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Will Affinity later import rif files?


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Hi, I'm not a photographer although I have worked a lot with great photographers in larger as smaller art projects. I say this as I find Affinity an excellent tool for me, just after a short time using the program. I also understand that the majority of users will be photographers, but it does serve as an essential help for me as an artist as well.

My primary tool is Corel Painter, and Affility will for me work as it's right hand. For me it would be a significant advantage if I could import Corel Painter rif files into Affinity - so I ask you if anyone knows if this is an option the developing team of Affinity consider?

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  • Staff

moved to feature requests. 

Currently, we do not support rif files. It might be supported further down the line, but not anytime in the near future, as it is not a common file type, nor generally used across different software. 

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4 hours ago, GabrielM said:

Currently, we do not support rif files. It might be supported further down the line, but not anytime in the near future, as it is not a common file type, nor generally used across different software. 

I see your point Gabriel, but allow me to add some facts?

There are many good painting programs around, as Krita and other useful programs, but as per today, the raster-based Corel Painter is in its own league. It's used as the primary software in academies of art and other high-level art education. So everything is great then?

Not exactly, when I should edit my artwork, I have tried to use Corel's PaintShop, but as the files of my artwork should be the best level for print, I have the colour profile in Painter as 'Adobe RGB 1989'. Still, PaintShop doesn't support Adobe RGB, only sRGB which only give around 70% of the colours in the Adobe RGB profile. Further, PaintShop doesn't have the option of putting the colour depth to 16-bit (well, now I just explained why I use Affinity Photo and not PaintShop).

I have worked with photographers since 1986 even if the art industry told me not to do so (photography was not the high end of art they told me). Also for the large art project, I had in 1989 under the patronage of UNESCO in Paris - one part of the job was to choose film for the photographers (as we got the film sponsored as well). Since then photography has gone digital, and today it's hard to find a photographer not working digitally. We, the artists have been far slower going digital, but recently more of us are moving into the digital sphere. I started painting with digital tools in  2006, and it's many years since I worked on a large canvas.

So to get ahead of this development I see two options:
Either Affinity get the option of importing rif files
- or Affinity develops an own raster-based Painter. From what I have seen so far, I would be very ready to switch to a Painter alternative from Affinity. The name is easy - Affinity Painter (-:

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5 hours ago, Artvid said:

I see your point Gabriel, but allow me to add some facts?

There are many good painting programs around, as Krita and other useful programs, but as per today, the raster-based Corel Painter is in its own league. It's used as the primary software in academies of art and other high-level art education. So everything is great then?

Not exactly, when I should edit my artwork, I have tried to use Corel's PaintShop, but as the files of my artwork should be the best level for print, I have the colour profile in Painter as 'Adobe RGB 1989'. Still, PaintShop doesn't support Adobe RGB, only sRGB which only give around 70% of the colours in the Adobe RGB profile. Further, PaintShop doesn't have the option of putting the colour depth to 16-bit (well, now I just explained why I use Affinity Photo and not PaintShop).

So to get ahead of this development I see two options:
Either Affinity get the option of importing rif files
- or Affinity develops an own raster-based Painter. From what I have seen so far, I would be very ready to switch to a Painter alternative from Affinity. The name is easy - Affinity Painter (-:

Corel is a terrible company to deal with - or at least how they and their marketing treat Painter. The latest version 2019 was released a couple of week ago, and is pretty much a maintenance update which should have been made freely available to their users. A dark GUI and 650 redesigned icons seem to be the big features in this latest update.

As for Painter itself - urgh.. Still no 16/32 bit per channel, water colours and impasto are done much better in competing products (art rage, Paint Storm), no decent free transform tools, it is absolutely dreadful for inking/line art, many tools haven't seen updates in decades,... The list goes on and on. The layer stack is doggone-awful to work with, brush creation and editing is a excruciating experience compared to Krita, ClipStudio, and even Photoshop, and so on, colour management is fraught with problems, and so on, and so forth. And it still is quite crash prone - without a file rescue/restore option!

Remember Ryan Church? The concept art guy who used to be a big Painter guy? Well, he gave up on the app, and nowadays works in Photoshop. If that isn't a tell-tale sign, I don't know what is. It got so bad that at some point that the program was abandoned by just about everyone in Japan, for example - and no wonder with an alternative like ClipStudio that is far less expensive.

Sorry to be so harsh sounding, but I used to be a big Painter fan a bit over a decade ago, and even taught classes using Painter. It's a train-wreck, slow as heck on larger canvasses (I paint at A4@300ppi minimum and for line art at a minimum of 600-800ppi).

Ever since version 7 and Corel marketing their thick paint brush engine it's been downhill since. Corel marketing has run it into the ground.

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1 hour ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

My previous post was somewhat off-topic, and I went off on a rant :-)

Anyway, I see no point of RIF file support in Affinity.

And I would add a third option to your two:

- drop Painter like the dead weight it is, and switch to other digital painting software. Use that together with Affinity.

