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Images should be constrained by Picture Frame (OLD thread)


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I find it strange that I can move the Image in an picture frame so freely it even must not be visible.

I would expect that I the Image should not be able to leave the borders of the picture frame.
This also means that I should not be able to scale the image to be smaller than my picture frame.
The way it's now its very cumbersome to place the photo the way I want.
Picture Frame is currently only a mask for an image where it should be a real frame in that regard.

Several photobook creation software from printers behave this way and so I think Publisher should at least have an option to enable that.

Before someone mentions it: The scaling options in "Properties" do not help me here in any way.

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Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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This is not "photobook" software.  It is professional page layout software.

This behavior is intentional, to allow the frame to be used for effectively cropping the photo in addition to scaling and placing it.

Other similar programs such as QuarkXPress and InDesign behave in essentially the same way:

 

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I still see end user photobook software as a kind of desktop publishing software.

The things you do with it are basicly the same. Many photobook printers accept InDesign PDF because of that.

I see no reason why a "professional" software should be harder to use or more cumbersome than other Software.

Here I want to crop and scale with Picture Frame, but I do not want to to add more border/pixels as shown in my first post.

This is not possible?

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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30 minutes ago, haakoo said:

So why don't you be creative,learn to do things differently and adapt to have a working workflow to use AFPub 

I fugured out how it is meant to be done and think it is a behaviour I would not expect and want for good reasons.

Doing it different here is way more cumbersome. I have to watch closely that my picture does not leave the frame.

I do not see how to achieve what I want here on an alternative easy way.

I do not mean to take anybodys feeedom. I just want an option or configuratuon possibility to restrain the image into the frame so that I can work faster on the Photobook use case which is a subset of things that should be possible with a publishing software.

Its frustrating that nobody sees my point.

Maybe Publisher is not suitable for easy Photobook creation and not meant to be...

@Chris_K What is Affinitys position here?

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Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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24 minutes ago, haakoo said:

But it is your point and you are still not clear of what it is what you want.
And two or three clicks more isn't cumbersome but just a part of creativity.
 

There is nothing creative about having to do three clicks more every time to reach the same goal as in another software. Struggling with that and not getting help from the software is by definition cumbersome.

I am clear what I want: Having a mode where my image edges cannot leave the picture frame. This is a default in many other software and not esoteric. And I just want a tiny Checkbox to operate in that very useful mode to save clicks.

I want to crop, but not to expand the image.

What dou you not unterstand about that??

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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19 minutes ago, haakoo said:

Add PF>add image to it>place to your liking>hold shift while resizing(only the PF)>rasterize>done
Rasterize doesn't have a designated shortkey by default but you can assign one.
So no clicks whatsoever
Seems doable don't you think?

 

Rasterize kills quality. I want to keep it an Image Layer and rasterize only in the final PDF Export for my printer.

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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7 minutes ago, fde101 said:

In this situation, what purpose does the picture frame serve?

Consider just bringing the picture into the publication without using one.

Cropping!

Ok, I will make a video of a software that does it right...

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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1 minute ago, Steps said:

Cropping!

Ok, I will make a video of a software that does it right...

Why are you bothering with the Affinity software at all?    If all you want is photo albums and you have something that works for you already, why not just stick with it?   Seems like an enormous fuss over something with a simple solution.   (Just to throw my oar in.   Unasked, I might add.)


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3 minutes ago, jmwellborn said:

Why are you bothering with the Affinity software at all?    If all you want is photo albums and you have something that works for you already, why not just stick with it?   Seems like an enormous fuss over something with a simple solution.   (Just to throw my oar in.   Unasked, I might add.)

That's simple: I want a printable PDF for my digital archive.

Other photobook software can only used to order real book prints. There is nowhere a PDF export. No digital copy. That's not the printers business model.

Some allow ordering with InDesign PDFs... InDesign is too expensive.

And Scribus is awful. A real usability nightmare.

That's why I want to use Publisher.

Does that make sense to you?

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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Just now, fde101 said:

How can you crop without the edges of the image leaving the frame?

I will show you what I mean.

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Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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38 minutes ago, Steps said:

That's simple: I want a printable PDF for my digital archive.

Hi @Steps,

I don't know if you are on Windows or MacOS. In Windows there is a 'Microsoft Print To PDF' option (at least in Windows 10). This lets you create a PDF from any software as long as it has a print option. I assume there must be something similar on MacOS :)

d.

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55 minutes ago, Steps said:

Ok, I will make a video of a software that does it right...

Right for you but not for me.

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1 hour ago, dominik said:

Hi @Steps,

I don't know if you are on Windows or MacOS. In Windows there is a 'Microsoft Print To PDF' option (at least in Windows 10). This lets you create a PDF from any software as long as it has a print option. I assume there must be something similar on MacOS :)

d.

Yes, I know. But printing services saw that possibility, too. Print is also low resolution, sometimes only grey scaled and has "preview" marks on it. They really don't want it.

Before trying out Publishing Tools I have gone further and tried all kinds of community written scripts to PDF export a "CEWE Fotobuch" file. Does not work, forget it.

