Clone Brush Tool (Stamp) in Affinity Designer

[iriskin]

Hello!

Help me find Clone Brush Tool (analog Clone Stamp Tool in Photoshop) in Affinity Designer, please ? Or how can I implement this tool in  Affinity Designer?

[MEB]

Hi iriskin,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

The Clone Brush Tool is only available in Affinity Photo which is our photo editing software. Designer doesn't have this as it's not intended to be used to perform complex image editing operations.

[iriskin]

Hi iriskin,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

The Clone Brush Tool is only available in Affinity Photo which is our photo editing software. Designer doesn't have this as it's not intended to be used to perform complex image editing operations.

 

MEB, thank you for answer.

I think Clone/Stamp is important tool for most tasks and simple operations (no editing photo) . 

I try use full version Affinity Designer for Web/UI design and i need this tools (clone/normal magic wand)  for comfortable work.

Now I have to use two products for some action.

But I still really like the Affinity :)

 

I hope that these tools will be in Affinity Designer later.

[Norway4T]

I agree totally with iriskin. A clone brush tool is not an advanced function. It's a basic function though. Not having this option, means I have to take my projects out of Affinity Designer and into a graphics program to do even the smallest touch ups, often going back and forth several times. Extremely time consuming and - to say the least - annoying. A Repair Brush tool and a Clone Brush tool ought to be a minimum standard for a graphics tool that boasts a pixel editing capability...

[Bard Judith]

I'm a graphic artist who has worked with PS in its various iterations for years.  Unhappy about paying thirty bucks a month for a professional subscription and checking out Affinity on the ten-day trial right now.  At first glance I'm impressed.  At second, actually loading and playing inside the program,  it seems to have a simple workflow with all the shortcuts and quickbuttons I'm used to, enhancing the learning curve... BUT immediately upon importing a project and trying to work with it as I would normally, I notice some aspects missing that I'd consider absolute essentials for a 'minimum standard', as Norway4T says above, and some peculiar responses that feel like glitches.    

a)  There is no easy way to merge or delete layers en masse - ridiculous.   The 'merge visible' or 'delete hidden' control is crucial for getting through blends quickly and efficiently.
b)  Where is my clone brush?   One hard-edge, one soft-edge:  so vital for making basic repairs to any pixel-based image.  
c)  copying over multiple layers from one project to another seems to produce uneven results, edges misaligned or showing up in strange ways.  C&P should be exact, not approximate.
d) Switching from one tool to another should not also switch you into a different layer.  You can really foul up your project by drawing or erasing on the wrong layer, especially if it already contains pixels which you are 'painting over' or images you are enhancing.  At the very minimum, you lose the work you've done if you've, say, traced directly on your reference image rather than the layer above it, as a simple example.
e)  This might be me missing something, but the 'flood fill' doesn't seem to have an opacity control with it, just a boundary sensitivity.  I tried adjusting it in the colour panel on the right with no results, and then tried 'fill opacity' under the Effects tabe, which made my entire original image opaquing, but had no effect on the actual level of fill.  Sometime you just want a subtle blush of colour added to an object, not the crude spraycan of MS Paint.

Can someone give me some workarounds, or are there pro solutions coming to these issues?   With appreciation - Bard

 

[toltec]

9 hours ago, Bard Judith said:

Can someone give me some workarounds, or are there pro solutions coming to these issues?   With appreciation - Bard

 

 

I suggest you download Affinity Photo instead. That is a Photoshop type image editing program.

Designer is an illustration program, like Adobe illustrator. Although it does have some basic image editing features.

[oscarfl]

I think if you should take into consideration the suggestion to implement The Clone Brush Tool in DESIGNER, because in many forums and reviews this tool is located as "The true alternative to fireworks", and Fireworks had this tool, it would even be a great boost to the tool. I bought it recently and I liked it, but I missed The Clone Brush Tool, without necessarily (photoshop or affinity photo).

Do not be like ADOBE, listen to the users :)

[Gary-ser]

Please add the clone brush. Right now I must use a 2nd bitmap editor.  Not happy about that.

Serif, I am not going to put out another $50 just to get a tool that is available in any other (free) bitmap editor. 
In the long term you will get more market share for a product that people love. I would have rather paid $100 for a product that wasn't gimped. 

Same for the missing crop tool in the photo side.

[JBOM]

I agree a clone/stamp tool would be extremely helpful!

[matiaspinto]

This is stupid, clone stamp tool its part of a BASIC set of tools. Now, i need to download PS and open TWO apps to do something basic even 10 years ago.
Really Sad Serif team.

[MEB]

Hi matiaspinto,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
It is a basic tool for a photo editor, but Affinity Designer is an illustration/design application. It's closer to Adobe Illustrator than Photoshop.We are trying to keep the apps as much focused in their own areas as possible. If you need to perform more advanced retouching/photo editing you can switch/send the whole document to Affinity Photo (in case you have it) going to menu File > Edit in Photo. Do the same in Photo when you want to switch back to Designer.

[cocoazenith]

 

On 7/17/2019 at 7:32 PM, MEB said:

It is a basic tool for a photo editor, but Affinity Designer is an illustration/design application.

