I completely forgot to put this in my notes for the stream: the Select Ranges functionality now works on Image/RAW layers as well. So that's these things on the Select menu: Select Sampled Colour Select Colour Range (Reds, Greens, Blues) Select Tonal Range (Midtones, Shadows, Highlights) Select Alpha Range (Fully Transparent, Partially Transparent, Opaque) Previously, you would have to rasterise Image/RAW layers to a Pixel layer, but you'll no longer need to do that from 2.6 onwards.
I actually enjoyed “nervous James”more than “edited to perfection James”. There is absolutely no need to apologise; it was great! I hope your vocal cords will be back to 100% soon. Very sorry to hear you have had these health issues. I used to be a singer, and I was constantly afraid of losing my voice. I can now appreciate how important our voices are outside of music and (voice) acting. Look after yourself and don’t stress over when you should churn out another video or livestream next. Take care!
As a new user (this month), and astrophotographer, thanks for your efforts! I am now using Affinity Photo for my astro work but also transitioning my normal work over as well so many of updates will help with this process. Thanks again.
Omg.. The "merge selected" for all layers is here... Finally 🤩 I missed that from Photoshop for years, I always used the keyboard shortcut for that and I still find myself trying to do that in Affinity. This is great. I merge things down constantly and I'll finally gain my speed back again
Good to see you back. Looking forward to 2.6. I think the ML selection tool will be welcomed by all.
10 днів тому+1
I'm looking forward to the things to come, but for now I'm happy about V2.6 which I've been using as a beta for a few weeks. Thanks to the team at Serif for developing this software. Thanks James ...
Hi James, thank you for this stream. I’m reaching to know if soft proofing will be addressed soon. The support team confirmed it’s not working as it should. Thanks again!
Glad to see you back James - really enjoy the vids and livestreams. Can I ask what you think the chances of a Linux version of Affinity would be, given the end of support for Windows 10 later this year?
I'm curious, is the warping/liquify live filter tool optimized better in 2.6? It's one of the filters I use all the time but the responsiveness is not there. The delay between a click and dragging the pixels is very noticeable. Working with a 3090, it always bugged me
James, outstanding as always. On a MacBook Pro running OS 15.2 with an Intel chip. Selecting the Object Selection tool yields this note, "Machine Learning Models. Sorry the use of machine learning features requires an Apple Silicon Device running Mac OS Ventura or later." When Photo 2 Beta was originally introduced I was able to use the Object Selection tool on my machine without a hitch. Will the final 2.6 version allow the use of Macs running the Intel chip?
26:35 regarding the Inpainting Brush tool, did you fix the problem where using the [J] hotkey cycles through the Inpainting Brush tool and the Patch tool instead of just activating the inpainting tool? For me, when I use the [J] hotkey for the first time in a new session, it cycles through the tools under that hotkey instead of activating the currently shown one in the toolbar. This does not happen with any other tool that has multiple cycleable options such as the Brush tool, the Colour picker tool etc. That problem has already been reported in the forums. Thanks in advance!
Sorry to hear you lost your voice and good to hear you have it back. Don’t worry, it is still beautiful, you could easily, kinda as sidekick, also start an ASMR career or reader of audio books or so.
Thank you-just to clarify, it wasn't so much losing my voice as it was my voice becoming incredibly strained and difficult to use properly, which really knocked my confidence. I would have to deliver training/demo sessions lasting over an hour and it was really difficult being able to "feel" that my voice was degrading the more I used it. The most frustrating part is that it wasn't an obvious case of an illness or condition causing me to "lose" my voice, but rather what was likely a combination of factors that had altered the way I used it. I went on vocal rest for six weeks to no avail! It's only through speech therapy that I've learned more about the mechanics of everything and how to maintain some good habits to keep me going...
Thanks for the video. In the interest of workflow streamlining here's a tweak I would like to see. Recently I used the Beta version to select subject on about 80 sports team portraits instead of using v2.5.7. It worked very well and saved a lot of time with the selections. Each selected image was exported as a PNG to go back to v2.5. Having recently come from a competitor software, I missed being able to save settings used in the Refine dialog. Specifically, I had to select "Output" > "New layer with mask" every time. It would be great to have the ability to save refine settings between files.
