Not quite a "painting" app...

[CartoonMike]

So, I've tried Affinity Photo Beta. I really tried to give it a fair shake, but I may just play around with it a bit more, but only in idle moments.

 

First off, I'm a comic book artist/cartoonist, so to me Photos are something I use for reference when drawing. I don't really use any apps to modify pictures because of that. 

 

I'm also coming from using Manga Studio (aka Clip Studio Paint), Sketchbook pro, Painter and Mischief as my main tools of creation.

 

Basically I'm looking for an app that I can sketch in, refine the drawing and paint the darn thing.

 

So I fired up APB and imported a sketch I did in Mischief. Thought I'd use APB to refine the drawing and color it in. When I start swearing at the monitor is a good indication that things aren't going as expected.

 

First off, for some reason selecting a brush requires 2 clicks if another tool is active. This resulted in a bit of fun as I had used the blur tool to smooth out some highlights, then (so I thought) selected the brush tool to strengthen a line. Even though I clicked on the brush tool, the blur tool was still active until I clicked on the brush tool a second time.

 

And the blur tool, instead of blurring the 2 colors on the canvas toghether, did some funky town stuff. I was blending a light brown and dark brown colors for skin tones and the blur tool came up with some green and dark purple colors. So either there's settings I need to adjust or the blur tool doesn't do what other blur tools do. 

 

There's a lot of stop-start in using a wacom. Sometimes it's smooth, most times it's like my tablet has developed parkinson's. I cannot, for the love of Mucha, do a smooth curved line. 

 

And the only plug-in I use in Photoshop, isn't/doesn't or won't work or show up in APB. That plug in is Magic Picker ( http://anastasiy.com/magicpicker ) which I love as it helps me create custom color palettes. 

 

then there's the little things...

 

Took me a while to realize/remember that the solid "layer" icon at the bottom of the layer palette is for Grouping and not to create a new layer. So used to seeing a Folder icon to indicate Groups. 

 

When I choose the paint brush tool, I then have to re-select the specific brush I had just used before using another tool (like the blur tool, for example).

 

Having to hover over a brush in the brush palette to see what (or if) it's been named and then figure out if that's the tool I want/need to use. While it's ... okay... to have a "one method to create all tools" -- One thing that other drawing/painting apps do get is that the interaction of different tools (pencil, ink pens, chalk, watercolor etc) on the canvas/paper are different enough to warrant actual categories of tools. 

 

So used to hitting the "delete" (backspace) key to clear the current layer (Manga Studio, Sketchbook Pro and Mischief) that I was unprepared to have the current layer I was on being deleted. 

 

While I'm sure that there's a method to blending colors, I haven't found one that actually blends instead giving me one color on one side of the stroke and the other on the other side with both sides blending, but not blending what I've already painted. I've not seen an airbrush tool, or what ever it may be called in APB.

 

The eraser tool icon should really be emphasizing the eraser part of the pencil, right now it just looks like a pencil pointing upwards. I guessed that it was an eraser tool because of its placement on the tool bar and not from what it looked like. 

 

I feel like that scene in Airplane! where Robert Hay's character sits in the pilot's seat and looks at the controls which go on and on forever. IOW, I think that APB is gonna require me to "forget"or radically relearn most of what I've learned about digital art I've picked up over the last decade. But then, TBH, I'm an artist and not a photographer -- so it's probable that I'm not the audience for this app, after all.  

 

As much as I love Affinity Designer (the latest update is just too sweet! good job team Affinity!), Photo really shows its rough patches. I just haven't "clicked" with it ... yet. I want to like this app, but I could only take about 20 minutes of it before getting just too frustrated and grumpy to continue with it. Which is an improvement over the previous update, I only used it for a few minutes before quitting and moving on to other things. I'm willing to admit that 20 mins may not be enough time to give APB a fair shake, so I'll try to work on it a bit every day this week and log some results. I have a sketches for a few covers and posters that I want to do, so I'll have material to work with. And Ronnie (among others) have some tuts on the 'tube that I can watch. The thing is, really, what does it really say about an app that you have to invest so much learning-time just to be able to use it? While I'm all for trying new paradigms of process, it needs to make some kind of sense to a "newbie" otherwise it's just gonna appeal to a closed group (think of the X-Men during the '90s, good luck in picking up a random issue of it and understanding what the ham sandwich is going on!) (Yes, I've been watching the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmitt, everyone should!)

 

I've tried to be specific when I could and been honest about how using APB was to me. I may have been harsh, but honest about it. I want APB to get outa beta-town and be the best darn app it can be. And sometimes that means ya gotta focus on what's not so good. 

