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Photo how-to: multiple crops of a panorama?


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Howdy...still learning the finer details of Affinity Photo...I'm using 1.7.2.471 on Windows...trying to post a panorama on Instagram using the multiple sequential photo technique. Danged if I can figure out the guide system for nicely creating equi-distance widths so I can crop the wide pano down into multiple images. I'm hoping there's a nice way to setup the guides on the pano, then have Affinity Photo crop down the segments into their own individual files. Lots of video tutorials for PS on how to do this, and of course I do my work in Affinity. :) 

Image is set to 1350 height (max required by IG before they do their own resizing).

Want to set up each width segment to 1080.

Could someone share a quick step by step pretty please? I've been through the nicely done tutorials on the web site, this angle isn't covered anywhere. 

Thank you!

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There may be some better way to do this but all I could think of is to manually create slices of the desired height, width, & position in the Export persona. This would be a lot simpler if there was a way to duplicate & reposition slices (like by alt-dragging on one with the Slice Tool) but I could not figure out how to do that.

What I had to do instead was create the first slice, snap it to the left edge & height of the pano, & then set its width in the Transform panel to the desired width (like 1080 px). The other slices were created the same way, except that I had to set each of their left edge x coordinates to the appropriate value -- like 1080+1 px, (1080*2)+1 px, & so on -- in the Transform panel.

This works but is far from ideal.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.0 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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5 minutes ago, DWright said:

You could also use the the Stack tool with the alignment option turned off and resize the canvas then use the transform tab to precisely position each layer across the canvas

By "Stack Tool" do you mean File > New Stack? If so, I don't understand how it could be used if all I have is a pre-made panorama file but not any of the files used to create it.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.0 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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25 minutes ago, R C-R said:

There may be some better way to do this but all I could think of is to manually create slices of the desired height, width, & position in the Export persona. This would be a lot simpler if there was a way to duplicate & reposition slices (like by alt-dragging on one with the Slice Tool) but I could not figure out how to do that.

What I had to do instead was create the first slice, snap it to the left edge & height of the pano, & then set its width in the Transform panel to the desired width (like 1080 px). The other slices were created the same way, except that I had to set each of their left edge x coordinates to the appropriate value -- like 1080+1 px, (1080*2)+1 px, & so on -- in the Transform panel.

This works but is far from ideal.

I would do the same, although I don't think it's that necessary to position them using maths like that, you can simply drag them together and they'll snap nicely next to each other. Also once you've set the width on the first slice, you should be able to drag create the others and as you do so there will be a snap point at the same width as the previous slice, so you can very quickly just drag create the rest of them. It's fairly swift that way, you just need to keep an eye on the snapping.

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3 hours ago, Dazzler said:

I would do the same, although I don't think it's that necessary to position them using maths like that, you can simply drag them together and they'll snap nicely next to each other.

How do you determine the width of the slices if not by using math of some sort? That was the only way I could figure out how to get all the slices to have equal widths, or for that matter to know how many slices were needed.

3 hours ago, Dazzler said:

Also once you've set the width on the first slice, you should be able to drag create the others and as you do so there will be a snap point at the same width as the previous slice ...

I could not get that to work. Not only was there no snap point for the same width for the next slice, I could not find any way to start dragging it out from the edge or corner of the previous slice -- all that would do is resize that slice.

Basically, snapping was useful only for setting heights & for moving slices next to each other once they were correctly sized.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.0 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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1 hour ago, R C-R said:

How do you determine the width of the slices if not by using math of some sort? That was the only way I could figure out how to get all the slices to have equal widths, or for that matter to know how many slices were needed.

I could not get that to work. Not only was there no snap point for the same width for the next slice, I could not find any way to start dragging it out from the edge or corner of the previous slice -- all that would do is resize that slice.

Basically, snapping was useful only for setting heights & for moving slices next to each other once they were correctly sized.

You have to create the new slice to the right because as you say it doesn't like drawing it from the previous slice corner. You can then drag it back and snap it into place on the end of the previous slice.

I have just realised that I was in Designer, not Photo, and weirdly that behaviour is not consistent between the two (I wonder why?) so the width snap doesn't seem to work in Photo, but works fine in Designer. Apologies for that confusion!

Here are my snapping settings in Designer - for what it's worth.
image.thumb.png.91024e012288790775675b283549fbf9.png

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I just realised you can draw it out from the previous slice if you deselect the previous slice first - it's just the transform handles that are getting in the way. It will snap to the position and the height in this way, leaving you to just set the width. In photo this time!

