preferences: add option to remove/hide brush outline

[ToreB]

It would be very helpfull if prefs had the option to turn brush outline on/off. This goes for both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer (pixel brush)

Preferences could then read:

 

1. crosshair on/off

2. brush preview on/off

3. brush outline on/off

 

Personally I find the brush outline very distracting when drawing/painting in these otherwise excellent programs.

 

 

[whitehead]

Yes, very much second this as I've posted elsewhere in the forum, my posts getting a bit muddied around the terminology of brush 'preview' vs. 'outline'. To add one further suggestion to ToreB's spot-on list, perhaps an option to control the opacity of the outline might be useful for anyone who uses the outline as part of their workflow.

And a happy new year to the Affinity team.

[dominik]

On 27.12.2017 at 2:53 AM, ToreB said:

It would be very helpfull if prefs had the option to turn brush outline on/off. This goes for both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer (pixel brush)

Preferences could then read:

 

1. crosshair on/off

2. brush preview on/off

3. brush outline on/off

 

Personally I find the brush outline very distracting when drawing/painting in these otherwise excellent programs.

 

 

 

Hello ToreB,

 

are you aware that there is a setting in the preferences that seems to do  exactly what you are asking for (see attached screenshot)? But maybe I am misunderstanding your request 

 

d.

 

[dominik]

On 27.12.2017 at 2:53 AM, ToreB said:

3. brush outline on/off

 

 

OK, I see that the outline cannot be turned off, yet.

 

d.

[ToreB]

Update 1.6.3.103 is out.

The issue not adressed, so this is still a request.

[ToreB]

Within hours 1.6.3.104 came along - but still no outline switch...

[whitehead]

Bumping this, as it's still the principle reason I don't use Affinity Designer/Photo for illustration. It seems a curious omission to me - I can't think of any other design app that doesn't cover at least a rudimentary set of alternative cursors, and some of course offer a sweep of alternatives, i.e.:

(Rebelle 2)

(Clip Studio Paint)

Certainly software like Painter has offered an extensive cursor dialogue for a couple of decades by now. Is this something isolated to only the Windows version?

[aradnom]

Adding to this.  If you're painting with a stylus the brush outline is super distracting.  Having the option to turn the preview off is a good start though.

[Dream]

Adding my vote.

Just tried to sketch with default brushes but the outline didn't let me focus well.

[SrPx]

oooOoooopppssss

Seems I duplicated the request, in June (apologies).... this thread is from last December... ( I have mine even in my signature, with another one IMO badly needed for painting/illustration/comics/pixel art.... )

But I think I did I make a deep search before posting.... well, go guess.... Maybe I had not my afternoon coffee that day.

Still, I have some added detail in that thread, same as there's details here not in my thread...

[Dream]

I've posted my vote there as well. Maybe we should stick to one thread and remove this one since the other one has more info in it?

[SrPx]

I think both are good, have very relevant information, there are suggestions and screens here, and solutions proposed here which are very interesting.  :). Same as I describe other aspects.  :). Probably linking them (adding a link to the other thread in each is the best. I have done so in  mine already. ).

Edit: Well, was already there, as is half of my permanent signature, but here it goes (btw, the other suggestion in my sig is IMO equally important for painting.... ) :  

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/60162-ap-hiding-the-brush-outline-as-an-option-at-preferences/

[whitehead]

Good to see this getting some support... let's hope the Affinity gang tune in. Both applications could be killer on the natural media front if they only acknowledged this weird oversight!

[ToreB]

Have been looking for this to be fixed in the latest betas, but alas not so! Is there even the faintest hope that this will be adressed soon...? It is really a show stopper for the otherwise wonderfull paint tools in Photo!

[SrPx]

Oh, as I show in my sig , I have more "wishes" (with the bargain that it is I don't feel I can call them complaints, not even requests....)  for using it for painting (I am still using my Clip Studio Paint, but slowly moving several  workflows to A. Photo). My guess is that the  brush system re-write -if it'd finally happen, but I am not sure if it will happen- has been postponed. Anyway, that's another shot in the dark from myself. I'm fine, AP is extremely useful even if not used for painting.

