 or PhotoPlusX8 to overcome this. This omission is a shame. Neither the selection brush nor the freehand selection tool quite do the job for those of us who are not too artistic and often try to modify existing pixel images as our starting position.

 

I still think that Affinity Designer beta is a great tool, but I cannot yet completely replace my Draw Plus with it - for my purposes.

However, - Well Done Serif.

 

David

Using Windows 10

 

[Patrick Connor]

David,

 

I moved your post from the beta forum to somewhere it will be seen more. As Designer for Windows moves from beta to product release this will come up a lot, so I thought it should be in the feature requests section of the forum.

 

Serif DrawPlus and Affinity Designer are different programs and do not share the same features. Affinity Designer is an illustration program that has been written new, from scratch, and does not share any code with DrawPlus. We have designed Affinity Designer from the ground up to and consequently it already has many features that we were never able to put into DrawPlus. Equally there are some features of DrawPlus have not been added to Affinity Designer yet. Some features like animation that do not fit in the concept of what Affinity Designer is will most likely not be added.
 

Folded printed documents may be more suited to the realm of our next application, Affinity Publisher. 

 

We have said that we will only add a 'Trace' type feature if we can do a fantastic one, better than others that are available. I expect we will.

 

To other readers, we would suggest before you purchase that you look at the existing features of Affinity Designer and the vast array of video tutorials (and the roadmap of features that are coming) and decide if the software is right for you.

[DavidSilverSteel]

Thank you Patrick,

I fully understand the choices you have to make in the application. My comments in no way mean that I do not admire Affinity Designer, it is a tremendous application with lots of wonderful features, and I shall probably buy it and use it alongside my DrawPlus. I am not an artist but a "practical computer user, also a programmer" and as such, I use the practical features of DrawPlus  quite a lot. As a programmer I know that you have to draw the line somewhere. - no pun intended!

 

Out of interest, I also missed a colour replacement brush, which I use often in PhotoPlus.

 

I look forward to the Affinity Photo becoming available for Windows, which I shall certainly purchase. I am a great admirer of Serif software and your sensible attitude to pricing. Well Done. Keep up the good work and thanks for your reply.

Kind Regards

David