360° Panoramic Painting Alternative to Photoshop

[Grrlduda]

I have the following laptop and notice when I use Photoshop's Spherical Panorama feature, my laptop's fan starts really working and gets slow. Here's the specs of my laptop:

 

OS X El Capitan 10.11.6

MacBook Pro 13-in Mid 2014

3 GHz Intel Core i7

Memory 16GB 1600 MHz DDR3

Intel Iris 1536 MB

217.25 GB Free Flash Storage Space

 

So I set out looking for Photoshop alternative so I can experiment with creating 360° illustrations / pano painting. Before purchasing Affinity Photo, can you tell me if my computer can handle it? Once you start 360 Live Editing, would I experience the same lag with your software as Photoshop has been doing to my laptop. I know it's an old laptop but I'd really like not to upgrade my laptop for this new hobby.

 

[firstdefence]

Download the trial version and have a play: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/ scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see...

 

[Grrlduda]

Thanks... will start to play around.

[James Ritson]

Hi, as firstdefence mentioned above, the best solution is to download the trial and see if it works for you.

 

I can tell you that your specs are still pretty decent - the 13" i7 processor is I believe a 4578U model (or variant thereof) which is dual core with hyper threading, so it should run Affinity Photo reasonably well.

 

Because you've got an Intel Iris graphics chip, however, the first thing I would check is under Preferences>Performance. See if you can enable "Metal compute acceleration". If so, you should find the 360 projection will run incredibly well. Some of the live filters will also benefit from Metal compute too.

 

Hope that helps!

[Grrlduda]

I have a question about Layers while in Live Editing (Layer > Live Projection > Equirectangular Projection):

 

1. Is there a way to re-assign what the Background Pixel Layer is? For example, I opened up an equirectangular grid pattern and that became by Background Pixel Layer. But essentially I want to hide the grid... as it's just for reference. So, should I always start with only a white blank canvas for 360 drawing / 360 illustration / 360 painting from scratch?

 

2. I'm used to Photoshop where I can prototype and keep multiple Layers without merging them so I can go back and change elements in the future, if needed. But in Affinity, it seems that when you create Layers and add design for a particular view, that eventually and essentially, for that design to stick to that particular view you have to Merge Down Layers down to original Pixel Layer. There's no going back and editing those prototyped layers. Is that right?