I don't have a clue about your question, only they'd know, but I strongly suspect that anything that "could be better", ultimately will get to be so. As is the case in every software developer I've worked at, I suspect there's a lot of people there doing constant checks on workflows, quality, plus reading the huge feedback in the forums, etc. I think is just the case of mere workload  saturation (with the painting issues,and also with any other feature needing improvement, or lack of important feature). Also, Photo is a photo editing package, focused on that. This probably make painting tools (my take is that the things I recommend would increase any photo retoucher comfort and speed (I've done quite advanced photo retouch at companies, btw), and they'd be able as well to focus better. These things are often not consciously perceived, but really important in every day work).

But is a tool in the toolbar, a very important one for many workflows, not just for illustration/comic/digital painting, and like everything, will get its moments of polishing. With APub release,  and surely other fixes more photography related pending, all that will go first, I'm afraid. But I have a huge patience, anyway.     (kept using Blender for 5 years (of a total of 17, I believe...) until I did a total migration !   That's hard to beat.    ). So, yeah... "never" is an improbable term, as everything gets improved when there is time. It can take a long way, tho.

 

[whitehead]

Yes, I work closely with a team of devs and I'm pretty acquainted with the pressures and timescales of software development. That said, I do find the Affinity team's position on this flaw really pretty odd, with a blanket refusal it seems to even comment or give projection I just don't think I've encountered in another small developer. It is pretty dismissive, and if it wasn't for the vector potential of Design (and the absence of good vector packages on Windows) I honestly don't think I would be pursuing any of this. 

As it is, the lack of communication from Affinity betrays a strange arrogance. Their obsession with their iPad presence really starts to grate when a fundamental usability issue continues to roll on, unaddressed, for month after month. I cannot confidently recommend Affinity to my studio team when this is the customer experience, a team happy on their Macs and their Adobe product. Software is not just the platform, it is the totality: it is the understanding you are cared for. What we are all suggesting will help open Affinity up to an even broader market, but for some perverse reason they seem pretty bent on breeding resentment, in at least one of their customers: not the greatest business model in the wafer-thin opportunity outside of the Adobe space.

[ToreB]

The lack of responce on this issue, is even the more strange, as it propably would be a very quick thing to fix...?

And you are right, Whitehead -- it would be nice to at least get a feedback from Affinity so as to know if this issue is going to be adressed at all.

[schtiefel]

I'd like to add my vote here — being able to hide the outline would greatly increase usability.

For me the problem is not solely large brushes with much structure, but dynamic-sized brushes using pressure-sensitive input devices.
Because then I can't even guess where a stroke will appear, e.g. as in the attached example image.

Maybe there is already an existing option that I/we might have missed — or can we hope for a future release?
Thx for any help  : )

[whitehead]

Does anybody know if this behaviour is also on the Mac version?

[EB3]

Hi, I'm having the same problem, looks that such option to hide the brush stamp (or outline) doesn't exist, which is really frustrating as it's very annoying trying to paint anything with that mark over it. 

But what I really don't understand and worries me a lot is the lack of response from the developers. I can see this post is from last year, and not only they haven't fixed it (can't imagine it would be too complicated to do so..)  but also they haven't even replied 

This definitely puts me off using it, I gave it a chance as a possible alternative to Photoshop but I can see (if things stay like this) there's no way I'm changing.. 

Thanks

[SrPx]

Meanwhile, in the customer beta, I just set to not show brush preview. And so, all I see is the circle outline-cursor which tells me the size (indeed, I also force it to show the cross hair cursor, anyway, for precision work). Probably I'd prefer to see the brush preview (only) if it were really a stroke of that shape and color, just the exact same once landed in the canvas. My fav way is like in Clip Studio, that I can  choose to show a tiny cursor only, like a crosshair, the brush circle outline, a tiny triangle,  a fat dot, or nothing. A brush stroke (but exactly as it'll lay over once painting) is a good "brush preview", is how is done in procreate, but not having at the same time any brush circle grey/white outline.

I'm talking tho about the Photo customer beta. I know one shouldn't use betas for production, but I do it carefully and I base yet all in other tools, mostly. The betas have taken active part in my work tho,Designer, Photo and Publisher. They're so much better.

I'd say, if only that is stopping you fully,  already, then I'd say, stay with Photoshop, as then it is that you don't see enough advantages in using Affinity.  I see other issues that I have solved in my own, and others indeed got fixed, some in the stable, and some in the betas, some are in the way for fixing.  And all of that (the issues) put together is really minimal when compared with the huge advantage of using Affinity vs the main other options. If I had not preference, and I was happy enough with my other tools, why would I change or be looking  anywhere else ? I mean, if ur happy with PS, then that's it, no need for more.

