Add Smart Guides to Affinity Photo

[Don - NZ]

Just came across these in PS CC2019 and they are particularly brilliant for aligning text labels on several photos within a canvas (and, indeed, even tweaking the alignment of various sub-pictures and shapes). Yes, I drag out guidelines to align several pictures on a canvas, but these take it a (big) step further and appear only when required.

[walt.farrell]

I'm not sure what the PS Smart Guides really do (as I'm not a PS user).

However, rather than dragging guidelines to do alignment I would usually make use of Photo's Arrange button on the Toolbar, or the red and green snapping lines that appear when you're dragging an object and it moves into alignment with another. Those occur when you have Snapping enabled, and appropriate snapping options chosen.

(In fact, as the PS ones "appear only when required" I wonder if they're the equivalent of the red/green snapping lines in Photo, which behave similarly.)

[Don - NZ]

13 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I'm not sure what the PS Smart Guides really do (as I'm not a PS user).

However, rather than dragging guidelines to do alignment I would usually make use of Photo's Arrange button on the Toolbar, or the red and green snapping lines that appear when you're dragging an object and it moves into alignment with another. Those occur when you have Snapping enabled, and appropriate snapping options chosen.

(In fact, as the PS ones "appear only when required" I wonder if they're the equivalent of the red/green snapping lines in Photo, which behave similarly.)

Hello Walt

I have had a play with the snapping manager and the arrange button and neither comes even close to what PS is doing.  The snap manager is the equivalent tool but I couldn't get any combination to do anything even close to what PS 2019 is doing by default. I guess you really need to see PS smart guides in action - it is almost uncanny how they got it exactly right (for me anyway).

Snap manager simply needs to be reworked - (it is like version 1.6 versus version 20) - which is surprising as when Affinity Photo include functionality, they invariably seem to do things better.

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Hello Walt - bit of an update...

I now realise that these are called Dynamic guides in Affinity and whilst they are quite crude in Ver 1.6, after playing around with Ver 1.7, I have found that they have already been extensively reworked in the beta and are now the equivalent of what is in PS 2019.

My only suggestion now would be that the green and red lines (indicating alignment with something on either the x or the Y axis) can be somewhat hard to see. 

PS uses a very easily seen colour and I would like to be able to define the colour in Affinity, perhaps to something like R255,G0,B255 - which does not normally exist in one's photos!

 

Edited January 5, 2019 by Don - NZ
Beta Ver1.7 has already addressed the request