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Sneak peeks for 1.7


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On 6/10/2018 at 12:29 PM, FT_SG said:

If I may add to the above 2 items which are pretty fundamental...

1. To have a cataloging feature...so that editing photos taken can be much easier, to first cull the photos, rate, etc then move to develop, edit, export...

i am trying out the trial version and just tried to do it with my shooting session...it is a pain to manage....have to switch back and forth to move files to folders that will keep for develop, etc...not a natural workflow and a waste of storage and time consuming.

if Affinity photo can speed up the performance, reduces the file size and have a cataloging feature, it will be a winner, those very specific and more nitty gritty features are niche, and nice to have. think of the larger community...feature sets are pretty rich already, from layers, stacking, Color channels, markings, selection tools....but with slow speed, large files that take much undue time to backup edits and lack of cataloging features just make it few notches behind....without these few fundamentals will not be adopted as full fledge system like adobe and captureone etc....I believe affinity photo has the features and functions covers (90%) but seriously lack what I mentioned.

I think you're looking for a Lightroom alternative rather than a Photoshop alternative, which is more in line with what I've always seen Affinity market Photo as. But...there really isn't a great LR alternative. I'm sure tons would disagree but out of the (literal) 30+ photographers I know, they all use LR. I've seen elsewhere Affinity has talked about adding a sort of DAM functionality to Photo but I'm not where that stands, if it stands.

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On 6/16/2018 at 7:25 AM, JET_Affinity said:

The biggest problem I had at first exposure was yet another "trendy" blacked-out treatment adopted by far too many graphics programs (including Adobe's) a few years ago, which is about as dumb for serious graphics work as it is for the pirate dress-up "biker" segment of motorcycling. Thankfully, Serif provided a retrieve from that hopefully short-lived fad in response to user demand.



So I'm legitimately curious as to why you don't like a dark interface. And while I agree that the design software landscape could use some streamlining (always, always), I'm also curious as to what constitutes as eye candy. I mean don't get me wrong, I think there's always room for improvement, but when I was in school we actually had to design an alternative Photoshop concept. Dude—it's hard. There's just a lot to consider design-wise without even diving into the development side of things. So I guess I wax sympathetic to the devs when people criticize Adobe and Affinity because of that. Give it a shot sometime, it's fun but not for the faint-of-heart.

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3 hours ago, Minimumsix13 said:

I'm legitimately curious as to why you don't like a dark interface

I use the Light theme in Affinity designer: It is much easier to read for my 57-years old eyes. Dark-text--on-light-background seems to provide a better contrast than the reverse. 

As for aesthetic considerations, I can see the merits in both. Really depends on what kind of drawing you are making.

It is very nice that we can select these different themes, according to our preferences and eye qualities.

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So I guess I wax sympathetic to the devs when people criticize Adobe and Affinity...

If you re-read my post, you should see that I also am sympathetic the graphic design of the Affinity products. I don't see how anyone considers it worse than any of the other mainstream programs. But it's from the standpoint of functional inelegance that I consider Adobe Illustrator's interface worst-of-class.

As for dark backgrounds, etc.: Human vision is highly adaptive. It seeks out contrast and exaggerates it. (You can see this demonstrated in many popular optical illusions.) Besides the simple fact of eye strain caused by reading too-bright screens in dark surroundings, designers, artists, and photographers have been taught for many decades that surrounding your work-in-progress with darkness causes your artwork to look more vibrant than it really is. This is particularly problematic when designing for print on glowing devices. I can't tell you how many times I've seen photographers and illustrators who like to work with dark surroundings complain that the printed results of their work comes out disappointingly muted and lacking detail in the shadow areas.

Pre-computers, it was common practice for photographers and pre-press color houses to go to considerable expense to surround working and proofing areas with color-neutral midtone grey surroundings for the very same principle.

Quote

...when I was in school we actually had to design an alternative Photoshop concept...Give it a shot sometime...

In conjunction with being an illustrator, designer, and product photographer since before the "desktop publishing revolution", I also happen to be a workgroup database developer, which  involves interface design on a daily basis.

JET

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I always set a medium grey UI theme, in every package. Lighter than medium, if possible. I rarely leave any of my production tools with a dark theme. 46, but eyesight quite tired (I guess due to too much computer use).... I agree with the issue of having darkness around (neither good for the eyes, also) being a problem. Or a bright colored wall... greys are best. I even have  6500k bulbs. I started doing that and calibrating by hardware my monitor when started to do more print work at home (to send to companies to print, not to print at home).