[Andy Somerfield]

Hello Mike,

 

Thanks for the feedback - I'll have a go at addressing some of these things:

 

"First off, for some reason selecting a brush requires 2 clicks if another tool is active. This resulted in a bit of fun as I had used the blur tool to smooth out some highlights, then (so I thought) selected the brush tool to strengthen a line. Even though I clicked on the brush tool, the blur tool was still active until I clicked on the brush tool a second time."

 

​I struggle to reproduce this - clicking between the brush tools seems fine for me. Are you using a Wacom pen? I do find that they often fail to register single clicks.. but more about them later..

 

"And the blur tool, instead of blurring the 2 colors on the canvas toghether, did some funky town stuff. I was blending a light brown and dark brown colors for skin tones and the blur tool came up with some green and dark purple colors. So either there's settings I need to adjust or the blur tool doesn't do what other blur tools do. "

 

The blur brush tool has a colour precision problem - I've fixed it for the next beta, so please let me know if you can still reproduce these issues in the build released later this week.

 

"There's a lot of stop-start in using a wacom. Sometimes it's smooth, most times it's like my tablet has developed parkinson's. I cannot, for the love of Mucha, do a smooth curved line."

 

We've got a number of Wacom devices here - from the cheap and cheerful (relatively speaking, that is), to the Cintiq - we've had a number of problems with performance and accuracy in the past, but we were under the impression that we'd got through most of that - I'm sure Matt will be interested to hear more information about the problems you are having (he deals with our tablet support - I personally cannot stand the things - your "swear at the screen" comment springs to mind ;) ). I would be very surprised if there was a difference between Photo and Designer here - but I could be wrong..

 

"And the only plug-in I use in Photoshop, isn't/doesn't or won't work or show up in APB. That plug in is Magic Picker ( http://anastasiy.com/magicpicker ) which I love as it helps me create custom color palettes. "

 

That sort of plugin will never work with any app other than something in the Adobe suite - it's a UI plugin - not a filter plugin. Unfortunately, we'll never be able to support those things. The plugin itself looks pretty similar to our colour panel in "wheel" mode - they have nice things like complementary, triadic, etc. - but I think AndyT mentioned somewhere that he intended to implement those someday anyway.

 

"When I choose the paint brush tool, I then have to re-select the specific brush I had just used before using another tool (like the blur tool, for example)."

 

This is caused by how Photo shares your selected brush between brush tools. I've added some options into the Assistant Manager for the next beta - so you can tell Photo to a.) Never share brushes between tools, b.) Always share a single brush between all brush tools or c.) Do what it does now (similar tools share a brush).

 

"Having to hover over a brush in the brush palette to see what (or if) it's been named and then figure out if that's the tool I want/need to use. While it's ... okay... to have a "one method to create all tools" -- One thing that other drawing/painting apps do get is that the interaction of different tools (pencil, ink pens, chalk, watercolor etc) on the canvas/paper are different enough to warrant actual categories of tools. "

 

​I'm surprised you need to hover over them - we though the brush preview strokes should be sufficiently large and detailed. You did give me an idea though - I've added a new feature for the next beta whereby you can "tag" a brush preset with a tool - so when you choose that brush preset, the appropriate tool is automatically selected. This means that once you've set up your stock presets with tagged tools, you could get rid of all the other UI completely and just have the brush panel and colour panel visible - no need to even have the tools palette visible. Let me know if this is useful!

 

"So used to hitting the "delete" (backspace) key to clear the current layer (Manga Studio, Sketchbook Pro and Mischief) that I was unprepared to have the current layer I was on being deleted."

 

I struggle a bit with this one - "Delete" should delete.. if you have a marching ants selection, that will be deleted. If you don't, your layer will be deleted. If by "clear", you mean clear the contents of the current layer, just do Cmd-A, then press delete. If you mean clear the current selection, just hit escape. I've not used the other apps you describe, but changing the behaviour of Photo to anything other than what I've just described would blow a lot of minds - and not in a good way!!

 

"While I'm sure that there's a method to blending colors, I haven't found one that actually blends instead giving me one color on one side of the stroke and the other on the other side with both sides blending, but not blending what I've already painted. I've not seen an airbrush tool, or what ever it may be called in APB."

 

We have a couple of ways to blend colour - the blur brush is one, the smudge brush another and the paint mixer the third. Maybe try the paint mixer brush, but press "C" when using it - to clear the tip of any paint. This should allow you to pull existing paint around properly. It mixes using an RYB (primary school) model - so you should get some pleasant results with say, blues and yellows.