Edit: Oh, and, in general, Photo customer beta is so much better for painting than 1.6.

[whitehead]

In response to EB3's comments, I am by now fairly confident that the brush outline issue is being attended to - the discussion moved over to here...

...which was originally in the context of the current problem 1.6.5.123 AD suffers when moving nodes around: this was solved in more recent betas. As you can probably tell from the tone of my posts above, my real frustration was really the lack of response from the Affinity team, but as you can see in the quoted thread Mark Ingram did pick this up.

It's a strange thing: ultimately I've just decided to be patient with Affinity and see what happens. My completely non-empiric hunch is that the suite originally never really had the ambition of being a 'natural media' product, but obviously a few of us - not least Paolo Limoncelli and his amazing brushes - have seen this potential, with AD in particular offering something not seen since the likes of the [Microsoft's] death of Creature House's Expression and even the obscure (but much-loved by me) programme called Satori from Spaceward. However, all this I doubt has ever really been seriously on Affinity's roadmap, the primary aim I guess to make a straightforward, stable competitor to Adobe and move - by all accounts pretty successfully - into the iPad space. 

So, at the moment, I wander by every few weeks to check on the betas and see if there has been any movement. My two main wishes are effectively a mirror of the cursor options CSP has (as detailed far above) and the ability to add raster brushes to paths in AP as you can do in PS: obviously this latter feature is 'built in' to the brush options in AP (presumably because it uses the same pop-up as AD) but simply doesn't work. It's an odd oversight.

In the meantime, I use CSP for pretty much everything - the brush engine isn't (to me) as good as Affinity's and it's vector functionality is as clunky as hell, but I find it stable and of course DAUB brushes are available there too. I would wonder if at some point the CSP team (who I assume are rather larger than Affinity's) might spot the potential of the vector space and radically improve this side of the interface, remembering how ghastly the earlier Manga Studio versions were for painting and now they seem to have really pushed that to make CSP a direct competitor to PS in the presumably lucrative concept art arena.  

Anyway, I live in eternal hope: frankly Affinity reminds me of my Satori days (i.e. a decidedly non-corporate developer pushing some pretty nifty technology) and I'm sure at some point they will address the needs of artists who see both AP/AD as potentially incredible tools. 

[AquaSky]

Is it just me, or is this issue resolved in 1.7.0.293?

[whitehead]

Quote

Is it just me, or is this issue resolved in 1.7.0.293?

After finally getting some time to investigate, I'd say sort of: virtually all the pixel brushes now have a round brush outline, rather than the image-obscuring texture outline, so there has been some progress. Not all, though: 'Airbrush 8' in the 'Sprays and Splatters' set still carries the texture outline, and I think I spotted one more plodding through the brushes.

The option though to switch the outline off completely only display a cursor is not in place, and we have a long way to go before Affinity could match the options of CSP, as pictured up the thread. The problem of the brush highlight in the Brushes menu being switched off if you change a brush parameter is still an issue. It's incredibly difficult to remember which brush is currently in play, and this is something of a deal-breaker too.

Overall, I'm glad to see something is happening around the brush issue, but we're still a long way off it achieving its potential.  

[whitehead]

So, a few months on, I've checked out AD to see if any of the issues listed above have been addressed over recent updates. 

• Cursors - as noted above in my post from March 11, 2018(!), a basic overhaul of the brush cursor function please so it is usable for freehand painting. On the whole, it looks like for most brushes we've at least lost the intrusive brush outline, but success seems random and occasionally the cursor flips back to a standard windows arrow. There doesn't seem to have been any real work at all on this, which seems disappointing. By now, I would think we would be moving toward a standard PS/CSP dialogue for cursor control, as suggested above.
• Brush Library - changing variables on the selected brush (i.e. size) still means the blue brush selection box is turned off, so you have no idea which brush is currently selected. This feels like basic stuff.
• Brush Size Dialogue - still very crude. You can just about change size via the slider, but using a keyboard shortcut throws in weird variables rather than standard increments by 5 or 10 or whatever. The package is also in dire need of a PS/CSP brush size shortcut window, with preset sizes you can quickly select. 

All very odd - certainly the big 1.7 update brought some key improvements, but I'm still a bit baffled/frustrated why some of the key bits someone like me would look for are so unloved. We have this big, gorgeous brush engine but I still can't drive it!