Then why did you include a Photo persona within the Designer in the first place???

I own both Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo and it's a drag to go to Affinity Photo every time i need to do some basic clone brush work.

I strongly agree with everybody who previously posted, this is a very simple photo editing operation and it should be included
in the Photo persona of the Affinity Designer.

EDIT: I noticed it's included now in Publisher with the LINK feature if you own both Designer & Photo.
Why not at least include this feature in Affinity Designer if you own Affinity Photo? Hopefully it's coming in 1.8.

But it would be ideal for it to be a native feature of Affinity Designer.

 

[Kochab]

Would also like the clone tool in AD. I'd pay extra to combine Photo and Designer into one comprehensive thing. I also miss having control over the separate channels.

[Mig]

I've just bought Designer, for fabric textures and other textures, clone tool would really be beneficial for Designer. 

[Anna_Moka]

I just downloaded the 90 days free trial and I'm join to the request to add the clone stamp, pretty pleeease!! 🙏 

[loukash]

3 hours ago, Anna_Moka said:

I just downloaded the 90 days free trial

Download the Affinity Photo trial as well and enjoy the absolutely unique feature of the Affinity suite that is the universal document format.
Switch documents between the apps on the fly via File > Edit In Designer/Photo, add and use features from one app to documents from the other app and vice versa! The document handover between the apps works seamlessly even with unsaved "Untitled" documents.

[Snap]

Affinity Designer (and Adobe Illustrator) is a vector based graphic editor/creator.

Affinity Photo (and Adobe Photoshop) is a raster based graphic editor/creator.

Affinity Designer and Adobe Illustrator will probably never have a clone stamp tool or if they did it would most likely not function the same way as in their raster based counterparts (Affinity Photo and Photoshop). The fact that Affinity Designer has a pixel persona is a nice and awesome unique feature that attempts to bridge the gap giving it some raster based functionality.

Asking Serif Labs to put a clone stamp tool in AP (or Adobe to put a clone stamp tool in AI) is like asking an automobile maker that makes a car and boat to put wheels on their boat because you'd like to drive it on land like a car. Cars are made to drive on land and a boat can be made to drive on land, but that would essentially require designing a boat to not be a boat and be a car and the end result would not work very well as neither a boat nor a car.

It's totally understandable that having a vector based editor that can also offer features and functionality of a raster based editor would be a very helpful thing to have just how having a car that can be a boat or a boat that can be a car would be very helpful. But there's a reason a boat is a boat and a car is a car and there may be some overlap in their functionality, but ultimately they're different things intended for different purposes. The same goes for both raster and vector editors. That's why Adobe has Illustrator and Photoshop, it's why Corel has Draw and Paint, it's why there's Gimp and InkScape, and that's why Serif Labs has Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer.

If a graphic editing/creating software company figures out how to make a graphic editor that can seamlessly work with both vector and raster based graphics, that'd be nothing short of amazing and they would certainly end up dominating the graphic software industry. As a matter of fact, that's exactly what Serif Labs, Adobe, Corel etc. are doing by offering their suites of programs that work both with raster and vector graphics and offer as much cross compatibility with each other as possible.

Please, before getting mad or frustrated at the lack of this functionality in Affinity Designer, search online for "Raster vs Vector".

Edited May 28, 2021 by Snap
fixup wording

[lepr]

7 hours ago, Snap said:

Affinity Designer (and Adobe Illustrator) is a vector based graphic editor/creator.

Affinity Photo (and Adobe Photoshop) is a raster based graphic editor/creator.

 

7 hours ago, Snap said:

If a graphic editing/creating software company figures out how to make a graphic editor that can seamlessly work with both vector and raster based graphics, that'd be nothing short of amazing and they would certainly end up dominating the graphic software industry.

 

AD, AP and APub are alternative versions of a single app. Different features and tools are revealed or hidden in each version. Industry domination isn't on the horizon, though.

 

[Snap]

On 5/28/2021 at 3:26 AM, anon2 said:

 

 

AD, AP and APub are alternative versions of a single app. Different features and tools are revealed or hidden in each version. Industry domination isn't on the horizon, though.

 

AD, AP, and APub are different apps that handle and process graphics in entirely different ways. The only thing they have in common is that they are all are designed to edit and/or create graphics in some way, but that's about where their common ground ends.

AD is designed to create and edit vector based graphics. Great for when scalability is needed. The images can be resized/scaled and warped with no quality loss. Often used for graphic design such as logos, icons, and text and for print.

AP is designed to create and edit raster based graphics. Great for editing photos and pre-existing images and/or creating more "organic" and less "artificial" looking graphics. For instance, removing an object from a photo or creating a digital graphic that had the look/texture of an oil or charcoal painting would be a good fit for AP.

In all honesty, I'm the least familiar with APub, but it appears to be designed for page layout. That is orienting graphics and/or text on a page.

Serif labs didn't create AD and purposefully omit features in it only to create AP or APub and then add those features to it and vice versa. Each one has and supports the features they do because of their intended purpose.