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1 hour ago, SrPx said:

I always set a medium grey UI theme, in every package. Lighter than medium, if possible. I rarely leave any of my production tools with a dark theme. 46, but eyesight quite tired (I guess due to too much computer use).... I agree with the issue of having darkness around (neither good for the eyes, also) being a problem. Or a bright colored wall... greys are best. I even have  6500k bulbs. I started doing that and calibrating by hardware my monitor when started to do more print work at home (to send to companies to print, not to print at home).

Personally I find the implementation of UI light and black themes too disparate. The light theme cannot get the UI to go dark enough, the dark theme I cannot get the UI to go light enough. It would be nice if the UI could be somewhere in between. For me.

My eyes get more tired from the light theme (too bright) and the dark theme just seems to have way too much contrast between the UI and art, which makes the art brighter than real life. At least for print work.

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On 6/22/2018 at 5:30 PM, Minimumsix13 said:

I think you're looking for a Lightroom alternative rather than a Photoshop alternative, which is more in line with what I've always seen Affinity market Photo as. But...there really isn't a great LR alternative. I'm sure tons would disagree but out of the (literal) 30+ photographers I know, they all use LR. I've seen elsewhere Affinity has talked about adding a sort of DAM functionality to Photo but I'm not where that stands, if it stands.

Tons of really good alternatives, like the free Darktable, C1Pro etc. Both are better in a lot of ways. Stating there is no real substitute is not really true and a very personal observation.

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Given the...um...affinity toward a widely practical level of technical drawing represented in the upcoming enhancements discussed and demonstrated in this thread, I seriously hope some much needed basics will be also addressed:

I'd be hard pressed to think of anything more basic to drawing than drawing straight lines and using them for object edges or construction.

As has been discussed here and in other threads, there is no dedicated Line Tool as exists in other drawing programs. Instead, the Pen can be put in "Line Mode" which yields mostly the same behavior (mousedown, drag, mouseup). I'm generally fine with that, in that, arguably doing this in Affinity...:

  1. Select PenTool
  2. Click Line Mode button
  3. ShiftDrag a Line of arbitrary length
  4. Key in desired Length
  5. Key in desired angle

...is functionally equivalent to doing this in, for example, Illustrator:

  1. Select Line Tool
  2. Click on page (modal Line Options dialog appears).
  3. Key in desired Length
  4. Key in desired Angle
  5. Click OK to dismiss the modal dialog

But Affinity's treatment still leaves crucial related aspects missing which affects measuring, scaling, and rotation in general.

One general example is the fact that Illustrator's Line Tool is (yes, inelegantly) a better measuring device than its separate dedicated Measure Tool. The poorly designed Measure Tool doesn't even abide by snaps. So in Illustrator, when you need to measure elements of your drawing-in-progress, it is better to ignore the Measure Tool and instead:

  1. Select the Line Tool
  2. Mousedown on any snap-sensitive element
  3. Drag to any other snap-sensitive element
  4. Mouseup
  5. Delete the line you just drew
  6. DoubleClick the Line Tool (The modal Line Options dialog opens, and displays the last-used values, effectively telling you both the length and angle of the "measure" you just made).

I'm certainly not calling this elegant, nor intuitive, nor even easily discoverable. But it is at least functional, and serves crucial purposes which Affinity does not yet address:

  1. Select the Pen Tool: Click the Line Mode button.
  2. Mousedown. drag in an arbitrary direction. Mouseup.

You now have a single-segment path with no extended curve handles (a "line"). But what is its angle? What is its length?

As I've said many times, it's great that Affinity's value fields can serve as trigonometric calculators. But how do you simply and quickly determine the angle or length of the above "line" without invoking Pythagoras? Every serious vector drawing program needs to provide immediate access to the length of any path (including curved paths). 

This also relates to rotation. Affinity does not provide transformation tools. It just provides transformation handles which you interact with using a selection tool. It retains bounding box orientations and provides a rotation field in the Transform palette. And again, I'm fine with that in principle, but not in the current implementation, because it does not provide all the needed functionality.

At the risk of stepping on what is likely "sacred ground" I'm going to go ahead and say this:  I know Affinity is not the only recent program to use it, but I just don't like the needless visual clutter of a rotation "lever" attached to a bounding box. I'm okay with (I won't say fond of) the typical momentary rotation icons that appear when you mouse around outside corners of a bounding box, but here's the thing: Having to perform tactile rotation by such bounding box-based handles (whatever their interface treatment) feel cumbersome and inaccurate because both the "lever" and the corner icons are off the object(s) being rotated.

Suppose that arbitrary diagonal line described above is an edge of a drawn object. Now I want to draw a straight line of a given length precisely at that same angle.