@R C-R Yes of course you'd need to use some maths to get the width if you wanted to split the entire picture into equal segments. I was more referring to the positioning not the width. Even without the width snap it's going to be easier to use the snapping to position the slices rather than typing the calc into the x position. So the workflow would be to work out the desired width by dividing the picture width by number of slices (or whatever method - maybe you have a desired slice width instead), then draw the first slice and set it's height and width the the required settings, then deselect the first slice, draw a new slice out from the top right corner of the first slice, until it snaps at the correct height, set the width, then deselect and repeat with the subsequent slices, setting the width each time. Not too bad, but much easier to do in Designer with it's better snapping to width feature.

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39 minutes ago, Dazzler said:

You have to create the new slice to the right because as you say it doesn't like drawing it from the previous slice corner. You can then drag it back and snap it into place on the end of the previous slice.

I have just realised that I was in Designer, not Photo, and weirdly that behaviour is not consistent between the two (I wonder why?) so the width snap doesn't seem to work in Photo, but works fine in Designer.

For me, dragging back to the right does work in both Designer & Photo, & it does not seem to matter in either one of them if 'Snap to Guides' is enabled in the Snapping Manager or not.

But after watching the video @dutchshader posted carefully, I realized that it does work in the same way on Macs -- it is just necessary to deselect the current slice first to be able to drag out a new one from the corner of an existing one, & it does snap to the same width. (In the vid, I think that was done by clicking once somewhere not already in a slice.) For some stupid reason it never occurred to me to deselect the current slice first. :$

Anyway, this simplifies creating the slices considerably -- it is only necessary to determine the appropriate slice width beforehand. Everything else is easy. :)

EDIT: I just saw your last reply after posting mine. Good to know we both figured it out, if a bit slower than perhaps we should have. xD

EDIT 2: I just realized that it isn't even necessary to to determine the appropriate slice width beforehand. Just snap the first slice to the full width & height of the image. Then, while it is still selected in the Transform panel add "/n" after the W value & press Return or Tab, where n is the desired number of slices. If this is done while any of the 3 left edge anchors are selected, it isn't even necessary to snap the slice to the left edge of the pano.

Edited by R C-R
Brain working better now

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.0 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Sooo...thanks a bunch for the quick replies. It pointed me in the right direction...I realized that I knew zip-zero-nada about slices and export personas, and found the help video on that (link below), and was able to export 5 sequential snips of my pano to the right dimensions with the right cropping.

Summary of my process...

  • Pano image is created in camera, not stitched, so it's just a big wide file import into LR
  • Do main image editing in LR along with other photos. Export to JPG.
  • Affinity Photo:
    • Resize image to 1350 height. Crop or expand vertical as needed (I love the Affinity how-to video on expanding!). 
    • Go into Export persona
    • Create 1080px wide slices across images. I used snapping to get precise on the upper left to begin the selection, estimated width by eye, then used the little transform box to get pixel precise on each width. I didn't worry about adding the +1 to each segment...since folks swipe anyway to see each image in progression, the impact was negligible in my test post.  
    • For my particular pano, I had 5 slices with some real estate left over on the right which I wanted to keep in the image. So I moved all the slices over to the far right, knowing the far left part of the image would be cropped out. 
    • Click the Export Slices button...and done
  • Then move the photos over to phone and upload to IG.
  • I was going to use that "upload to IG from your desktop" using the Chrome developer tools trick, but looks like IG wised up to it and removed it from their interface. (If you use Chrome, open Developer Tools, then click on the toggle device toolbar icon on the upper left.) 

Thank you!

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Quick update … after some experimentation, I did go back and added the +1 to the Y axis snip point for each crop, as I found the initial one pixel overlap to be noticeable on IG when doing a slow swipe on phones. Adding the +1 does provide a more seamless transition between pictures. It's not totally seamless, as IG treats each segment as a separate photo, but close enough. 

To share an example...remember we want to maximize IG's photo dimensions without causing a server side resizing...vertical is then 1350, never changes...max horizontal is 1080. So when cropping a wide image, first snip ends at 1080, second snip starts at 1081 and ends 1080 pixels later, third snip starts at 2162 and ends 1080 pixels later, etc.

Here's my first panorama post on IG as an example...oooh, and we get to see how the Affinity message boards handles embedded viewing too! Nice. 

 

 

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