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Affinity Photo for ipad - feedback


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I guess such problems will be somewhat mitigated with the advent of iOS 11, which appears to have some sort of “Finder” application, or at least, a place where all files brought to an iDevice are stored, regardless of which app they belong to.

I think you are referring to the "Files" app. From Apple's iOS 11 Preview page:

 

The new Files app brings all your files together. You can easily browse, search, and organize all your files in one place. And there’s a dedicated place for your recent files. Not just the ones on your iPad, but also those in apps, on your other iOS devices, in iCloud Drive, and across other services like Box and Dropbox.

 

Depending on what it means, the "recent files" qualifier might be an issue but I guess we will just have to wait & see.

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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Hi,

New IPad user here,

 

Congratulations for making such a great app available for the iPad !

 

I prefer being able to rotate the canvas with gestures by default or having this option in the prefs.

 

This is a quite complex-expensive program for iPad standards and the lack of a manual is annoying. Video tutorials are few and it is very time consuming to search for a specific feature - workflow, plus it is not so easy to take the first steps trying to 'translate' techniques over the desktop version.

 

I am trying to rename a layer - where in the forums should I post similar questions and where should I search for answers ?

 

Kind regards

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With regards to the file management side of things, I totally agree we have work to do here - it's not as smooth as it should be - we'll obviously try our best to get this sorted out quickly.

I think what users want most is to be able to seamlessly go back & forth between working on a Photos document on an iPad & on their desktop Photos (or Designer) app without having to save anything (much like how the desktop apps let you go back & forth between AD & AP via the File menu) and to be able to transfer files between iPads & desktop computers locally, without having to rely on any cloud-based services or internet connectivity.

 

Neither of these things seems easy to implement, mostly because of limitations inherent in iOS & the still evolving "Continuity" concept Apple has not quite yet figured out how to make as seamless as users would like.

 

I think AirDrop might be a partial solution for the local transfer problem, but that would not work for Windows, would it?

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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new?

 

it was already working a year ago at serif

Working on a prototype at Serif & working in the wild with a release version are two very different things.

 

Also, at least prior to Sierra both Handoff & AirDrop can often be flaky between iOS devices & Macs -- there are many reports on Apple's related forums of problems with the two devices failing to connect or taking several minutes to do so. Besides, I doubt either one would work with Windows desktops, making feature parity a problem.

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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Hi,

New IPad user here,

 

Congratulations for making such a great app available for the iPad !

 

I prefer being able to rotate the canvas with gestures by default or having this option in the prefs.

 

This is a quite complex-expensive program for iPad standards and the lack of a manual is annoying. Video tutorials are few and it is very time consuming to search for a specific feature - workflow, plus it is not so easy to take the first steps trying to 'translate' techniques over the desktop version.

 

I am trying to rename a layer - where in the forums should I post similar questions and where should I search for answers ?

 

Kind regards

 

Hi Ippokratis,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

To rename a layer, tap/select it in the Layers Studio, then tap the ellipsis icon on the top of it (the three points inside a circle), click the layer's name at the top of the Layer options (immediately below the layer options header) and the keyboard will appear for you to rename the layer.

You can access the Help from the Affinity Photo home screen, clicking on the "?" icon on the top right of the interface.

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With regards to Hand Off... it works just fine, but it's alarmingly slow for large files because it actually currently only works via bluetooth. Apple originally said the feature worked via bluetooth and wifi but they never made the wifi part work because nobody ever transferred anything sizeable. They said they'll get this sorted and as soon as they do, we'll enable it. The experience at the moment is sometimes very painful over bluetooth... :/

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Wouldn't it make sense to have the adjustment buttons to the left where to toolbar currently resides to have easy access with your thumb? Or do you guys not hold your tablets with the left hand while painting with the right? That way you could choose w=tools with the pen and then only have your left thumb for the adjustments, like brush size etc. Photoshop fix is set up in this manner and it works really well. Sadly photoshop fix has nothing on a fully fledged affinity on the go. :)

 

Also, directly importing raw files from the photos app and then saving them to camera roll when you're done isn't working, why?

In the current state of the app it's not possible to have an offline workflow which makes this app completely useless when traveling.

Thoughts on this?

 

Edit: apparently saving to camera roll does work, sorry about that.

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Hi Daphen,

We are aware of those workflows issues. We will do our best to improve/solve them in upcoming updates. iOS 11 will also introduce changes here so we have to check how all this will work. Bear with us while we work on them.

Alright. I mean, just a quick fix for importing raw files from you photo library is at least a bare minimum.

Importing several files at once is a really nice to have and seems like an absolute basic functionality but at least it's not making the app useless, I literally can't use it without being able to import and export files locally. I.e importing raw files and exporting jpegs locally, since I don't have a strong enough internet connection when on the go.

I'm sure I can't be the only one.