Great to hear your opinion, but I usually get sceptical when people paint their views in black and white. I know lots of downsides with Painter, but for ME it's the one that works best for my way of working.

When I worked on large canvases with acrylic paint, I had friends working with oil paint (of course) - but I never told them that it was shit painting they were working with. I usually used radiator brushes, but I never said fine artist brushes was shit. We all have our preferences, and they are not always alike - but as long as it fits our artistic expression - who should bother.

I have used more painting programs than I can remember - including those you mention - but none of them worked for me.

So why don't we share our experience, but stay away from downgrading tools others work with - and PhotoShop which you also mention, well I personally never liked its options for painting.

As soon as I find a new painting program, I try it - I still have a desire to find the ultimate tool - but until then I prefer my Painter (now 2019). I respect your opinion, but pushing down other peoples preferences is not the way to welcome new members in a forum - or? I hope this doesn't reflect an attitude here ...

for Ryan Church, that's so totally on the other side of the visual universe I work in, and I state that not because he work with Photoshop - but because he don't have an artistic expression that I find interesting (illustration, not art in my world). But as long as many like his work, that's great for him and them (-:

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I stand corrected. I went on a bit of a rant due to past experiences with Corel, and my disappointment in the development of Painter years and years ago. Which led me to look for alternatives. Reading back my earlier response (rant), I recognize a lot of emotional frustration that was pent up and expressed in it.

You are of course right in writing that we all have different purposes when working with digital painting and drawing software. In my case, I mainly do cartoon/comics and conceptual work, as well as game art and asset design. I am not as much interested in fine art, although I have been known to do the odd Bargue drawing :-)

That said, Painter is lacking and lagging in key areas (for me at least) which Corel seemingly just aren't interested in fixing. Two of the primary reasons I left Painter behind are inking and overall performance. Inking using Painter is not very nice, and the tools limited, which is why I use ClipStudio EX, which has incredibly responsive drawing tools, and resolution independent vector drawing which feel very natural for inking. The fact that these can easily be edited is quite nice as well. With inking I go up to 1200ppi, and most other software can't deal with that. Krita I do most of my concepts and texture painting in nowadays. And I often need to work in 16 bit per channel for game work - something still not supported in Painter, unfortunately.

Currently I favour Krita's GUI over most other drawing software - it allows me to work quickly and efficiently without touching the keyboard (much) and just get on with the job on my Wacom. ClipStudio's GUI gets in the way somewhat, as does Affinity's GUI.

Anyway, it wasn't my intention to belittle your use of Painter. Painter still has some of the best blending in the biz, and a lot of favour going for it when it comes down to creating art with it. The latest 2019 release seems to at least fix a lot of issues of previous two versions, and hopefully the Corel devs are planning on modernizing and expanding the obvious holes in the app in the upcoming release. It's good they focused on making a more stable application.

Software is just software. I allowed my tribal human self to pop out, and for that I apologize. If the software works for you as a artist, more power to you.

Happy painting!

PS as for RIF support: is that really necessary? I mean, exporting your work as TIFF or PNG, for example, and importing that in Affinity Photo would work too? That's what I do when I finish off a piece made in Krita/ClipStudio, for example.

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Medical Officer Bones, I do appreciate and respect your answer highly. From what you explain this time it's easy to see that we work in very different areas. My background is in painting on large canvases where I mixed my paint - buying 50 litres with PVA (acrylic base) and mixing it with raw pigments. Through the painting process, I put the canvas on the floor and washed away some of the paint before all was dry, to get the effect I wanted in the result. To give you two examples, first, it's a portrait I did in 1985. In the photo here it's hanging home at an art collector so you can see the size. The second picture is an underwater serial with paintings, and beside is a younger version of me (-:
Both done basically the same way where the painting technique is an essential part of the process for me.
Below that again is two paintings done with Painter. Yes, 35 years as a painter makes me use a technique digitally that's based upon my work with canvases and painting.

I have many things I'm far from happy with Painter, as the support staff - still it's the software that let me work in a way where I can bring some part of my experience with non-digital painting into digital made artwork as well. For me, that's best done with Painter, but I do hope that Corel gets better and start to listen more to its users - or that I find a different software that fits my needs better than Corel's Painter.

If I had worked more in the areas you work in, then I would not have used Painter, but it works well with my Wacom MobileStudio - and I admit that I'm a bit lazy as well - as when it works ok, then the rest is up to me (-:

 

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On 7/8/2018 at 5:44 AM, Medical Officer Bones said:

PS as for RIF support: is that really necessary? I mean, exporting your work as TIFF or PNG, for example, and importing that in Affinity Photo would work too? That's what I do when I finish off a piece made in Krita/ClipStudio, for example.

 

Good point, I actually have landed on the same conclusion. Should we then ask S. Affinity to start to develop an Affinity Painter - then we can both use the same program? (-:

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