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APwin 1.5.1: Complete feedback / Wishes


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Hi there,

 

Here is a rather complete, but not exhaustive, wishlist regarding Affinity Photo on windows from our team.

 

We sure will continue to follow forum discussions and test new versions to see if it fits our production workflow

 

Affinity Photo Wishlist

We are a team working in CG industry, working with usual psd/psb files around 1Go and more, with around 200layers, adjustments layers and such, on document around 5000px wide and more. As a team, we have different people running software differently according to preferences. Here is feedback from internal tests to replace Photoshop CS6 with AP. All Windows users (win7 pro SP1 x64) and great nVidia cards. Don't see it like a one person rant, but a team feedback regarding a production tool in a professional environment. This list isn’t exhaustive… Oh, and there’s lot of positive feedback also, some tools being even better than Ps, congrats for such very new product! If development continue it can become a big player in this field!


 

____Blocking (Wishes that actually prevent us from buying team licenses and use it in production)

 

__Keep text layers as text when exporting/saving a psd/psb file. Definitely must have !

 

__Multi layers selections:
Ctrl+Click on a layer get the selection
Ctrl+Shift+Click on another layer add this layer selection to actual selection
Ctrl+Alt+Click on another layer substract this layer selection from actual selection
Ctrl+Shift+alt+Click on another layer keep layer intersecting selection with actual selection

 

__Dezoom shortcut inconsistency in floating window mode. We need to Alt+Space+Click several times to dezoom once, when it works at all. + zoom icon flashing instead of -. This alone doesn't make confident...
__Selecting layer inconsistency in floating window mode. Sometimes works, more than often not.
For two above, it seems that if you open it, leave it tabbed and work a bit in the document, when you detach it it works better. But if you open the doc, immediately detach (untab) it, it is unusable.

 

__When using the Move Tool, each time we click on a layer in the document window, it select the layer under the cursor. This is generally quite disturbing, and an option 'auto select' would really be helpful. This option could appear under toolbar with move tool options. If option off (or always), select layer with Ctrl+Click when using the move tool. Also when clicking on a layer (in document), with lot of semi transparent layers, it rarely select the layer we want. Having contextual menu with all layers altering the pixel we clicked would really be helpful, or in move tool options, when the name of the layer appear, a drop-down list of all layers being underneath selected layer (or both !). This is such an important behaviour, you need to the user decide how to use it. It also can cause performance slowdown when selecting lot of layers, as Photo will need to get and draw all rectangles selection even if not needed at all.

 

__Remember settings: why does I always have to check, for example, 'Show Rotation Center' and 'Hide Selection While Dragging?? All such settings should remains, actually very time consuming.

 

__Scaling layer/group should be done accordingly to rotation center also.

 

__Move a group of layers into another group: This should open the group you have move it into !! It let you without any feedback that which layer/group is selected, which should never happen.

 

__Preference setting, so when opening files, they open as floating instead of tab. Even when only one document is opened as floating, when opening new files they are tabbed, very disturbing and slow down workflow! Ps: Prefs/Interface/Open Documents as Tabs.

 

__Regarding Levels, Saturation, Curves and such, we can't cancel it. An adjustment layer is always created, and we have to manually delete it later or Ctrl+Z. Would also be nice to not create adjustment layer, being able to rasterize it automatically (option like in assistant, but all assistant settings should go into preference and remains).

More options, global settings lock between sessions, more personal customization, less clicks. Think productive...


 

____Really annoying things

 

__Have a preference settings for cycle tools shortcut. Really bothering to never really know actual tool, has shortcut cycle between tools. We should not have to look at tool panel to be sure a shortcut gave the wanted tool.

 

__When a document open, it should never be bigger than 100%. If we can see it all at 100%, show it 100%, if not, 75%, 50%, 25%, 12.5% etc.)

 

__Duplicating a selection part on same layer. Select a layer, get lasso selection tool and draw a selection, we should be able to Alt+Drag to duplicate this selected part of the layer on the same layer. Actually we have to copy/paste, move, collapse. Slow and cumbersome.

 

__Ability to add colour pickers into tools panel 1 column.

 

__Remember windows position. For example, apply a sharpen filter: move the unsharp mask window to a better place, apply it. Re open unsharp mask, it doesn't open where I placed it ! Very annoying ... Same for lot of such floating tools.

 

__Drag and drop layer between opened documents. We use this a real lot, Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V is slower.

 

__When right click on mouse with Brush and such tools, open the Brushes and Pencil Advanced Toolbox as contextual menu (yes, Alt+RMB+LMB works great!).

 

__Do a selection (or get it from layers), and crop image according to this selection. Document / Crop Selected regarding the active selection. Or, when there is an active selection, open Crop Tool adjusted to this selection so we can do C / Enter !

 

__Multiple layers in 360° projection mode (even only selected one when starting projection)!! Actually, a useless amazing feature :-( We would use it a lot, but only one layer make it totally useless. You have a key feature here, make useable!

 

__Fill tool (Edit/Fill):
- Add Lock Alpha option. So fill respect the alpha of the layer instead of filling entire document. This checkbox should remember between documents/sessions.
- Get a layer, start fill tool, click the color, then the colour picker: when picking a color on the document, the fill aera doesn't update accordingly. Should update in real time according to pixel color under the picker.
- We shouldn't even have to click the color then drag the color picker: pressing i shortcut, we should be able to directly pick a color anywhere for the fill color !
- No way when 'filling' with the color picker to set the color picker settings (1x1, average 5x5, etc). Contextual menu should give this option (such contextual menus are missing in lot of aeras globally, again, less click everywhere!)