I can use the Pen Tool in its Line Mode to snap at both ends of the pre-existing "line", effectively doing the same thing as just duplicating the original. But how do I now make the new path the desired length? There is no Length field, and because the "line" was initially drawn at an angle, I can't use the W or H field as a substitute.

Okay, so I draw the new line, shift-constrained to either horizontal or vertical, so I can use the W or H value field to specify the length. Say I key in a value of 1 inch. But now I need to rotate the new path to the angle of the original path. But again: In other programs, even if the angle is not provided, I can still at least:

  1. Move the new "line," snapping one of its endpoints to one of the nodes of the original "line."
  2. Set the transformation anchor at that endpoint.
  3. Mousedown on the opposite end of the new "line," drag it, and snap it to anywhere along the edge of the original "line."

But I can't do that in Affinity because the bounding box rotation "lever" is off the object. So using that "lever" to do the rotation, when I get the path I'm rotating visually aligned to the  angle of the original "line", there's nothing pertinent to the transformation being performed within snap distance of the cursor.

What about those corner bounding box rotation handles? They would have the same problem of being off-object, but it's moot anyway, because you can't even get them to appear in this scenario, because the "bounding box" of a horizontal line has no height. (Try it.) And that brings up an issue with scaling.

Suppose I just go ahead and rotate the horizontal path and just "eyeball" its alignment to the original path. I know the length of the new path, because I expressly keyed it in, and the Transform palette still shows that value. Suppose I now want to scale this path to the measure of an object edge in the subject, say, 2.875 inches. Knowing that the new rotated path is 1 inch long, I should be able to key this in as a multiplication value. So I:

  1. Transform palette: Turn on the Proportional link.
  2. In either the W or H field, key in *2.875.

But when I do this, the path disappears entirely. Affinity interprets this "uniform scaling" of a "line" as zero, because even if the bounding box is rotated it's still considered to have a "height" of zero. It even does this if the straight path is already rotated. Yeah, I can click the Reset Selection Box button to temporarily make Affinity treat the object as unrotated (by the way, we do still also need to be able to permanently reset a rotated bounding box), but continue...

So now I have two single-segment straight paths which were drawn in exactly the same manner (Pen Tool in Line mode) except that I didn't press Shift to constrain the first one to horizontal or vertical. Yet when the original path is "uniformly" scaled, it doesn't disappear. And if I select both of the now diagonal lines, and perform a uniform scaling, neither of them disappear.

Honestly, of what use is this behavior of "uniformly" scaling a straight path to zero width and zero height and then deleting it? Since when is 0x0 "proportional" in terms of aspect ratio to 2.875 x 0? What other drawing program does this? None of the six or seven on this computer do. (Perhaps it's been reported as a bug and I've just missed it?)

For the sake of interface elegance, I'm not saying we must have a dedicated set of transformation tools like other programs do. But if all transformations are to be performed with the selection tools, they need to be just as easily performed and just as fully functional as if there were transformation tools. I'm not finding that to be the case.

What's needed is the ability to:

1. Set the transformation anchor to anywhere, abiding by all current snaps.

2. Rotate any current selection about the current rotation anchor by mousing down on any snap-sensitive element (any node, center, etc.) of the current selection and dragging it to snap to any snap-sensitive element of unselected objects (including path edges), regardless of the rotation of the current selection"s bounding box(es). And this should not have to be done with the white pointer after selecting all of the selection's path nodes.

JET

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Hi,

is it possible you can inform us by percentage about the progress of v. 1.7? Is it 70%, 80% ready or so?

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
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1 hour ago, Petar Petrenko said:

Hi,

is it possible you can inform us by percentage about the progress of v. 1.7? Is it 70%, 80% ready or so?

 

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12 minutes ago, αℓƒяє∂ said:

 

Are you here, on this Forum, on duty 24/7? Are there any chances any other user to be heard? Or from Affinity staff?

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
15” Dell Inspiron 7559 i7 Windows 10 x64 Pro Intel Core i7-6700HQ (3.50 GHz, 6M) 16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600 MHz (8GBx2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED - Backlit Touch Display
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27 minutes ago, Petar Petrenko said:

Are you here, on this Forum, on duty 24/7?

No, I’m not here 24/7. Not quite, anyway! xD And I’m certainly not “on duty”. :)

Quote

Are there any chances any other user to be heard? Or from Affinity staff?

No doubt other users will chime in as they see fit, but I don’t think we’ll hear much from staff members. :ph34r:

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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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17 hours ago, Petar Petrenko said:

Hi,

is it possible you can inform us by percentage about the progress of v. 1.7? Is it 70%, 80% ready or so?

