Workflow, and again workflow

[DarkClown]

For a year I kept my mouth shut ... waiting for things to develop. Now checking the old list of suggestions I made to improve basic and essential workflow in AP and AD to get closer to PS 20 month ago - hardly anything has changed (oh, no, I don't expect every suggestion beeing taken over). But even basic simple improvement like centering the picture when undocking have simply been ignored ... instead new features were introduced also not working properly. So many basic things like saving settings, size of handles, windows handling (a neverending list of just workflow issues ... everything that one needs to USE the product and not only to play around with it) have been ignored ... for over a year. I'm still working with PS6 on a daily base due to these topics ... need a product I can work with .... not somethings that comes with more and more buggy features. And I ask myself: what's the f***ing problem to do a job right and not only 80%? To be clear: Affinity poducts offer great features. One of the only close competitors to Adobe products feature wise - but as long as workflow and basic handling as well as stability is in such a mediocre state and not at all improving - I can't call it a competition.

And I read all the fanboys, cheering up ... claiming to be long time professionals ... wondering what they do with the product. Are they getting paid by serif?

A seriously disappointed long term "want to be" user ...
DC

[Rick G]

Agreed. There have been a lot of suggestions for speeding up workflow and they get nothing but silence

[Ray S.]

6 hours ago, DarkClown said:

.....

And I read all the fanboys, cheering up ... claiming to be long time professionals ... wondering what they do with the product. Are they getting paid by serif?

 

 

Ich denke mit der "Aussage" hast du dich selber als ernst zu nehmend disqualifiziert. 

[Mark Ingram]

8 hours ago, DarkClown said:

For a year I kept my mouth shut ... waiting for things to develop. Now checking the old list of suggestions I made to improve basic and essential workflow in AP and AD to get closer to PS 20 month ago - hardly anything has changed (oh, no, I don't expect every suggestion beeing taken over). But even basic simple improvement like centering the picture when undocking have simply been ignored ... instead new features were introduced also not working properly. So many basic things like saving settings, size of handles, windows handling (a neverending list of just workflow issues ... everything that one needs to USE the product and not only to play around with it) have been ignored ... for over a year. I'm still working with PS6 on a daily base due to these topics ... need a product I can work with .... not somethings that comes with more and more buggy features. And I ask myself: what's the f***ing problem to do a job right and not only 80%? To be clear: Affinity poducts offer great features. One of the only close competitors to Adobe products feature wise - but as long as workflow and basic handling as well as stability is in such a mediocre state and not at all improving - I can't call it a competition.

And I read all the fanboys, cheering up ... claiming to be long time professionals ... wondering what they do with the product. Are they getting paid by serif?

A seriously disappointed long term "want to be" user ...
DC

Everytime you could on the forum and raise work flow issues, we try to sort these out. I can't remember specifics off the top of my head, but I remember you mentioning being unable to drag windows accurately enough, so @Chris J added a fix for that. We've also been saving more settings in dialogs (I think I remember you raising issues with resize document / canvas which we addressed). So to say that we are ignoring things is not accurate. We might not have fixed things as quickly as you'd like, for that we apologise, but we are here, we are reading, and we are fixing. I've asked @Chris J to address more of the areas of the applications that don't remember settings for 1.7. With regards to centring the image when undocking a window, not everyone wants this to happen, feedback has been that people want to maintain the current zoom (if you're working in a specific area in a document and undock, why would you want to zoom out and lose your place?). We could look at adding a preference for this, but you have to realise, the reason we haven't made that change is because it's only been raised by 1 person, so we can't justify making the change.

With regards to the other users here, no, they aren't being paid by Serif. It might be that other people have different workflows to yourself, so are unaffected by the issues that you are raising.

[DarkClown]

Hi Mark,

sorry for that last "unqualified" comment (I take that back! ... happens, when you are upset and don't really know who to blame)
I will try to be more constructive again and assemble a list with verified open topics (based on the latest beta) and bring all the unfixed stuff up again.

