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Workarounds for Distortion, Warp, or Perspective distort?


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No the Affinity products sadly don't have yet any plain vector based warp, perspective, or free distortions features. Thus one always have to tweak around with third party products as workarounds.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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Well well well, this thread (and many others) goes on and on and on. This week I finally made a career move away from my last few hands on tasks in Illustrator and InDesign to project management and project work in large and huge projects full time. Good stuff. For me Affinity was a fruitless wait since 2014. Also it was unbearable to see software developed like it is. The year is 2021. Not 1995.

Just imagine that these tools will not come to Affinity at all or in a form you don't like. Imagine if Affinity still rasterizes so much more than professional products. Imagine if all current issues and usability issues will not be resolved. Imagine spending the same amount of time on workarounds for years. How long will and can you wait?

There is no such thing as a free lunch. But time has a value.

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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6 hours ago, Jowday said:

... This week I finally made a career move away from my last few hands on tasks in Illustrator and InDesign to project management and project work in large and huge projects full time. Good stuff...

Best of "luck" with your new endeavor!

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17 hours ago, MikeW said:

Best of "luck" with your new endeavor!

Thank you @MikeW 🙂

Take care and stay healthy! 

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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We're now at Designer 1.9.1 and STILL waiting for a vector type distort feature. Yes, you can take work into Photo and use Warp there, but that destroys the vector quality and limits you to bitmap, meaning you are limited in quality of output at large size. It's a severe gap that many users need filling urgently. Even very early versions of Freehand and Illustrator had it - because they knew how useful it would be to a graphic designer. Come on, Affinity!

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On 3/4/2021 at 1:58 AM, Jowday said:

Well well well, this thread (and many others) goes on and on and on. This week I finally made a career move away from my last few hands on tasks in Illustrator and InDesign to project management and project work in large and huge projects full time. Good stuff. For me Affinity was a fruitless wait since 2014. Also it was unbearable to see software developed like it is. The year is 2021. Not 1995.

Just imagine that these tools will not come to Affinity at all or in a form you don't like. Imagine if Affinity still rasterizes so much more than professional products. Imagine if all current issues and usability issues will not be resolved. Imagine spending the same amount of time on workarounds for years. How long will and can you wait?

There is no such thing as a free lunch. But time has a value.

Amazing that an ex-user still have so much time to whine about the software you don't want to use. Of course there are things Affinity does not do as well as some would like. But no one is forcing you to use it and no app is for everyone. I miss some things in Affinity too, but for me as a whole it has giving me a lot and I like to use the apps, despite some shortcomings. If you want more advanced vector support but not illustrator, just try Vectorstyler. This is an app with great potential, and many of the features Affinity users request. Despite that the UX is still better with Affinity so its only a side gig.

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On 3/4/2021 at 1:58 AM, Jowday said:

Well well well, this thread (and many others) goes on and on and on. This week I finally made a career move away from my last few hands on tasks in Illustrator and InDesign to project management and project work in large and huge projects full time. Good stuff. For me Affinity was a fruitless wait since 2014. Also it was unbearable to see software developed like it is. The year is 2021. Not 1995.

Just imagine that these tools will not come to Affinity at all or in a form you don't like. Imagine if Affinity still rasterizes so much more than professional products. Imagine if all current issues and usability issues will not be resolved. Imagine spending the same amount of time on workarounds for years. How long will and can you wait?

There is no such thing as a free lunch. But time has a value.

I still use Adobe products - actually only Photoshop and XD. All their major apps have so much old code - they get out a fraction of the possibilities of modern CPU/GPU (except for instance the new XD - very fast!). Exporting a 3000 x4000px for web lasts waaaaay too long! I sometimes force quit PSD because I have not enough patience - and I am on a MacPook Pro 2018 with 16GB of RAM! And it's not the mac which is at its limits - it's just ole' Photoshop.

PSD still in beta for the new M1 - and once finished it will not really use the M1's power - I am convinced! They never did optimize in the past (multi core, for instance). Illustrator: Besides a user interface beyond common human understanding: Giving a shape a simple shadow and zooming in and out brings the app to its limits and turns the fan of my computer to an airplane turbine. In Affinity everything I do is fast as light - they're ready for M1, now, not in 5 years.

