Do Designer and Photo work together?

[Wizaerd]

Say I'm working in Affinity Designer, and I decide an image I'm placing could use a bit more touch up, something more than the Pixel Persona can offer.  Is there a direct link between Designer and Photo?  Can I click the image in question, and somehow send it to Affinity Photo for editing, then when I come back into Designer, see those changes immediately?  Of do I have to get out of Designer, into Photo, re-find my image, make adjustments, save it out as an external file, get back into Designer, and then re-import or re-place the image from the saved file?

[MEB]

Hi Wizaerd,

You can swap the document between apps (with history included) going to menu File ▸ Edit in Designer/Photo depending on what app you are currently in. Some features exclusive to certain apps (like Live Filters in Affinity Photo) can be edited/adjusted directly in Designer double-clicking on their thumbnail in the Layers panel as if you were in Affinity Photo without the need to swap the document.

[Wizaerd]

I'm sorry, I should have looked around a bit more.  While there's no easy double click or context right click, there is a menu option under File to Open in Photo. Although I'm not sure how to send it back to designer... If I want to save, it wants to save as a Photo proprietary file (.afphoto) instead of as the actual image file...

 

Thanx MEB, I didn't see your response until I was getting ready to submit my own reply.  But how do I send it back and forth without having to save as their individual file types (afdesign or afphoto)?

[MEB]

To send the document back to Designer do exactly the same: go to menu File ▸ Edit in Designer while you are in Affinity Photo. There's no need to save the document to swap it between apps. To "save" in other formats other than the native ones, go to menu File ▸ Export.

[Wizaerd]

Here's where I get a bit messed up... When in Designer, if I want to edit a photo only, when I click Edit in Photo, it opens the whole document in Photo, not just the image.  And then if I want to do something special to it, such as use the Liquid Persona, I have to rasterize my image into a pixel layer, do my adjustments, and then send the whole document back to designer...  That's what was kind of throwing me off.  I was thinking it'd only open the photo... Either way, I suppose it'll just take my getting used to how it works.  But thanx for your help!

[MEB]

No, it send the whole document. Sorry if i wasn't clear.

[Jonopen]

Probably something for the suggestion box but I think it would be great if the zoom view was retained from one app to the other. For example, if working at 150% in Designer, the document opened the same view point in Photo. At the moment it reverts to 'Zoom to fit'.

[Mark Ingram]

Moving to Questions forum.

[R C-R]

On 12/21/2017 at 0:57 PM, Wizaerd said:

I'm not sure how to send it back to designer... If I want to save, it wants to save as a Photo proprietary file (.afphoto) instead of as the actual image file...

The .afphoto & .afdesign extensions just determine which Affinity app opens the document when you double-click on it. The file format is the same for both -- you can even manually change the extension from one to the other with no effect other than that.

 

IOW, no conversion of anything in a native format Affinity file is required or occurs when you open it with either app.

[BJP]

How does this work in iPad version?