Any way to enable hand gesture canvas rotation?

[Rocksalter]

Is there any way to enable canvas rotation with hand gestures on the touch screen? For instance, in Photoshop, you can place two fingers on the screen and rotate them, and the canvas will rotate in that direction. I can't seem to find any setting to enable it and its very frustrating not being able to shift my canvas around freely when I'm drawing. I end up just turning my whole tablet around, which is very inconvenient.

[Callum]

Hi Rocksalter,

 

Welcome to the forums

 

We added this feature when we originally created the iPad app but found it was too easy to rotate the canvas by accident so we moved the functionality to the rotate canvas tool until we can find a better solution  

 

You can find out more about this here: 

 

 

C

[Patrick Kayser]

Where is said tool in the desktop app. Without being able to rotate freely (preferably using a hotkey like in photoshop), its pretty much useless for most of my use-cases that involve a graphics tablet (without a monitor) and sketching.

[MEB]

Hi Patrick Kayser,

This tool is not available in the desktop version. Currently there's two way to rotate the view in the desktop version:

- go to menu View ▸ Rotate Left/Right o rotate the view in 15º increments (you can also reset the rotation there);

- go to Affinity Photo/Designer Preferences, Tools section and tick Enable Canvas Rotation with Trackpad if you have one available. This one rotates the view freely using a two finger rotation gesture.

[Wiredframe]

 

On 5/8/2018 at 1:18 PM, MEB said:

- go to Affinity Photo/Designer Preferences, Tools section and tick Enable Canvas Rotation with Trackpad if you have one available. This one rotates the view freely using a two finger rotation gesture. 

I can't find this option unfortunately. (Windows 10, Dell 7373 2in1 Notebook)

[MEB]

Hi Wiredframe,
This option is only available on the Mac.

[Wiredframe]

Bummer. Will it be ported to Windows? Or are you planning to bring that iPad behaviour to the desktop versions?

[lasgor]

Why not implement canvas rotation by combination of shortcut key and mouse/stylus (canvas rotation tool maybe)? It seems many desktop users want this feature. Most other painting applications have this feature (Photoshop, Corel Painter, SketchBook, Krita, Paintstorm Studio, ClipStudio Paint and MyPaint for instance all do).

[kainote]

I also miss this feature on my TabletPC. In other software it is just natural to use your fingers to rotate the canvas while you sketch with your pen. When I change to Affinity Designer from another app, it often feels like something is broken.

 

[TooManyDemons]

Hoping the rotation tools improve. It doesn't even have to be touch input: the canvas manipulation is especially nice in Krita, I haven't found anything that matches it. (hold shift + spacebar and drag left or right).

Artists rotate their canvas constantly, all over the place. This feature is very essential for digital artists. I hope the Affinity dev team considers implementing it soon. Cheers!

[anotherzen]

Hi, now that we are well Into 2019, I am wondering if you are planning on adding touch based canvas rotation like most other professional digital art programs? Why not have all features on the desktop version? Would the desktop version suffer in any way because of this? Would it not benefit greatly? This just creates confusion. Lots of us are on touch devices that run Windows. Why can't we have something as simple as rotate canvas? I mean, would your iPad app be as popular if you never had this basic feature? This is a major neglect and we who want to use Affinity for this just can't. If you care for digital artists this should be a high priority feature. Right now you are making people choose Photoshop instead of you because of this simple feature.

[Claudio60]

Quote

On 5/3/2019 at 10:34 PM, anotherzen said:

Hi, now that we are well Into 2019, I am wondering if you are planning on adding touch based canvas rotation like most other professional digital art programs? Why not have all features on the desktop version? Would the desktop version suffer in any way because of this? Would it not benefit greatly? This just creates confusion. Lots of us are on touch devices that run Windows. Why can't we have something as simple as rotate canvas? I mean, would your iPad app be as popular if you never had this basic feature? This is a major neglect and we who want to use Affinity for this just can't. If you care for digital artists this should be a high priority feature. Right now you are making people choose Photoshop instead of you because of this simple feature.

I can second this request too

 

[SurfinBrat]

I also need a better rotation solution. Transitioning from Krita to Affinity Photo. 

(Windows 10, Surface 3 tablet + Windows 10, desktop with traditional Huion tablet) 

[mx_k]

same here really sad you dont have it for windows

[kainote]

I am also a Tablet PC user. The lacking canvas rotation in Affinity Designer is often the only reason I have to switch to concepts or even bitmap graphics like Sketchbook Pro, ArtRage and Sketchable.

I really love Designer, but the lacking support for free rotating my canvas by hand just breaks the work flow. :-(

[ashf]

Still not available on Windows?

[Kione]

16 hours ago, ashf said:

Still not available on Windows?

Still. I don't know for what is in preferences>tools touch for gesture only when i can only move and zoom in and out with touch. It's really strange that in times where most displays have touch input there is still no touch function in affinity photo/designer. Give us just rotation please, i don't tell but it will be nice if we can have undo/redo function with touch (like adobe fresco have) but please add rotation with touch function on windows 10.

[brettOMC]

Affinity,

Why not allow users to assign a hotkey to rotate the canvas while holding it down?  Then a click and drag or pen to canvas and drag can rotate the canvas.

Brett

[NobleCarp]

I was excited to move to Affinity software from Adobe, but without the rotate canvas feature the program it is virtually unuseable for drawing on windows. If not with two finger touch rotate (a standard), a hotkey is essiential. Hope to hear it gets implemented, but I suppose I'll have to hold off any purchases until then. :(

Thankyou for the useful thread.

[Utes]

Lack of such a basic feature makes this great program useless. Artists on PC tablets need instantaneous rotation capability either with touch or with a hot key. Destroys workflow. Please add proper rotation!

[jburgoon]

Any updates on this feature request?

Designer is awesome but the inability to rotate via touch is real limiter with a Surface Pro.

[FryZeit]

+1

[Patrick Kayser]

So, i am on the latest beta and it still isn't implemented.  I can't work with Affinity without hurting myself without this feature. It's almost comical that touch gestures and the scroll wheel only do a 90° canvas rotation.

What purpose does this serve on the PC? Do you do User Testing and observe if they can use it without straining themselves? Do you expect all of us to switch to screen tablets? Whats going on? 

[thomaso]

On 4/24/2018 at 3:37 AM, Rocksalter said:

Is there any way to enable canvas rotation with hand gestures on the touch screen?

6 hours ago, Patrick Kayser said:

So, i am on the latest beta and it still isn't implemented.

Works here on a macbook trackpad...

 

[Patrick Kayser]

That implementation isn't the same on windows. It doesn't work in 1.8 and below. In 1.9alpha there now is a control-alt-scroll (up/down) do rotate around the cursor as pivot point. That is neat.
THough I really would like to see a control alt drag so i don't have to switch from pen to a mouse to do this interaction. This seems not be fully thought-out yet but is a very appreciated step forward (among the other refinements 😎😍)