 

Sure.  Precisely 63.174%.  Precisely.

 

...if that makes you happy.  I measured it with my "finger in the air".

 

Of course, that has absolutely nothing to do with what day we will actually start the Beta.

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14 hours ago, αℓƒяє∂ said:

No, I’m not here 24/7. Not quite, anyway! xD And I’m certainly not “on duty”. :)

No doubt other users will chime in as they see fit, but I don’t think we’ll hear much from staff members. :ph34r:

Yeah - some of us like to sleep in between working days.

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  • MacBook (Early 2015), 1.3GHz Core M, Intel HD 5300
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31 minutes ago, Ben said:

 

Sure.  Precisely 63.174%.  Precisely.

 

...if that makes you happy.  I measured it with my "finger in the air".

 

Of course, that has absolutely nothing to do with what day we will actually start the Beta.

Wow. I didn't know anyone could be so accurate. Great. I fill extremly happy!!! :)

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
15” Dell Inspiron 7559 i7 Windows 10 x64 Pro Intel Core i7-6700HQ (3.50 GHz, 6M) 16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600 MHz (8GBx2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED - Backlit Touch Display
32” LG 32UN650-W display 3840 x 2160 UHD, IPS, HDR10 Color Gamut: DCI-P3 95%, Color Calibrated 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort
13.3” MacBook Pro (2017) Ventura 13.6 Intel Core i7 (3.50 GHz Dual Core) 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB 500 GB SSD Retina Display (3360 x 2100)

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32 minutes ago, Petar Petrenko said:

Wow. I didn't know anyone could be so accurate. Great. I fill extremly happy!!! :)

Ben didn’t say the figure was accurate!

1 hour ago, Ben said:

Sure.  Precisely 63.174%.  Precisely.

 

...if that makes you happy.  I measured it with my "finger in the air".

Precision (three decimal places in this case) is not the same as accuracy. The "finger in the air" method of assessment is inherently inaccurate, since it is subject to the effects of variations in moisture level as well as wind speed and direction.

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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The "finger in the air" method…is subject to the effects of variations in moisture level as well as wind speed and direction.

Not only that, but software development is also a system characterized by extreme sensitivity to tiny fluctuations in initial conditions. I had that figured out before I ever heard of chaos theory.

JET

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1 hour ago, JET_Affinity said:

Not only that, but software development is also a system characterized by extreme sensitivity to tiny fluctuations in initial conditions. I had that figured out before I ever heard of chaos theory.

JET

That's why I can only be accurate to three decimal places when giving a % complete figure.

 

But, as some people will already know - the last 10% takes 90% of the time.

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  • iMac 27" Retina 5K (Late 2015), 4.0GHz i7, AMD Radeon R9 M395
  • MacBook (Early 2015), 1.3GHz Core M, Intel HD 5300
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  • 3 weeks later...
On 6/22/2018 at 4:31 PM, JET_Affinity said:

I can't tell you how many times I've seen photographers and illustrators who like to work with dark surroundings complain that the printed results of their work comes out disappointingly muted and lacking detail in the shadow areas.

Totally not trying to be a jerk about this, and you bring up the excellent point of working on screen vs. print, but it doesn't matter what your UI looks like. Any time you go from a backlit screen to cast lighting on a piece of paper there's going to be a difference. No one blames a dark UI for the screen to print translation, that variable is just part of the job. Preflight, preflight, preflight; use a color book, get proofs, work in the right color space, etc. But if a light UI is just your preference then that's totally cool, no need to justify what you like, right? 

On 6/22/2018 at 4:31 PM, JET_Affinity said:

In conjunction with being an illustrator, designer, and product photographer since before the "desktop publishing revolution", I also happen to be a workgroup database developer, which  involves interface design on a daily basis.

Yeah I design interfaces, too, a lot of us on here do. But I can't think of an audience more critical of UI design than designers who design UIs criticizing the UI of the app they design their UIs in. Get my point? An app like PS or even an Affinity product have a lot of bits and pieces that get crammed onto a single screen. And a lot of those modify the behaviors of other things which can affect workflow. All I'm saying is that when a new app comes around and tries to do better than its predecessors with over 20 years in the industry (and succeeds in many, many ways)...yeah, #respect.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Really looking forward to 1.7.

I've been doing a lot of painting work lately in 1.6 and am looking forward to those path tool improvements for shape creation and any other new goodies coming up...

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 8/5/2018 at 11:18 AM, retrograde said:

Really looking forward to 1.7.

I've been doing a lot of painting work lately in 1.6 and am looking forward to those path tool improvements for shape creation and any other new goodies coming up...

Got to wait for the Publisher Beta release first

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