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Affinity Designer Customer Beta (1.6 - Beta 6)


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Hi @MattP I have a bit of a mystery blend mode issue.  I can't figure out why objects are blending, apparently in multiply mode, when there doesn't seem to be any reason why - please see attachment.  It affected a big document of my but I copied over the offending part and simplified to show the mystery effect.  Hopefully it's not a mystery and some switch that I don't know about.  Anyway I am using multiply mode now - and problem solved - but have a look at.  

mystery blend modes.afdesign

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2 hours ago, ronnyb said:

 

 

Maybe be a "solution" is to 1. upscale the selected shapes to an optimal size for the algorithm, 2. apply the expand stroke command with the proper tolerance settings (which seem to have improved drastically in the new beta) and 3. then scale down to original size? All this would happen behind the scenes of course. Admittedly this appears more like a temporary hack, but if it yields results without breaking things elsewhere...

This is what is happening - MBd’s assumption was incorrect. You must scale up a small thing so that the tolerances apply to it and mean something sensible, do the expansion in this form, then scale down.

 

any incorrect results are down to me not scaling correctly which is why I’m interested in what size people are creating these bad results from...

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1 hour ago, MattP said:

This is what is happening - MBd’s assumption was incorrect. You must scale up a small thing so that the tolerances apply to it and mean something sensible, do the expansion in this form, then scale down.

 

any incorrect results are down to me not scaling correctly which is why I’m interested in what size people are creating these bad results from...

 

Cool, I'm not even a coder... B|

2021 16” Macbook Pro w/ M1 Max 10c cpu /24c gpu, 32 GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Ventura 13.6

2018 11" iPad Pro w/ A12X cpu/gpu, 256 GB, iPadOS 17

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2 hours ago, MattP said:

MBd’s assumption was incorrect. You must scale up a small thing so that the tolerances apply to it and mean something sensible, do the expansion in this form, then scale down.

 

any incorrect results are down to me not scaling correctly

well, scale up as much as possible to minimize the tolerance, otherwise in which way was I mistaken :$

 

afterall this whole affinity is supposed to be written from scratch in the best way possible (better than draw whatever)

 

 

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That was pretty interesting to read … :)

 

(I am wondering though how that expanding is actually effected. Is it some sort of tracing process? Or how is the shape of the stroke calculated in the first instance? For example, when you attach a 100pt wide stroke with rounded caps to a simple linear path and expand the stroke afterwards, I cannot really make sense of the distribution of the nodes. Or I should rather say, it is obviously different from how you would draw such a path if it was meant to be a rounded rectangle. Even with the corner tool, you get lovely symmetric curves in such an instance. Well, I am basically just curious.)

 

Examples.png.805ddbf5e127207eca37470d262224db.png

 

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Nice. I see the boolean problem has been fixed. Nice work. I do, however, have two issues to report.

 

1. There is still a problem with masking. If you have a pixel selection on a layer, and you click the mask icon, then other layers will disappear.

 

2. If you have nested layers, then clicking on an object will expand all parent layers under it. It takes you to the layer position without clicking on that option.

 

Edit:

Oh and this is also going on. 

 

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

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Also can we have the Gradient panel detachable? It's extremely annoying to always have to mess about in the top left corner of the screen in a tiny area instead of where it's comfortable, like right next to the object you're working on for example. Also for complex gradients it should be able to scale that window/panel up ridiculously large. Especially when you have to simulate physical materials in a texture that have hard stops.

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4 hours ago, Frank Jonen said:

Also can we have the Gradient panel detachable? It's extremely annoying to always have to mess about in the top left corner of the screen in a tiny area instead of where it's comfortable, like right next to the object you're working on for example. Also for complex gradients it should be able to scale that window/panel up ridiculously large. Especially when you have to simulate physical materials in a texture that have hard stops.

 

Yeah this has been mentioned before; gradient fly-out needs its own studio panel, specially given how much Serif pimps' how awesome gradients are in Affinity... it's a productivity slowdown to have to continually click on the fly out...

2021 16” Macbook Pro w/ M1 Max 10c cpu /24c gpu, 32 GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Ventura 13.6

2018 11" iPad Pro w/ A12X cpu/gpu, 256 GB, iPadOS 17

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14 hours ago, Frank Jonen said:

Also can we have the Gradient panel detachable? It's extremely annoying to always have to mess about in the top left corner of the screen in a tiny area instead of where it's comfortable, like right next to the object you're working on for example. Also for complex gradients it should be able to scale that window/panel up ridiculously large. Especially when you have to simulate physical materials in a texture that have hard stops.

