linked images, picture frame behaviour, auto fit

[4dimage]

Hi,

first of all, thanks for your intense work on Publisher to complete the Affinity "family" ;-)

 

Following remarks to the public Beta 1.7

1) To my mind, the default behaviour in AP should be to link images rather than to embed them. I guess this meets the nature of the application better because as a page layout tool (like InDesign or QuarkXPress) you rather deal with a lot of images in one document. Furthermore the typical team workflow may be that one person does the layout while another one does image editing.

2) There is a strange behavour with the image fit when scaling and streching the pciture frame. Autofit (max, min strech, none) meight be handy in some scenarios when the images are prepared in the exact size and crop. But mostly you don't not know the exakt crop and resolution until you placed the image in the page layout - tweeking it a little bit to see how it looks in the context of the whole layout.

In AP there is the positbility to resize, rotate and pan the image contained in the picture frame to get the desired crop (double clicking on the frame activates the masked image). But as soon as you resize or strech the whole picture frame again, the image snaps back to the auto fit behavoir and all your manual sizing, positioning and croping is immediately gone. Even when setting the picture frame property to 'none' (no auto scaling), when resizing the whole picture frame the image is scaled to its original size (as it says - allways switch to original size...). All manual croping an paning is gone.

This missbehaviour is even applied if "lock children" is active on the picture frame.

 

This auto fit behavoiur is absolutely counterproductive in most cases. E.g. InDesign shows how an image frame should behave:

- Any manual resizing and positioning on the inner image is maintained. The position is relative to the page scope - unless you move the picture frame as a whole. Then the image is moving with the frame. When resizing / stretching the picture frame by the side or corner controls, the inner image is typically not scaled and stays at its global coordinates. Only if you press some modifier keys while scaling the picture frame, the content is scaled with its parent as a group (either proportionally or squeezed).

 

Why is this usefull?

For example if your layout was OK but afterwards you may have to extend the document bleed and have to resize picture frames that extend into the bleed. Or imagine after some text changes the text floating around a picture frame does not longer look that good. You may have to tweek the size of the picture frame a little bit to get a better hyphenation. In all cases your previous image aspect will be dropped. Not funny...

 

To wrap it up:

- any imported resources - regardless of whether this is bitmap or vector - should be linked by default instead of embedded. Embedding should be the option.

- content (picture) frames should not influence their content by default (unless moved or scaled as a whole) when resized with the box controls ("anchors"). Auto fit should be an option but not the default. Or make this customizable via the app prefs.

 

By the way: please implement this linked resource behaviour (and the resource manager) directly in Affinity Designer because there every imported and embedded image inflates the document filesize dramatically. And even in Photo linked resources might be a really cool feature (compare this to Photoshop linked smart objects)...

 

 

[iaing]

completely agree - especially no2 - even if you turn auto fit to none, then resize your picture frame, the scale and positioning of the placed image jumps - it makes anything other than auto fit almost impossible - I suspect this is a bug rather than anything deliberate.

[tsp1965]

Completely agree on the behaviour of the picture box. I've been trying to get my head around how it is supposed to work all day, but it is so counter-intuitive. 

The team really needs to copy the way InDesign works, with separate tools for changing box and contents sizes. Plus auto-fit when you want it, not all the time. Using the lock children tick box means each rescale/resize takes four or five iterations, rather than the simple 'change box, then scale the content'. 

I think the problem here is the nature of the solution chosen rather than a bug in its implementation. I don't believe it can be refined to work well!

 

[tsp1965]

And another thing - as far as I can see if you want to insert an image placeholder box you can't - you have to put an actual image in. A lot of the time I do a layout before colleagues have supplied pics, so I often lay out a newsletter with lots of empty grey boxes to be filled later. This doesn't seem to be so easy in AP.

[walt.farrell]

3 minutes ago, tsp1965 said:

as far as I can see if you want to insert an image placeholder box you can't - you have to put an actual image in.

Why not just create an empty Picture Frame using the Picture Frame Tool?

[RyS]

Agree with the comments regarding adjusting frame and picture size. Being able to adjust each independently and easily as with InDesign is much better than the clumsy method in Publisher. Can we also have "fit content proportionally" and "fit frame to content" also as InDesign.

[Chris_K]

Hi 4dimage

There have been in number of improvements in both these areas since you made this post. Have you tried the latest version (139) to see how these elements now operate?

Cheers

[4dimage]

On 10/5/2018 at 4:55 PM, Chris_K said:

Hi 4dimage

There have been in number of improvements in both these areas since you made this post. Have you tried the latest version (139) to see how these elements now operate?

Cheers

Hi Chris,

i tested Beta 1.7.0.57. I guess, the scale/position/clip of the picture frame content with properties autofit set to 'none' now works as expected. As RyS mentioned, maybe a nice addition would be some contextmenu commands regarding fit content to frame or fit frame to content etc. But the basic behaviour now is OK to my mind.

OK, there is one thing I forgot:

at the moment it's possible to group the picture frame (with itself) to scale the box together with it's contained image element. This solves the problem of having a well prepared picture frame with the right image aspect and so on, that afterwards should be scaled up or down as a union.

To edit the picture frame box one can doubleclick the group to be able to change the frame with the side/corner controls. By holding STRG-key while clicking on the contained image element you can directly select this and work on the image element independently.

So far so good :-)

Nice addition would be: instead of always having to group the picture frame there might also be a keybord modifier combination, that makes the picture frame behave like a group during scaling. Maybe STRG+SHIFT+ALT when scaling the frame scales it as a group. Without modifiers the frame scales independent from it's contained image element.

just an idea for working even more fluid...

Thanks