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I just bought Affinity Designer yesterday.
First of all, great job! I've been working in vector art for over a decade and I'm impressed with your innovation. 
 
The good:
  1. Your pen tools are far superior to anything else I have used thus far.
  2. Awesome set of shape tools - the most comprehensive so far. The visual controls to alter them save me a lot of time ie. rounded corners on the fly.
  3. Nice touch with the transparency tool - this was so frustrating in Adobe Illustrator.
  4. The customizable UI is sleek and intuitive
The bad:
  1. Where is the line smoothing? Every vector illustration software I've ever used had this feature. It is standard workflow to 1)rough in your illustration, 2)smooth, then 3)hand edit the node handles. I found something promising in the node area called 'convert to smooth', but it actually added more nodes. This is the exact opposite of what smoothing should do! 
  2. Where is the raster to vector trace equivalent? I looked everywhere and I can't figure this out. This is such a common function for artists working between mediums - you're basically excluding them right from he start. For reference check out Adobe Illustrator's powerful image trace palette.
  3. Restrain proportions/dimensions when resizing elements is not consistent. Placed images and text will stay proportional by holding down ALT. Everything else stays proportional while holding down shift. Why the inconsistency? 
  4. I can't seem to figure out how to lock objects without having to go to the layer palette and doing it manually.

Thanks for the hard work! I've been in software development for 12 years. I know the sacrifices made and wish you the best of luck. 

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  1. Where is the raster to vector trace equivalent? I looked everywhere and I can't figure this out. This is such a common function for artists working between mediums - you're basically excluding them right from he start. For reference check out Adobe Illustrator's powerful image trace palette.
  2. I can't seem to figure out how to lock objects without having to go to the layer palette and doing it manually.

 

impossiblecolor,

 

A raster to vector feature is often requested. If you search the forums you can find many post about it. I thought that the developers have said before that they are working on adding it but it won't be anytime in the near future (but I'm not sure if this is correct or not). As a side note. Illustrator didn't have the ability to convert raster art to vectors for 25 years. It is only since Illustrator CS 2 (version 12) that it got the ability to do this. Affinity Designer is powerful but it still is young in terms of its development and something as complex as a vectorizer will no doubt take some time. In the meantime there are some decent alternatives that you can use (some of them are even free). 

 

You can lock objects by selecting the object/objects that you want to select and then simply hitting command + L (for Mac I'm not sure for Windows but if you look in the menu you'll see the shortcut for it). This will save you trips to the Layers panel. The only problem with this is, you can't unlock them without having to go to the Layers panel (right now). 

 

Hokusai

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Restrain proportions/dimensions when resizing elements is not consistent. Placed images and text will stay proportional by holding down ALT. 

 

There's an option for this in the Tools section of the Preferences dialog. If you don't like the automatic behaviour for 'Move Tool Aspect Constrain', you can change it to either 'Constrain by default' or 'Do not constrain by default'.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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You can lock objects by selecting the object/objects that you want to select and then simply hitting command + L (for Mac I'm not sure for Windows but if you look in the menu you'll see the shortcut for it). This will save you trips to the Layers panel. The only problem with this is, you can't unlock them without having to go to the Layers panel (right now). 

 

 

Thanks Hokusai, that's good to know! I just bought the program. I'm fine hanging on to my CS6 Master suite for the meantime. Ctrl+L is great, I just think a right click option or unlock hotkey would be a quick fix for that end.  

 

Thanks Alfred! That solves my problem.

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impossiblecolor,

 

There is also an "unlock" menu command but it doesn't really do anything right now so I'm guessing that it will in some future release. You can use the "unlock" command now but only if you lock something and then don't deselect it or click on anything else. Other than that, it is not useful for anything (that I can tell) at the moment but I'm guessing that it is leading to somewhere otherwise why put such a command in the menu?

 

best of luck,

Hokusai

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I Really want the Image to Vector Ability which is available on both Illustrator and Inkscape But i cant find it here in Affinity , PLEASE add it SOON it's a major letdown in my eyes that this feature is not here...

But other wise this is a powerful tool in my artillery and really is an inexpensive compared to Illustrator dose the job for SVG images for Sprakol Scribe and well it just need the ability to turn images into vector ones ,

just black and white ones will do in my eyes

 

although Illustrator has a really good Version in its latest update that makes iven a normal hi res picture look pretty good in Vector (albeit that its not tip top and if you look closely you will see your final vector images is missing quality)  

 

SO PLEASE ADD this feature soon !!!! (copy the source code form InkScape if you have to LOL)

 

 

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It isn't that Adobe just put in a raster to vector line tracing to CS2, they had it all along, they just wanted you to make a separate purchase to get it. Anybody remember Adobe Streamline? I had that app installed way back when. Development stopped at version 4 and then it remained fallow until they debuted Live Trace in Illustrator CS2. 

 

I don't know for certain, but I always got the impression over the years that Adobe would take discontinued products like Streamline and tinker with them, repurpose them and add them to Illustrator. Another app that I think was folded into Illustrator was Adobe Dimensions. This was a standalone app that allowed you to extrude, revolve (lathe) just like the 3D effects/modeling that you can currently do in Adobe Illustrator CC. Adobe Dimensions stalled at version 3.0.

 

So, users may say, hey Serif, hurry up and add this feature to Designer but look at the advantage that Adobe had. They had years and years of development in both Streamline and Dimensions as separate apps and then were able to fold them into Illustrator. It is understandable to me that Serif is going to need quite a bit of time to add those features. Rome was not built in one day.

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SO PLEASE ADD this feature soon !!!! (copy the source code from InkScape if you have to LOL)

 

If you're willing to put up with all the extra nodes that you usually get from the feature in Inkscape, why not do your tracing there, save the result and open it in Affinity Designer? Since Inkscape uses SVG as its native file format, the transfer is pretty painless.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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