[Snap]

On 7/17/2019 at 8:46 AM, matiaspinto said:

This is stupid, clone stamp tool its part of a BASIC set of tools. Now, i need to download PS and open TWO apps to do something basic even 10 years ago.
Really Sad Serif team.

I'm curious as to what software you were using 10 years ago? As Meb said, it's a basic tool for a photo editor, such as AP and Adobe Photoshop.

[loukash]

4 hours ago, Snap said:

AD, AP, and APub are different apps that handle and process graphics in entirely different ways. The only thing they have in common is that they are all are designed to edit and/or create graphics in some way, but that's about where their common ground ends.

Um… no.

On 5/28/2021 at 12:26 PM, anon2 said:

AD, AP and APub are alternative versions of a single app. Different features and tools are revealed or hidden in each version.

It's quite a simplified statement, but essentially that's at the root of the Affinity concept.
The proof:
affinity.serif.com/publisher/studiolink

[Snap]

 

14 hours ago, loukash said:

It's quite a simplified statement, but essentially that's at the root of the Affinity concept.
The proof:
affinity.serif.com/publisher/studiolink

To quote the information from the provided link:

"Nearly ten years ago we had a vision—to create an all-new suite of professional creative applications that worked seamlessly together."

That line honestly sums it up perfectly. Please note the choice of words here. A "suite" of "applications" that work "seamlessly together".

So a suite, in the context of a software or an application suite, is a collection of interrelated programs/applications with related functionality.

Then they explicitly mention applications, as in multiple applications, that work seamlessly together. Each application with a specific purpose that when combined with other applications help solve a common goal. As in AP and AD being separate applications intended for different purposes, ideally to fulfill the needs that the other one doesn't.

Then they go on to further state:

"To fully experience StudioLink, you also need to own our other apps in order to unlock their toolsets in Publisher..."

That is the root of the Affinity concept according to their very own statements. They're not trying to make a single application that can do everything, they're making a suite of applications that work very very well together to solve graphics related tasks.

So, to go back to the original reason for this thread and why it's not feasible:

To put a clone brush (stamp) tool in AD.

AD works with vectors. A clone stamp tool takes the pixels of one part of an image and copies them to another part of an image. That is a function specific to a raster based graphic editor such as AP. AD is vector based and doesn't even have the concept of what a pixel is until you render, i.e. export, it as a raster based image such as a PNG or JPG. And even then, the actual working AD file is still vector based and the exported image is an entirely separate entity by now.

If we create a circle as vector, and we want to clone a part of it, then that circle will have to be rasterized so then it can have pixels that can be copied/cloned. Which is certainly an option, but the layer the pixels get cloned to will not be vector based and at that point we're stuck working with a raster image, i.e. we're no longer using AD at this point.

And conversely, say we want to clone some pixels to our circle vector...well, there's just no easy intuitive way to implement that. We could create and merge paths with our vector circle to add the section we were hoping to clone the pixels to and then attempt to fill that newly added section with the pixels we want to clone. Except if the pixels we want to clone aren't a repeating pattern and/or the resolution of them varies significantly from the section we're cloning to which is very likely, then the fill is going to look extremely distorted.

So, inline with Serif Labs' stated vision, they offer a suite of applications which include a vector based editor, AD, and a raster based editor, AP. A clone stamp tool is a function of a raster based editor because a raster based editor works with bitmaps and the very nature of a clone stamp tool is to copy pixels from one section of an image to another. A vector based editor does not use bitmaps, therefore they cannot have a tool designed to work specifically with bitmaps (pixels).

[loukash]

6 hours ago, Snap said:

To quote the information from the provided link

I didn't link there to analyze the semantics of Serif's marketing blurbs.
The actual point was:

You can run all three apps within Publisher without actually launching the other two. That's what the StudioLink is about: Publisher persona, Designer persona, Photo persona. All that Publisher needs to know is that you have installed the other two apps and launched them once, then it will allow you to execute the same code that the other two apps provide in their respective main personae.

I don't know the exact technical solution for this feature, but given that it also works within the highly restrictive MacOS sandbox regime, I'd expect that all code is already present in the Publisher's app libraries. If you compare the content of the Affinity […].app/Contents/Frameworks directories, most *.dylib libraries appear to be essentially the same in all three apps.

6 hours ago, Snap said:

So, to go back to the original reason for this thread and why it's not feasible:
To put a clone brush (stamp) tool in AD.

And I've already agreed (per "like" button) with you on that:
ADe doesn't need a clone brush tool.

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, loukash said:

You can run all three apps within Publisher without actually launching the other two.

No, you are not running the apps within Publisher, and I have never seen where they have said that. They are always quite specific that StudioLink allows you to run the primary Personas from Designer and Photo within Publisher, not the complete Designer and Photo applications. That is an important distinction.

And for the record, Publisher is not running "the same code", as you can have (in the betas) a lower build of Publisher installed alongside a higher build of Photo or Designer. StudioLink will work as long as the basic release level is the same, even though the exact build levels are different, but Publisher will not have the enhancements that are available in the Photo and Designer applications. That indicates that Publisher has its own copy of the code.

[loukash]

40 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

That is an important distinction.

I was massively simplifying the concept. But fair enough, you have worded it better than I did.