Resizing a layer proportionately inconsistently

[Jeremy Bohn]

My understanding is that when dragging the handles of an image layer, Affinity Photo resizes it proportionally, but if you add the shift key then it will scale disproportionately. This is opposite to how I'm used to from Photoshop but I can get used to it. However what confuses me, and maybe this is a bug, but when I select 2 layers to scale together at the same time, the above is reversed. With 2 images selected, dragging the handles scales disproportionately and adding pressing the shift key makes it proportionate.

Is there a reason for this behaviour? It makes no sense to me, and I would like to report it as a bug or a request to make the feature consistent.

[p_mac]

View the video in the tutorial section 

moving, scaling, and rotating 

perhaps that will help

[walt.farrell]

On 6/15/2019 at 4:18 PM, Jeremy Bohn said:

Is there a reason for this behaviour? It makes no sense to me, and I would like to report it as a bug or a request to make the feature consistent

It's intentional and based on whether you're rescaling an object that has an aspect ratio or not. Shift is used to override the default behavior, and the default is to:

(a) preserve the aspect ratio if the object has one (scaling proportionally) but

(b) not preserve it if there isn't one (scaling non-proportionally).

Case (b) would usually apply when you have multiple objects or layers selected. Pressing shift would override it andt make the scaling proportional.

[Jeremy Bohn]

But the question is WHY is the default behaviour for 2 objects different from one. In my case, both images are exactly the same kind and size.

[Jeremy Bohn]

1 hour ago, p_mac said:

View the video in the tutorial section 

moving, scaling, and rotating 

perhaps that will help

I just watched it. He explains that vector layers do not constrain by default, but images layers do. But the video doesn't explain why when I select 2 image layers (not vector) it doesn't constrain by default. The underlying question is WHY there is a different behaviour between scaling images, vectors, and multiple images. Unless someone can explain why anyone would want this, it seems just like an arbitrarily made decision.

At least if Affinity did it one way, I could get used to it. Consistency is key to efficiently and usability. Expectation as well. None of the above behaviour is how I would expect a professional graphics program to act. First, using shift to NOT constrain is crazy and backwards to pretty much any graphic designer's way of thinking. In fact, Affinity goes against it's own rule on constraining and you can see it in the tutorial when he shows rotation - he's pressing the shift key to constrain the rotation.

But as I said, I could get used to it if Affinity picked a way and stuck with it.

[Alfred]

6 minutes ago, Jeremy Bohn said:

I could get used to it if Affinity picked a way and stuck with it

Like you, I don’t understand why the default behaviour is different with two images selected instead of just one. Having said that, you can tell the app to pick a way and stick with it!

 

[Jeremy Bohn]

You rock! Thanks for pointing this out! I never would have thought there was a setting for it.