Every app has its flaws, I never ever used an app I was 100% happy with - who does. But I am sooooo happy to have valid! alternative to Adobe and that Adobe has competition (hooray!). So as of today I use Publisher and Designer and will never go back to Illustrator and InDesign. I know Photoshop that well with all its shortcuts that I cannot change to Affinity Photo. But that may change sometime in the future as well.

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22 hours ago, postmadesign said:

Amazing that an ex-user still have so much time to whine about the software you don't want to use.

Probably not the only one. One still hopes that announced things are finally realized …

Wohl nicht der einzige. Man hofft noch immer, dass Angekündigtes endlich verwirklicht wird …

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On 3/6/2021 at 5:15 PM, postmadesign said:

Amazing that an ex-user still have so much time to whine about the software you don't want to use. Of course there are things Affinity does not do as well as some would like. But no one is forcing you to use it and no app is for everyone. I miss some things in Affinity too, but for me as a whole it has giving me a lot and I like to use the apps, despite some shortcomings. If you want more advanced vector support but not illustrator, just try Vectorstyler. This is an app with great potential, and many of the features Affinity users request. Despite that the UX is still better with Affinity so its only a side gig.

The status 'Ex User' was written after I finally stopped using the software. Didn’t - and don’t - plan to use the forum more either. This is a rare Sunday evening exeption.

I wouldn’t waste time with Vectorstyler either - unstable, incredibly buggy early beta software disguised as release candidate number SIXTEEN. S I X T E E N!! I tried it, believe me. I found so many bugs in a few days in the core program itself and in output files.

I voiced a lot of concerns in here but I sure as hell also posted a lot of bug reports and features requests. So quit talking about whining. I participated! I had too much patience with Affinity though thanks to twelve months of lockdown boredom but a career move finally got me moving towards a better place. I will have SIX user experience designers and several professional networks at my disposal. That is SIX user experience designers and several professional networks more than Serif.

No further comments. The forum and waiting is all yours.

 

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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17 hours ago, Oval said:

Probably not the only one. One still hopes that announced things are finally realized …

Wohl nicht der einzige. Man hofft noch immer, dass Angekündigtes endlich verwirklicht wird …

I guess it all comes down to the expectations. I agree 100% that Affinity would need a couple of features to really compete with Illustrator for everyone. How much you rely on these features to do your work determines your success or failure in using Designer. For me, there are things I would like to see, but I have about 95% of the features I need ATM. If you need Live-Trace or Vector transform all the time, then AD is not for you right now, and you would need to try Corel or Adobe. But it would make little sense for Affinity to add a feature like trace when it works badly. Inkscape, Vectorstyler and Vectornator all have this feature, but the results are very poor most of the time, especially for color images. Even Illustrator is not very good at that. And if you only need B/W vectorisations, either trace yourself or use an online convertor. Only if Affinity adds one that does a proper job am I going to use it.

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I use vectorization of a pixel based graphic a lot - but I learned, that there are cheap one-time buy tools (Super vectorizer for multi colour and Image vectorizer for one colour) that do a much better job than Illustrator (at least when I last used it about 1.5/2 years before). So this is not a plus for Adobe IMO. However free transform of shapes/text,... would be really handy needed. But I'm sure that we will see this in the near future.

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38 minutes ago, postmadesign said:

...a feature like trace when it works badly. Inkscape, Vectorstyler and Vectornator all have this feature, but the results are very poor most of the time, especially for color images. Even Illustrator is not very good at that. And if you only need B/W vectorisations, either trace yourself or use an online convertor.

Well this topic is about vector distortion and not bitmap to vector tracing (vectorization), which are two completely different pair of shoes here!

Further Inkscape has one of the best tracers around (beside one two other tools), though you have to know how to deal with it the right way and so to make the most possible out of it. Algorithmic tracing always also needs some degree of adjustments and if you throw in bad source images you can't expect miracles as results then. Thus automatic tool tracing generally also highly depends on the quality of a given source bitmap and the adjusted/fine tuned tracing parameters. - Tracers/vectorizers aren't tools for throwing in whatever and then get back automatically wonders.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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On 3/8/2021 at 9:23 AM, postmadesign said:

If you need Live-Trace or Vector transform all the time, then AD is not for you right now, and you would need to try Corel or Adobe. […] And if you only need B/W vectorisations, either trace yourself or use an online convertor.