 

__Assistant should save options between sessions. And such options being in Preferences would be better anyway.

 

__When resizing a document window, would rocks if the image itself could stay centered in the window when resizing. Actually I can resize the window, the document itself doesn't move and can easily end-up with a dark window showing nothing!

 

__When I see all my document, so the window is larger than the shown document itself, why does I still have scroll bars? I can scroll so I see only 50% of it in width/height. Really disturbing, if the window is larger than the doc I should have no scrollbar at all, like in any other software on the planet. Indeed, no scroll bar = you see it all.

 

__Background saving! Saving file only takes 15% cpu here, allow us to continue working.

 

__Clone brush Tool: Allow selecting source on one layer only, and cloning from this layer to another layer.

 

__Selecting layers in layer panel: Allow Ctrl+Click, then Ctrl+Shift+Click (convention in Windows world!)


 

____Improvements

 

__Make possible to set a layer color in layer panel. When working with tons of groups/layers, group and layer color display really help organizing stuff.

 

__Export as TGA file!

 

__When duplicating a text layer and changing text inside, would be nice if layer name could change according to the new text (get the first few words, or x first letters+...).

 

__Ability to get smaller icons in toolbar (use small toolbar icons in preferences?). They could be same size as Context Toolbar.

 

__menu File / Close All, Save All

 

__Change numerical field value according to cursor position in the number (a la TheFoundry Nuke):
Let's say you have a value 100:
- with cursor 100| the wheel will do 101/102/103
- with cursor 10|0 the wheel will do 110/120/130
- with cursor 1|00 the wheel will do 200/300/400

 

__Regarding fx layers, would be nice to detach them. Like ‘Release Mask’, a ‘Release fx’ would be nice.

 

__More printing options: Auto scaling according to print size/orientation, manual scaling/placing

 

__Tools Panel docking on the right of the screen.

 

__Could we have, in the window top bar or bottom one, some info on the open doc? color profile, bit-depth, size in pixel/cm? These infos are really important and should be always easily seen. What is displayed in Context Toolbar with pan tool would be nice.

 

__Save as with at least unlayered formats like jpg, png, tiff, tga. Something inconsistent, if I open a tif file I can do Ctrl+S, but can’t do Ctrl+Shift+S to save it as another tiff name...

 

__python API ! Writing scripts, plugins with Qt, interacting with sql database, integrate pipeline tools, etc.

 

 

Finally, there is lot of positive things to say, but I can’t not talk about price. It could seems odd to say it, but a lot here think a 40€ price point doesn’t deserve it. Such very low price doesn’t place it as a professional tool ready for production. One thing that comes to mind is: Not expensive enough my son !

intel i7-3930K - 32Go - SSDs | Dual screen | Running last customer beta

Win 7 Pro SP1 x64 | nVidia GTX 680 - v376.33 | intuos 3 - v6.3.15-3

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Such very low price doesn’t place it as a professional tool ready for production. One thing that comes to mind is: Not expensive enough my son !

 

Yet, somehow, your team is testing it to replace another software with a more "professional" price.

System specs: Win 8.1 Pro 64bit | AMD PhenomII X6 1055T @ 3.0Ghz | 16GB DDR3 @ 1600Mhz | WD10EZEX | GTX 960 4GB | Wacom CTL-672

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Yes, I talked about 'feeling', not reality. And indeed AP is the first product we ever considered to replace Ps, which is ever a success ;) Just wish it can go further to the mark.

intel i7-3930K - 32Go - SSDs | Dual screen | Running last customer beta

Win 7 Pro SP1 x64 | nVidia GTX 680 - v376.33 | intuos 3 - v6.3.15-3

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just realized something about AP requiring Aero:

When connecting office via VPN and RDP, I can't start AP. Please make it start, with a popup saying "degraded performance due to disabled aero", at least we could check some file or do simple stuff.

intel i7-3930K - 32Go - SSDs | Dual screen | Running last customer beta

Win 7 Pro SP1 x64 | nVidia GTX 680 - v376.33 | intuos 3 - v6.3.15-3

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  • 3 months later...
  • 2 months later...
On 1/19/2017 at 1:50 AM, KiboOst said:

__When I see all my document, so the window is larger than the shown document itself, why does I still have scroll bars? I can scroll so I see only 50% of it in width/height. Really disturbing, if the window is larger than the doc I should have no scrollbar at all, like in any other software on the planet. Indeed, no scroll bar = you see it all.

I agree with this. Coming from Photoshop this can be very frustrating. At the very least this should be a toggle in settings.

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18 hours ago, Turgo said:

I agree with this. Coming from Photoshop this can be very frustrating. At the very least this should be a toggle in settings.

The Mac OS provides a system-wide user preference to show scroll bars only when needed or to always show them. I prefer the latter -- the former does not work very well in Affinity & several other Mac apps because sometimes the scroll bar fails to appear when it should.

 

With the 'always' setting, Affinity always shows the scroll bar 'tracks' but does not show the scroll bars in them when the document is smaller than the view window. This leads to a strange behavior: clicking & dragging in the 'empty' track causes the document to snap between two positions near the edges of the window -- there are no in-between position available.

 

The bars begin to appear a little before the document fills the view window, when the zoom level is just slightly larger than the "Zoom to fit" view level, from what I can tell. At this point the length of the bars indicates that the scrollable workspace is about 2.5 times the size of the document view size, & in indeed that is the limit of the amount of document scrolling I can do using the scrollbars or View (hand) tool.

 

This limit is of course completely arbitrary -- using the Move tool, I can move a layer to anywhere in what is effectively an unbounded workspace, including to positions tens of thousands of times removed from the current document, canvas, or artboard location.

 

With all this in mind, I have to wonder if the OS-provided UI scroll bar feature is really applicable to Affinity or to other apps with similarly unbounded workspaces.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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