More guide information and control in the manager

[Bible9230]

I would like to see more control over the guides in the manager.

1.  Guide grouping: This would allow you to turn on/off guides to reduce the number that you want to interact with at any one time on each layer.  You could also use these groups over different layers.

2.  Guide color selection:  Similar to the grouping, but this way you could color code your lines.

3.  Guide position shown in the work area:  Right now I believe the only way to see the exact position of each guide is in the manager, but if the positions were listed on the guides themselves like coordinate dimensioning you could easily identify the position.  You could even key in the exact location like a CAD system.

4.  Guide Highlighting:  Another way to see which line you are working with in the manager is to highlight the same guide in the work area that you have selected in the manager.

[mbrakes]

Anyone know if it possible to save guides and reuse them between documents? As for now, it seems to me like this isn't possible, although I'd really like to be proven wrong... 

For the life of me I can't understand why this isn't a standard feature in either Photoshop, Affinity or any other programs that I am aware of. I could really use it like; all the time. I had high hopes when I realised Affinity had a Guides manager, but it seems half-baked - for me it seems like a major oversight to not allow for these guides to be saved and reused later, and be able to easily transfer them between documents. So much promise, but unfortunately falling short when you have to recreate the guides for every document. Life's far too short.

Just for a bit more background information about my usecase:

It is ridiculously difficult to achieve consistency between headshots when cropping without having to jump through a lot of unnecessary hoops, having to resort to copying photos and layer them and set transparency to 50% and the like. If I could simply set up a guide template based on percentage and use that as a cropping guideline, that would make my life so much easier.

Pretty please...!

And, while at it, please also add relative cropping based on face recognition, that would REALLY make my life easier :-)

[walt.farrell]

You can do it, but it's a manual process.

1. Create an empty document, add some guides, and save that document for later use.
2. When you need another document with those guides, open that original document, Save As under some other name, and begin working.

[mbrakes]

Thanks Walt!

I really appreciate your helpful response, but your suggestion is more cumbersome than I like, and I'll explain why:

I shoot portraits tethered to my laptop using Capture One, and enter the names of the subjects straight into a naming template, so the names are becoming a part of the filenames. This is important for the filehandling further downstream from me.

Having to copy the photos into a new file for the sake of guidelines will mess up my workflow completely, and will introduce so many new hoops to jump through.

I just can't believe that nobody have thought of implementing reusable guidelines before. Major oversight. Probably just goes to show how few Photoshop users are actually photographers as opposed to graphic designers that tend to create uniqe designs?

I've found this Photoshop plugin https://pixnub.com/portrait-crop-photoshop-plugin/ which seems like it does what I really need, except it only works with Photoshop CC, and is quite expensive. Probably a no-brainer for a high-volume headshot-business, but it is only a part of what I do, and I really try to resist Creative Cloud (which is why I'm here in the first place)

I've looked into Graphic Converter which can also crop using a similar face detection batch feature ("Crop portrait"), but needs to be set up as a batch process, and as it isn't WYSIWYG, it is quite cumbersome to set up the first time, and similarly make adjustments based on changing portrait compositions etc. But for the lack of alternatives I will have to experiment with it further. My greatest issue with the GC route is the fact that any crops are "hard" crops, so will be impossible to make any small adjustments after the fact. 

[carl123]

Assuming the guidelines are static, cant you just create a new file, draw the guidelines on a transparent background, save that as a transparent PNG file and in future just File > Place that PNG file on top of your images as a new layer.

[mbrakes]

Thanks carl - yes. That is more or less what I've been doing in the past. It's just that it is a pain compared to simply storing a few preset guides that could be kept handy just like brush presets. There's so many things that seems assbackwards with these image processing apps from my perspective as a photographer. I almost never ever use brush presets, although that is included by default, but what I REALLY could need - guides - is treated like a second citizen. It has never made any sense to me and still doesn't.

 

your signature line made my day! :-D

[dominik]

13 hours ago, mbrakes said:

but what I REALLY could need - guides - is treated like a second citizen. It has never made any sense to me and still doesn't.

Hello @mbrakes,

I can see the advantage of a 'guides template system' if one can call it that way. One proof that Serif is thinking in that direction is the introduction of 'Designer now supports custom document presets' with the beta of version 1.7. And also the improvements with guides and grid even though nothing is a solution to your request 

What I do is to keep a couple of guide like pages in the Assets. E.g. I have a (transparent) rectangle at the size of A4 that contains a couple of dashed lines (similar to guides). They are all grouped together and were as a whole saved as an asset with an appropriate name.

Now, when I'm working on an A4 page I simply drag this asset from the panel in and place it. It helps to lock it.

Since you seem to work with a limited set of guidelines this could be a workaround that to me seems to be very fast.
The only difference is that it is not a true guide template.

d.

[mbrakes]

Thanks Dominik! That is super helpful, and actually sounds like a viable solution.

"Assets" is new to me, but if it is possible to use this as a system-wide drawer where often-used assets are kept handy at all times then it sounds like it could be just the ticket. Will have to look that up and play around with it.

That being said - I still don't get why guides as per default can't be stored and reused easily across several files over several projects without having to sort to workarounds. To me, the most obvious purpose of guides would be to keep things consistent over time, and to do that you really need to be able to store them and access them easily across documents and projects.

And you also have to be able to set the guides as relative values; percentages of height or width or something of the sort, so proportions can be kept even though the pixel dimensions are different between photos - as they regularly are after photos have been cropped. I'll keep on flogging this horse until the horse either dies or Serif listens :-)

I also tried to figure out how to us the colour sampling tool yesterday, and it seemed harder than necessary to just sample a colour from one file and then use that colour as the basis of a gradient background in another. The only way I managed to accomplish this was through first storing in "Swatches", and then accessing "Swatches" in the other document, something that necessitaded a lot of needless clicking around. In Photoshop this is relatively easy by comparison - the sampled colurs just arrives in bacground/foreground color and off you go. But I admit I've only had limited time to play around and there may be some genius way of doing this in Affinity that I just haven't found out yet...

[dominik]

18 minutes ago, mbrakes said:

"Assets" is new to me, but if it is possible to use this as a system-wide drawer where often-used assets are kept handy at all times then it sounds like it could be just the ticket. Will have to look that up and play around with it.

I really hope that this is working for you, before ...

 

18 minutes ago, mbrakes said:

the horse either dies or Serif listens :-)

 

I personally find your suggestions for guides, especially the relative ones, logical and desireable, too.

 

18 minutes ago, mbrakes said:

I also tried to figure out how to us the colour sampling tool yesterday, and it seemed harder than necessary to just sample a colour from one file and then use that colour as the basis of a gradient background in another. The only way I managed to accomplish this was through first storing in "Swatches", and then accessing "Swatches" in the other document, something that necessitaded a lot of needless clicking around. In Photoshop this is relatively easy by comparison - the sampled colurs just arrives in bacground/foreground color and off you go. But I admit I've only had limited time to play around and there may be some genius way of doing this in Affinity that I just haven't found out yet...

There is a difference between the colour picker tool (left) and the colour picker in the colour palette. I am not on my APub computer.  With one of these you can sample from outside the APub window, with the other not (at least I think to remember).

You could also copy the object with the desired colour, paste in the other document, sample from there and delete the object afterwards.

d.