Thanks, but this was/is not the subject.

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  • 2 months later...

How many hundred thousand dollars do we need to make this happen? I'll chip in. Maybe you can kick-start it - or create an optional "pay for software" type of "club" - like GreenSock does.

I'm pretty sure we could get together and pay for it.

It's great that Affinity is priced low enough that it's basically free - but

As a teacher - who is using Affinity in our course at PE, the inability to transform vector shapes is always the first and most notable road-block.

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1 hour ago, sheriffderek said:

How many hundred thousand dollars do we need to make this happen? I'll chip in.

Serif is an independent company. You cannot buy it.

d.

Affinity Designer 1 & 2   |   Affinity Photo 1 & 2   |   Affinity Publisher 1 & 2
Affinity Designer 2 for iPad   |   Affinity Photo 2 for iPad   |   Affinity Publisher 2 for iPad

Windows 11 64-bit - Core i7 - 16GB - Intel HD Graphics 4600 & NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M
iPad pro 9.7" + Apple Pencil

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7 minutes ago, dominik said:

Serif is an independent company. You cannot buy it.

 

Because it is an independent company you probably can buy it, but you'll have to over pay.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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No one wants to buy the company. The company is great. I'm saying - that (if it's even possible) to program a free-transform type vector path manipulating thing... that I (for one) - would be happy to pay LOTS of money for it. I'm saying that I want to give Serif money in exchange for goods.

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1 hour ago, sheriffderek said:

would be happy to pay LOTS of money for it

I don't think cash is the issue here.
Finding qualified developers willing to relocate to Nottingham, UK, likely is. Post-brexit, nota bene…

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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On 5/25/2021 at 7:12 PM, Old Bruce said:

Because it is an independent company you probably can buy it, but you'll have to over pay.

Technically this may be a possibility. What I mean is that one most likely can't convince this company to do anything only by pulling out a huge amount of money.

d.

Affinity Designer 1 & 2   |   Affinity Photo 1 & 2   |   Affinity Publisher 1 & 2
Affinity Designer 2 for iPad   |   Affinity Photo 2 for iPad   |   Affinity Publisher 2 for iPad

Windows 11 64-bit - Core i7 - 16GB - Intel HD Graphics 4600 & NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M
iPad pro 9.7" + Apple Pencil

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  • 2 months later...
On 5/28/2021 at 7:08 AM, dominik said:

Technically this may be a possibility. What I mean is that one most likely can't convince this company to do anything only by pulling out a huge amount of money.

d.

My guess is serif have had some form of vector distortions working for years but they maybe need to find a way of making it play nice and integrate, Ideally, if you have a raster image inside a vector container, you would want to distort both the vector and raster and retain both formats, can you imagine how complex that could be, especially if trying to remain non-destructive, I do have faith that Serif will get there, hopefully, not to far off in the future. 

I know a few have poo pooed using VectorStyler but for me this as totally changed my workflow and I've seen it as a great investment, just for my use as a kind of Temp, Affinity, Vector Distortion Persona, copy and pasting back and fourth between Pub and VS now works great and along with a few other 'missing basic features', I can now complete Affinity stuff quickly and easily without having to open up clunky old Illustrator CS5 - I've just completed work on a number of event presentation certificates and VS's shape blend tool has come in super handy and is fantastic to use, being non destructive and infinitely editable, which seamlessly copy paste back into my Publisher cert layouts and remains fully editable vectors - totally recommend as a (hopefully) short term solution to get by a couple more years before Serif knocks it out the park 

Daz1.png

Mac Pro Cheese-grater (Early 2009) 2.93 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon 48 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC Ram, Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5, Ugee 19" Graphics Tablet Monitor Triple boot via OCLP 1.2.1 - Mac OS Monterey 12.7.1, Sonoma 14.1.1 and Mojave 10.14.6

Affinity Publisher, Designer and Photo 1.10.5 - 2.2.1

www.bingercreative.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

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