 

I just started a two week vacation and I'm really hoping this is a quick fix because that would make my trip a whole lot nicer.

Lightroom mobile can only do so much but it's my only option right now.

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@RHiNO, Aligning the context bar on a side means sliding up & down instead of left & right to make changes. Since the screen is wider than it is tall, that means a controller's full range has to be mapped to a shorter on screen distance, making it more difficult to set precise values.

Not exactly game breaking, so much apps use this "up and down" behaviour. Besides, One smart way to do it is the "non linear way", meaning, you do not use the full widht or height to represent the full range, instead, you can use the velocity of the swipe to increase the steps and/or the distance from the initial click to define the step ;)

 

...Also, for real precision, you just click and input the value, affinity implemented this beautifully with a nice number keyboard popup

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Apple originally said the feature worked via bluetooth and wifi but they never made the wifi part work because nobody ever transferred anything sizeable.

But people have tried using Handoff to do that ever since it first became available (in OS X 10.10 Yosemite I think) & iOS 8. Not only is it painfully slow at transferring even relatively small amounts of data over a Bluetooth connection, just getting the two devices to connect to each other over Bluetooth for handoff to work can take a long time or fail to work at all, even when they are just a foot or two apart.

 

Apple does not even seem sure if Wi-Fi needs to be enabled for Handoff to work. On the Apple Handoff page for Yosemite, Wi-Fi is not mention at all. On the El Capitan page, it just says the devices must be on the same Wi-Fi network. The latest (June 6) Apple Continuity article I can find definitively (?) says Wi-Fi must be turned on on each device for Handoff to work. However, while on the slightly older Sierra page, it also says they both must have Wi-Fi turned on, when I just tried turning off Wi-Fi on my Mac running Sierra, Handoff still worked with my iPhone 5 -- in fact, on the Mac, the Handoff Dock icon for Safari appeared much more quickly than when Wi-Fi was enabled!  :wacko:

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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You can access the Help from the Affinity Photo home screen, clicking on the "?" icon on the top right of the interface.

The help is really vast with animations and all that stuff. Out of curiosity, How much megabytes are occupied by the embedded manual and how much megabytes are occupied by the app itself? I am guessing the manual is very large :) If that is the case, why not make the manual a separate app? It will become easier for new users to check the manual and go back to the program too. Every time we enter the manual we are back to the "introduction" - a separate app will stay there, opened at a specific topic. Also, the updates of the app itself can become lighter? 
 
...and the user can update the manual later to be in sync with the app version, of course ;)
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@RHiNO, perhaps it is just me but I think nonlinear, velocity sensitive sliders for context bar functions would be a bad idea, hard to control in practice, & an unnecessary complication. The UI seems well thought out, with enough screen space devoted to control functions to make them fluid & easy to use without obscuring too much of the canvas, even on the smaller screen iPads.

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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Mate let me assure you:

Handoff works great

Maybe for you it does, but for me & quite a few other people I know, it does not. It may have something to do with USB 3 interference with Bluetooth radio connections, with too many BT enabled devices in range of each other, or possibly the particular combination of devices it is being tried with, but for whatever reasons Handoff can be unreliable to the point of unusable, even with Apple's own apps.

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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Exporting after a Raw editing don't work on iPad Pro 9.7. Hi! I upload a photo from ICloud, then I process it and export it. The program does not crash, it just tries to process the photo, after 5 minutes I just exit the program. When I was working on jpeg, not Raw from ICloud, or Photos, everything is fine

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@RHiNO,

 

You can limit the scope of any adjustment by putting it inside the container - i.e. you asked how to limit it to the group you wanted to affect? The answer is just to drag that adjustment inside the group :)

Cool, I just used the threshold + group layer to (somehow) simulate "1bit layers" while we don't have a proper 1bit layer effect in the adjustments studio  ;)
 
Check it out my 1bit simulator setup at the screenshots (One with the threshold on and another one with the threshold off). I drew the face with a normal brush, not a pixel brush, and I can use the regular eraser to erase with "pixel crispness" without antialiasing artifacts if I enable the threshold  :)
 
The "group" is set to multiply (so the white bg become transparent), everything else is set to normal. The white bg is a layer filled with the color white (necessary for the threshold to work)
 
BTW, you can gives us an option to show the name of the blending mode selected of each layer using that nice tiny font used to write "pixel", "group" etc, it can be very useful to track more easily the blending modes we are using if we see something like "Pixel - Normal", "Pixel - Darken", "Group - Multiply" etc
 
I hope you guys implement a 1bit layer like we have in clipstudio. if we have an option to change the color from black to any other color - like a threshold+color overlay with just one step - it will be awesome too. In clipstudio this is under layer property - expression color - monochrome, and we can change the color of the layer in the "layer color" option above it. Good to make black crisp outlines become brown crisp outlines easily, for example
 