Cool, I could not get used to the non destructive workflow, so I kept returning going back to GIMP, thanks for this. I am very happy with this release.
Hi James - great to see you back. Love a full on live stream, though it will take me a while to catch up with it all. I wish I understood the significance of terms like rasterize, tone stretch etc - is there a bible I can consult to get me up to speed with you professionals? I get what I have to do I just don't understand what its about. Also pet hate - and sorry if you cover this later - why, when I export a processed image, say as a jpg, does it default to the last used folder rather than the current working folder? The number of times I've lost final images because its put them 'somewhere else'. I have to re-open Affinity and search recent images to see where it has saved it. Anyway, will catch up with the rest of the video and maybe will find some answers. I mostly do astro and have recently discovered high pass filter which is a game changer for sharpening :)
Hey Andy, rasterise is just a general term to encompass converting non-pixel content explicitly to pixel content. For example, you could have vector data that you want to convert to pixel data, so you would rasterise it. Image layers, which I covered in the video, can also be rasterised to pixel content in order to be "mutable" (the pixel content can be manipulated directly). It can all get a bit involved, because you can use layers to alter non-pixel data non-destructively. For example, instead of rasterising an Image layer so you can delete a portion of it, you can instead use a mask layer which will temporarily "hide" the content instead (that's what my change does which I show as the first point during the live stream), Tone stretching is mainly just applied for astrophotography. Imagine you have pixel values within the range of 0-1 (0 being full black, 1 being full white). Because of the nature of imaging deep sky objects, most of the values tend to be bunched down in a really dark range (e.g. 0.001, 0.002, 0.1 etc). The goal is to "stretch" these values further apart so you can see meaningful detail. This is why astrophotography imagery should be stacked and processed in 32-bit per channel floating point, because it offers a much greater precision. If you tried to do the same in 8-bit for example (which only offers 256 values per channel), you haven't got enough precision to stretch these values apart without significant banding. Regarding the export, yeah, I take your point! Can't offer anything more concrete at this point, but I believe it's on a list somewhere... High Pass: have you tried stacking multiple high pass filters (using different radius values) with a Soft Light blend mode? It's similar to the Absolute point of focus sharpening method that's become popular. You can enhance structural detail without artefacting around star detail, it's really useful. I've got a Bandpass Sharpening macro in the astrophotography macros if you wanted to see how to set it up. Hope the above helps!
Thanks James! Couldn't make it live, sadly. They all seem like small but impactful quality of life improvements so I hope it'll come out soon. Best of luck with your voice!
It was a great session James, as usual. Thanks for the great usability enhancements in 2.6. I really like the fill/clear mask as being on a mac, I can't get the channel pannel alpha right click menu to work. I think it's a known issue, I hope it can be addressed
Hey, I can't reproduce this, is it specific to where you're clicking? E.g. try clicking on the channel thumbnail as opposed to the text, I think we had an issue related to this a while ago but I could have sworn it was fixed.
In Adobes ACR and Lightroom it has been (and probably still is) possible to draw a straight line when e.g. drawing a mask within an architectural image with a lot of straight edges. The method to draw a straight line from A to B is to position the cursor in A, then hold Shift and position the cursor in B, and when Shift is released a straight line between A and B is drawn. Why is this (still) not possible in Affinity Photo's Develop Persona, James?
Love these improvements, faced a lot of these frustrations learning affinity initially over the years. Biggest thing I still would like to see is more efficient pdf export, as affinity saves pdf files at a much larger filesize than competitors, even when the settings are similar.
Hey, regarding PDF file size, there are a couple of things I can think of: One is simply that our JPEG compression scale maps differently to other software, so you would have to reduce it further than you might typically do so. You can get good results in the 70-75 quality range, for example. The other might be related to PDF Passthrough, which we see a lot with architecture firms. Placed PDF content defaults to passthrough, and it *literally* passes through and doesn't do anything to bitmap content in the PDFs. So if you have imagery that is lossless or inefficiently compressed in the PDFs, that will carry through to the PDF exported from Affinity. Even though it sounds counterintuitive, I've produced smaller file sizes by setting the Rasterise option to "Everything" in these cases. Not an elegant solution, as it compromises editable text, but worth a try to see if that's the cause.