 

About icons and such - I'm inclined to agree about the eraser icon - but we get a lot of noise about icons and if we tried to fulfil each request we get to change them, we'd either end up with a single set which nobody liked, or about 20 different sets. We'll address it all one day, but it's not high up the list at present.

 

Hope this helps,

 

Andy.

[CartoonMike]

thanks for the thoughtful and detailed response to my grumpy-post. 

 

I have an older intous 3 tablet. It works well/great in other apps that I've mentioned. And it works fine in AD. I am at a loss why it behaves so differently in APB. The tablet is "tabloid" sized so I can use a lot of shoulder movement in drawing. Can't abide with small tablets and don't have the trust fund that would enable me to get a display-tablet.

 

FWIW, when I create a new brush, set the size jitter to 100% so I can (in theory) get small to large strokes based on pressure, it works fine for the first few strokes. Then it just kinda-sorta stops being responsive. Let's say I'm working on a drawing of a face in ¾ view, the long line for the side of the face works well. Then I go into drawing the lines for the eyes and eyelashes. The short light to heavy pressure strokes for the eyelashes  looks fine for the first couple of strokes, then the line just stops/intermittently responds to pressure. 

 

One interesting factoid, in my APB session this AM, I didn't have that click on the brush twice issue... until the brush stopped responding to pressure. I'll check this out more in-depth later today or tomorrow.

 

About that Delete key -- it's a quick shortcut in Manga Studio for clearing off a layer without selecting all and then deleting -- it leaves the layer intact, which for MS makes sense as layers can be monochromatic, greyscale or color and each layer can have settings for a color overlay, tone and outlines. As it is now, APB doesn't have all those bells & whistles so (aside from blending modes) there's not much that differentiates one layer from another. I understand that consistency across apps is paramount so I believe some kind of dialog that appears when the Delete key is pressed that warns the user that a destructive action is about to take place (maybe with a checkbox to 'not show this dialog again'); it was a bit unsettling to find out that I had deleted a layer after the fact without any warning or notice. I do like the fact that when beginning to draw without a layer selected/active will create a new layer. So all things being considered, I totally agree with your reasoning in making the Delete key work consistently across the Affinity Family. 

 

Icons are like coffee and tea, everyone has their favorite, but will deal with whatever's being served when visiting a guest. :) 

 

Can't wait for the color wheel to support color schemes and such. Kinda figured that the Magic Picker was a no-go. Have no problem with making a "palette" layer to resolve that issue. Advantage of being "classically trained in the arts."

 

I'll also mess around more with color blending and use the hints you mentioned. (And so so so so so good that it follows the RYB blending method. )

 

Having tool icons for each brush would be good. A issue is that with the limited real estate that the Brush palette has, what's on top gets noticed and what's not visible gets ignored. Again, I'm spoiled by how Manga Studio shows brushes, it has a sample stroke with the name of the brush below. Then in the brush properties palette, it shows details about the selected brush. It's like having the Brush Editor (in APB) always opened and ready to be changed. Again, this veers into interface decisions and stuff. So I can deal very well the way things are now. However, having the brush palette show a bit more info about the brush (blending modes, opacity, etc) would be nice in addition to tagging brushes for different categories (which is a brilliant idea, btw!).

 

The issue I have with the brush previews, as they stand now, is that I have to actually use each brush and then relate how they behave on the canvas with how they look in the preview. Sometimes I can't tell is a brush is textured or just has large spacing, for example. Not a show-stopper, to be honest. I just like to complain. :P

 

I feel that APB is on a nice track, the most important issue is that darn pressure sensitivity and other tablet issues that I'm having. Since all other graphic apps (Manga Studio, Sketchbook, Mischief, Artrage, Anime Studio Pro, et al.) that I use do not exhibit these issues, I think that something specific to APB is mucking up the waters a bit.

 

Thanks again for the response, Andy. Looking forward to the next beta. 

[Etiennepascal]

It's quite interesting to read, so I just add something I noticed usung the blur/smudge tool.

While painting I'm using around 50-60% opacity, now strokes if the smudge tool apear to be 100%.

Don't know if this should be as it is, I would love to keep the opacity as it is while smudging!

 

Étienne...

[CartoonMike]

Today I deleted the wacom drivers and re-installed the most current version (as of 7april15 -- making sure I save the old settings and re-apply them, as per Wacom's online suggestions). The same issues with pressure sensitivity persists. It's like the APB brush doesn't register light touch and goes to a medium pressure right off the bat. After trying for 20 minutes, I've been unable to consistently get a smooth thick to thin or thin to thick line. It's mostly a medium (like half the width the brush is set to) to thick. All other apps do not exhibit this behavior.