Now this is something apparently I cannot achieve here: Using the setup from the screenshot, how do I change the pure black, pixel crisp outlines generated by the threshold to another color, like brown? If I apply a gradient map to the outlines group, it will affect the blue clouds because of the "white bg" layer... If we disable the "white bg" layer, the gradient map works, but we lost the crispness from the threshold... Trying to solve this without using masks or flattening the layers of course. Interesting puzzle
 
PS: you can see in the screenshot the threshold value looks like is set to 100% but it is not! Notice the tiny bit gap at the context bar (if we put *real* 100% at threshold we will have a all black image). Looks like we can set fractional values with the finger (like 99.99%) but not with the number panel, we don't have a decimal point in the number panel for threshold - and the value showed at the context bar is simply rounded to the nearest integer. Am I guessing right?

post-61014-0-09128900-1496873974_thumb.png

post-61014-0-42490800-1496873981_thumb.png

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@RHiNO, perhaps it is just me but I think nonlinear, velocity sensitive sliders for context bar functions would be a bad idea, hard to control in practice, & an unnecessary complication. The UI seems well thought out, with enough screen space devoted to control functions to make them fluid & easy to use without obscuring too much of the canvas, even on the smaller screen iPads.

But the Affinity Photo sliders *already are* nonlinear and sensitive to velocity, move away very slowly and move away with a quick swipe to see it for yourself :)
 
...the UI is uber cool, I agree, but have room to small quality of life touches regarding drawing and painting, I believe the app will evolve to be even more awesome :)
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Maybe for you it does, but for me & quite a few other people I know, it does not. It may have something to do with USB 3 interference with Bluetooth radio connections, with too many BT enabled devices in range of each other, or possibly the particular combination of devices it is being tried with, but for whatever reasons Handoff can be unreliable to the point of unusable, even with Apple's own apps.

Yeah, just want to chime in, handoff has never worked for me at all, I've tried with several different devices and computers and it's just always super unreliable.

Sometimes the apps I'm using show up on the computers dock but when I click them they just disappear. The clipboard sync never works at all either.

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Yeah, just want to chime in, handoff has never worked for me at all, I've tried with several different devices and computers and it's just always super unreliable.

Sometimes the apps I'm using show up on the computers dock but when I click them they just disappear. The clipboard sync never works at all either.

Just curious, but what Mac model do you have & what OS version is installed on it? Have you tried turning off Wi-Fi to see if that makes any difference? Considering all the Apple articles that say it must be turned on (for what reason remains unclear if the transfers never go over Wi-Fi) I was very surprised that my iMac continued to show the Safari Handoff icon in the Dock after I turned Wi-Fi off on it.

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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Wouldn't it make sense to have the adjustment buttons to the left where to toolbar currently resides to have easy access with your thumb? 

Or do you guys not hold your tablets with the left hand while painting with the right?

 

I'm pretty sure this scenario has been considered and I somehow suspect that an option will be enabled at certain point...  ;)

Personally, using the iPad together with the smart keyboard I feel pretty comfortable with the current layout.

Also I tend to "hold only" with my left hand, just because the iPad Pro is too large to allow a safe and agile thumb movement.

It was different with the iPad Air.

 

So far this is the most feature-rich and complex application ever released on iOS for photo retouching.

Nobody (event the biggest names out there) attempted to do something like this, I think we could forgive something and wait patiently for a proper polishing.

With the support of Apple (extending to WiFi the handoff protocol) I think that the workflow could turn into something very smart.

The white dog, making tools for artists, illustrators and doodlers

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Just curious, but what Mac model do you have & what OS version is installed on it? Have you tried turning off Wi-Fi to see if that makes any difference? Considering all the Apple articles that say it must be turned on (for what reason remains unclear if the transfers never go over Wi-Fi) I was very surprised that my iMac continued to show the Safari Handoff icon in the Dock after I turned Wi-Fi off on it.

MacBook Pro 2015, always on wifi and always on the latest firmware on both phone and laptop.

It's just working awfully so I never rely on it. AirDrop however, has seen HUGE improvements since it first released and I use that all the time now, for everything, it never fails me.

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I'm pretty sure this scenario has been considered and I somehow suspect that an option will be enabled at certain point... ;)

Personally, using the iPad together with the smart keyboard I feel pretty comfortable with the current layout.

Also I tend to "hold only" with my left hand, just because the iPad Pro is too large to allow a safe and agile thumb movement.

It was different with the iPad Air.

 

So far this is the most feature-rich and complex application ever released on iOS for photo retouching.

Nobody (event the biggest names out there) attempted to do something like this, I think we could forgive something and wait patiently for a proper polishing.

With the support of Apple (extending to WiFi the handoff protocol) I think that the workflow could turn into something very smart.

Yeah, I use it with only my left hand too, that was the point?
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