So I'm not looking any more into using those propritary tools to achieve it, but have a clean, high-resolution PDF master file and let print that.

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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1 hour ago, Seneca said:

Right for you but not for me.

That's why I ask for an option, not change of standard behaviour.

And I doubt somehow that you understood what I'm talking of when I have trouble to explain it to all the others.
So your judgement is kind of uncalled for.

But of course I know what you meant. I wanted to say "[...] that does it right in my opinion for this specific use case".
Are you fine with that? :-)

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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3 minutes ago, Steps said:

So I'm not looking any more into using those propritary tools to achieve it, but have a clean, high-resolution PDF master file and let print that.

I understand and I think APub is one option (once it is released) to achieve this.

Those proprietary tools you are referring to are made for users who are not at all familiar with desktop publishing.
APub's target audience is most likely a more advanced (partly professional) group of users.

This is a huge gap between two user groups. I think the Affinity team had to make decisions on how to start out. I am pretty sure the photo book audience is not a major focus of APub's initial feature set.

At the same time we are free to discus (especially in this forum) future development :)
In the meantime you perhaps have to get used to how it works with this early beta (I mean this in a friendly way. There's no emoticon for this).

d. 

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Ok, now I see what you are asking for.

One thing that might complicate this a bit is the fact that Affinity Publisher, like other high-end layout software, does not restrict frames to specific shapes - not only can the frames be rectangles and circles, but stars, hearts, custom paths created using the pen tool, and so on... and the shapes can be edited after the pictures are placed.

In order to make sure the behavior is logical when such frames have their shapes edited after a photo is placed there would be a number of situations that would need to be accounted for - what happens if the frame is temporarily larger than the photo while the frame is being reshaped and the photo can't reach both edges, for example? - so I don't know how well this could really work in a general case in practice.

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2 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Ok, now I see what you are asking for.

:)

3 minutes ago, fde101 said:

One thing that might complicate this a bit is the fact that Affinity Publisher, like other high-end layout software, does not restrict frames to specific shapes - not only can the frames be rectangles and circles, but stars, hearts, custom paths created using the pen tool, and so on...

Yes, you're right. This can only work with rectangles.
I think it can be implemented the way that I set the Picture Frame a property to behave this way and then it can only be a rectangle.
Maybe there could be a second type of Picture Frame that is always a rectangle, so there is no need to deal with other shaped Picture Frames.
I'm not yet quite sure what would be the best user experience here.

7 minutes ago, fde101 said:

what happens if the frame is temporarily larger than the photo while the frame is being reshaped and the photo can't reach both edges, for example? - so I don't know how well this could really work in a general case in practice.

As seen in the video the image is scaled with the picture frame when the frame gets to big.

When scaling the picture frame the image always scales with it if it needs to. I think this is perfectly fine behaviour.

There is always a moment when I check out new software and encounter a new thing where I think either "yes, makes totally sense" or "oh, this is surprising".
Seeing how picture frames behave in software of Rossmann and Pixum is a clear "yes, this is logical" moment.

In contrast I really wonder how professionals don't get mad using InDesign, QXPress and Publisher with a behaviour that you always need to fine-tune the edges. I even did not find a snapping functionality of some kind to help there. It's just fine-grained work with the keyboard to fit it in there and this is what me really suprises. Maybe trough the years as professional you gone trough so much pain that you don't see it anymore, but as a new user to desktop publishing I'm really surprised nobody sees that as a problem.

But somehow as a software developer I started to oversee the problems of Eclipse also and sometimes trainees give a hint. I account it to that.

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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2 hours ago, dominik said:

I understand and I think APub is one option (once it is released) to achieve this.

Those proprietary tools you are referring to are made for users who are not at all familiar with desktop publishing.
APub's target audience is most likely a more advanced (partly professional) group of users.

This is a huge gap between two user groups. I think the Affinity team had to make decisions on how to start out. I am pretty sure the photo book audience is not a major focus of APub's initial feature set.

At the same time we are free to discus (especially in this forum) future development :)
In the meantime you perhaps have to get used to how it works with this early beta (I mean this in a friendly way. There's no emoticon for this).

d. 

I see this as a question:

Does Affinity want Publisher to be a easier, better & cheaper solution than InDesign?
Or is the mission accomplished when it does the same thing as InDesign for a lower price?
Will it be the next step in desktop publishing or just a close to identical copy?

Time will answer that and right now this is not entirely clear to me.
As I often said I see great potential to reach a lot of people including non-professionals.

Think about how many people can use those photo book softwares.
After doing quite advanced things with that I think there is not such a big gap as you mentioned.

Of course photobook software does not have all that fancy stuff the frame text tool can do.
This is were I see differences between what professionals and normal users need.

But the basics should be done right.

But after having made some suggestions and seeing the reactions (some also negative)
and seeing other people making suggestions for something that Adobe products also
do I think this software may not want to try something else or new and just wants to
replace InDesign. So being closer to Adobe products is here perceived as better.

If I suggest something InDesign also is not capable of there is a strong "no, we don't want,
we don't need, stop talking" manner as if this would do anybody a harm to think about new ways.

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Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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