Cheers, Timo

[Mark Ingram]

16 minutes ago, DarkClown said:

Hi Mark,

sorry for that last "unqualified" comment (I take that back! ... happens, when you are upset and don't really know who to blame)
I will try to be more constructive again and assemble a list with verified open topics (based on the latest beta) and bring all the unfixed stuff up again.

Cheers, Timo

Thanks Timo, it's much appreciated. When you raise these issues everyone benefits (eventually!).

[DarkClown]

 

Edited January 23, 2019 by DarkClown
Added a second topic

[SrPx]

For allusions (maybe?) , as I have been a big contender ( but I do my requests, too!) against some complaining posts (from many), my position is not really of fanboy nature. Even while debated against some of your points strongly in the past. Not with that kind of time and energy, anymore, tho. But am certainly an optimistic grunt. I tend to see the glass half full rather than half empty, having been fighting (at jobs, at companies, high stress, full responsibility) with much harder and poor open source , mid cost and freeware in the past, so much that became used to generate my workarounds everywhere (btw, this is specific companies, and at home. The majority of my experience is with the dominant tools: Adobe suite, Autodesk suite, etc). I focus in how much these young tools are evolving under the hood. And the new entire world that they open to artists. Is more of a case that I have full confidence on that they really care about any actual issue. But I'm feeling less and less eager to debate some things...  (btw, with the lorry truck loads of ppl I've worked with, freelancing and at 10 companies, yet to find a single one that considers me "unqualified" in the fields I work at (I'm an unqualified dancer, that's for sure...) ...  No worries , I read your apologies, I know ppl can write whatever when in the heat of the moment... )

Wish I was getting paid by Serif, haha.

PS: Don't take too seriously this post of mine....

[mmuller]

Having used Affinity Designer/Photo and now Publisher in a full time design and photo editing capacity since their introduction and having raised a few issues myself both for Mac and PC versions I feel that this thread could almost be the opposite of Timo's suggested paid for by serif and more of a paid for rant by Adobe.

I ditched Adobe CS as soon as Designer and Photo became stable releases after their beta versions and haven't looked back since. Sure there have been annoying work arounds at times, but nothing deal breaking. Sure there are features I would like to see ( mesh distortion of vectors for example, or mesh gradients in designer and one day maybe some rudimentary 3D positioning, rather than just rotate and shear in Photo) but in general for day to day print and web layout deisgn and image work both packages have been more than equal to the challenge. Even producing 36pp magazines for clients in designer was acheivable...

Publisher, the missing link, is coming along at a rate of knots and bringing with it welcome updates and additions to both the other applications as they progress through the 1.7 beta - lets also not forget that apart from the initial purchase - not one of us, not one - has had to purchase again for any of the features we have all been clambering for.

Personally, if I were Serif/Affinity I would bump 1.7 to 2.0 and charge everyone again for an upgrade, they definitely deserve the financial incentive to keep improving this software, through bonuses and salary increases - which is hard to do without continual investment from us.

Not a fanboy, even though it sounds like one, but want to balance the argument above. No puppies were harmed during the typing of this post.

[Alfred]

On 1/25/2019 at 6:34 PM, SrPx said:

lorry truck loads

< pedantry >

(British English) lorry = truck (American English): Choose one or the other, not both!

< /pedantry >

Quote

(I'm an unqualified dancer, that's for sure...)

LOL.

[Ron P.]

15 minutes ago, Alfred said:

< pedantry >

(British English) lorry = truck (American English): Choose one or the other, not both!

< /pedantry >

LOL.

Not so much one or the other. Truck does not define what type of truck. Over here, my personal vehicle is a pick-up truck. I use to drive a tractor-trailer truck or commonly known as a semi, 18-wheeler, big-truck or large car.  Then there are Box trucks, those have a large box compartment on them. So in England (UK) which one of those is a Lorry? I'm thinking it refers to box and semi. So using the Lorry Truck to reference size and how much it can haul, a box-truck can haul more than my pick-up truck. An 18-wheeler can haul more than a box-truck.