 

Speaking about Gradients in the creative workflow, as Matt said, the direct editing mode is vastly superior and I do agree. 

In the past I shared your same thoughts, but after a couple of months I changed my mind and embraced their solution. Now I'm really accustomed to this.

"Indirect" gradient editing is useful for styles creation for storage purposes (as you've just said), so maybe a bigger dedicated editing panel (like the colour chooser, which is non-modal) with a shortcut to "Add as New Style" or "Add To Swatches" could do the job and improve things.

 

colourChooser.jpg

 

One big improvement to the direct editing could be the possibility to open the colour panel just using the colour node as shortcut.

 

gardientToolSuggestion.jpg

 

What I'd love to see detached from the top bar is the Alignment Studio... :P

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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1 hour ago, celliott80 said:

I'm noticing a bug with the corner tool when trying to add radius to multiple corners, it doesn't apply evenly or let me go beyond a certain radius. It feels unresponsive and stuck. I'm on MacOS Sierra 10.12.6. and I do have Metal on

corner-tool.mov

There's a separate entry about this issue in the 'Photo Beta on Mac' folder. Also, have a look at a entry higher up in this conversation, which includes a link.

 

;)

Affinity Photo - Affinity Designer - Affinity Publisher | macOS Sonoma (14.2) on 16GB MBP14 2021 with 2.4 versions

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15 hours ago, MattP said:

The pre-App Store version of Designer originally had a modeless gradient editor dialog but we removed it in response to feedback- the on-document gradient tool itself is a vastly superior way to edit gradients. If there are specific deficiencies with this method then we can address them?

 

Indeed there are. If you're doing stroke gradients it's absolutely maddening to constantly bring up that tiny widget at the top of the screen. After a while I just gave up, used an online gradient generator and brought it in with an SVG. The "creative" solution was for the birds, I can't actually see the gradient behind the blue overlay. Even when I make the stroke the wrong size just so I can see the colours during editing, the overlay distorts colour perception, so does changing the line width.

 

I found the on-document solution to be quite terrible for a lot of use cases. You can't type in percentages of stops, you can't just click through and have the next stop placed at the 50% point between the stop you just placed and the next. It's a frustration bath for so many things. Everything has to be made in tedious manual steps and with guesswork. The time that takes just isn't available for creative tasks anymore then. This caused me to look for other options, like the various online tools for gradient generation.

 

Also a thing that'd be useful with gradients in general but nobody bothers with is gamma lock or in HSL/HSV a saturation and luma / value lock. That way a gradient would always have the same saturation and lightness while blending across hues only. Right now it's a matter of checking and re-typing on each stop. We can edit all the values, why not put a little lock icon next to them? Linking would be useful as well. An easy way to bring up the values of an HSV gradient all at once, or decrease the saturation. This would save an additional adjustment layer. Adjustment layers can become quite expensive when part of a symbol group. This would be a simpler way.

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On 8/11/2017 at 8:54 PM, Scungio said:

Hey Matt, 

Thanks for the improvement to the Expand Stroke. This is just a simple test but so far I am liking what I see...

 

 

ExpandStroke.png

 

That is just a simple line drawn with the pen tool and a pressure curve applied. If I had to guess it would seem like the Expand Stroke command in 1.5.5 created almost 200 points whereas in 1.6 Beta 6 it may have created 20 points? It would be nice to have an Info panel of how many points an object has when you select it, manually counting it isn't fun!

Great! :-) 

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I made a drawing in the previous beta and exported it as a PNG image. I have three copies of the Affinity file, and now when I open them in this beta, there seems to be a strange edit on my logo which I never made. There is strange handling on the left side of the skateboard that wasn't there before.

Screen Shot 2017-08-14 at 10.07.03 AM.png

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

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27 minutes ago, Bri-Toon said:

I made a drawing in the previous beta and exported it as a PNG image. I have three copies of the Affinity file, and now when I open them in this beta, there seems to be a strange edit on my logo which I never made. There is strange handling on the left side of the skateboard that wasn't there before.

Screen Shot 2017-08-14 at 10.07.03 AM.png

Sorry about this - it's because of the mistake I made with Corners - It'll fix itself in the next beta (which I'll try to put live soon to fix this...)

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57 minutes ago, MattP said:

Sorry about this - it's because of the mistake I made with Corners - It'll fix itself in the next beta (which I'll try to put live soon to fix this...)

 

You're the man, Matt.

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

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