EDITED:

Actually the proper name for the 18-wheelers,  the tractor uncoupled from the trailer is a Truck-Tractor, and the trailer is a Semi-trailer.

[Alfred]

12 minutes ago, Ron P. said:

So in England (UK) which one of those is a Lorry?

They’re all lorries in England (and in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland): that’s what I meant by “lorry = truck”. A semi-trailer truck (or “semi”), for example, is what we call an articulated lorry (or “artic”) here.

Have we gone off topic yet?   

[SrPx]

Oh, we have a word for all this in Spanish, and yep, we typically use a single word......   

hehehe... no worries, I like/need you fixing my broken Spanglish. The day you wouldn't, I'd be stuck with just Chrome highlighting stuff that it thinks is too American or too British, or worse: Distastefully Spanish.  All of it without the depth of "Alfredrly"....  

[DarkClown]

8 hours ago, mmuller said:

Having used Affinity Designer/Photo and now Publisher in a full time design and photo editing capacity since their introduction and having raised a few issues myself both for Mac and PC versions I feel that this thread could almost be the opposite of Timo's suggested paid for by serif and more of a paid for rant by Adobe.

I ditched Adobe CS as soon as Designer and Photo became stable releases after their beta versions

... I stopped buying Adobe products  when they came up with the blackmailing SW release model. So CS6 and LR6 was the last money Adobe got (and will get) from me ... Jumped into Affinity products and was convinced it's the only alternative featurwise to Adobe products .... One of the reasons I was so desperate to really support and giving extensive feedback! I really needed an PS alternative. While Affinity Designer evolved into a reasonable alternative to AI for me - maybe due to the fact that I was no heavy duty user of AI. AP did not make it my photo SW until today. l'm still using PS6 for my daily work - mainly for what I call the lacking workflow. I never went the way other people took, asking for LR alternatives (what would have been nice) just not to distract serif from focusing on getting AP right. Instead they came up with AP (undoubtful an application other people heavily requested) but again another building site that distracts the programmers from getting AP right (from my perspective) - and again an application that is incomplete and struggling in so many ways.

[lmphotoz]

For what its worth.....I find using On1 Photo Raw for raw processing and other Lightroom type functions then exporting off to Affinity Photo for editing (I do fashion and fitness photography) to be a winning combination. My only gotcha is Portraiture 3 - doesnt play nicely with Photo. 

[Zox]

 Hi, after reading these post I wanna just link this, IMHO “important thing” (Mac and PC related) not yet improved-implemented-solved, from 2015.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/10375-all-ui-elements-are-too-small-on-a-5k-imac/&tab=comments#comment-44470

Any good news by the staff?! 

Thanks.

 

[MEB]

Hi Zox,
What OS/System are you running? If it's macOS and you are using a retina display, setting the resolution to Default for display should render the interface elements with twice the size, making them readable on 4k/5k monitors. If you still find the text too small you can also go to Affinity Preferences, User Interface section and set the Font UI Size to Large.

On Windows you have to use the OS Display settings panel to set a percentage for the scale/layout of the Windows apps interfaces (note this affects all Windows apps).

[Zox]

27 minutes ago, MEB said:

Hi Zox,
What OS/System are you running? If it's macOS and you are using a retina display, setting the resolution to Default for display should render the interface elements with twice the size, making them readable on 4k/5k monitors. If you still find the text to small you can also go to Affinity Preferences, User Interface section and set the Font UI Size to Large.

On Windows you have to use the OS Display settings panel to set a percentage for the scale/layout of the Windows apps interfaces (note this affects all Windows apps).

Hi MEB, thank You for answer.

I'm on Win 10 with 2k monitor and as You say ...I have to change the size of the text in W10 OS display settings, but unfortunately not the whole UI are affected, like other users say, Affinity Photo needs a more flexible way of scaling the fonts/icons/ and also layers thumbnail sizes!

Just an example, as mentioned in the  linked thread, could be the DPI method adopted by Blender

I just hope in improvements.

Cheers.