@@JamesRitson Thanks for the feedback. This is most prominent in publisher when I create a lot of 10-50kb tiff files for pages of historical book scans that I want to save into one pdf (I usually process them through a mac port of scantailor advanced first to get them that small), but I've seen the same trend frequently enough that I assumed it was a universal affinity thing. Does placed tiff content also default to passthrough? When I try rasterizing all + setting it to 75% quality, this brings what was exporting as a 22mb pdf down to 18mb, but acrobat brings the same files down to 6mb with no visual deterioration on the highest quality setting by default. This difference is significant.
In the Develop Persona it would be very useful and time saving to have a "use previous settings "button instead of saving and deleting presets for smaller batches .👍
Hey, I'm afraid not, I only do live streams on Photo! If I do step outside of Photo in a future live stream, it will likely be for a combination of Designer, Photo and Publisher, or for a very specific workflow like architecture (e.g. floor plan texturing)-so not illustration/graphic design...
Also, are you planning to introduce a drag and drop functionality in the Batch job window? This will be a serious time saver. I really miss being able to just quickly pull images and folders from different locations and dropping them into the window. I've been waiting for years for this feature so I would be really happy if you could implement it.
A quick way of applying an inverted mask came up in the chat, should've mentioned that you can do this on any adjustment easily with that adjustment selected simply by hitting Ctrl/Cmd I, as all adjustments have an inbuilt mask, that mask becomes inverted and all you do is paint the adjustment in with a white brush. All objects are smart in Affinity.
Yes, I was thinking of how else you might do this outside of Photo, as Designer doesn’t have the Layer>Invert command (to my recollection). I put the fill and clear commands in primarily for Designer which doesn’t have the Channels panel, so perhaps an Invert command on the right click menu would also be useful?
Why don't you, James Ritson, reveal the plans for how to upgrade the Develop persona to be competitive with e.g. Adobe Camera Raw? It has obviously been neglected for a long time.
I completely forgot to put this in my notes for the stream: the Select Ranges functionality now works on Image/RAW layers as well. So that's these things on the Select menu:
Select Sampled Colour
Select Colour Range (Reds, Greens, Blues)
Select Tonal Range (Midtones, Shadows, Highlights)
Select Alpha Range (Fully Transparent, Partially Transparent, Opaque)
Previously, you would have to rasterise Image/RAW layers to a Pixel layer, but you'll no longer need to do that from 2.6 onwards.
James, Sorry to hear you have had health problems. Glad to see you back. You are an important presence in the space.
No need to apologize for "nerdy" explanations -- Far better "too much" information than too little. Greatly appreciated!
Fully agreed
I agree fully
I missed your content. Great we finally have you back!
I actually enjoyed “nervous James”more than “edited to perfection James”. There is absolutely no need to apologise; it was great!
I hope your vocal cords will be back to 100% soon. Very sorry to hear you have had these health issues. I used to be a singer, and I was constantly afraid of losing my voice. I can now appreciate how important our voices are outside of music and (voice) acting. Look after yourself and don’t stress over when you should churn out another video or livestream next. Take care!
As a new user (this month), and astrophotographer, thanks for your efforts! I am now using Affinity Photo for my astro work but also transitioning my normal work over as well so many of updates will help with this process. Thanks again.
Great to see you back!
I am looking forward to the changes with the text tool. I always found pressing escape and v very annoying!
Glad to see you are back!
Thanks for a very informative presentation.
Great session, thank you. Good to see you again!
Omg.. The "merge selected" for all layers is here... Finally 🤩
I missed that from Photoshop for years, I always used the keyboard shortcut for that and I still find myself trying to do that in Affinity. This is great.
I merge things down constantly and I'll finally gain my speed back again
Thank you James for the update. I missed your live session ! Hope to see you more in 2025. Take care
Good to see you back. Looking forward to 2.6. I think the ML selection tool will be welcomed by all.
I'm looking forward to the things to come, but for now I'm happy about V2.6 which I've been using as a beta for a few weeks. Thanks to the team at Serif for developing this software. Thanks James ...
Hi James, thank you for this stream. I’m reaching to know if soft proofing will be addressed soon. The support team confirmed it’s not working as it should.
Thanks again!
Glad to see you back James - really enjoy the vids and livestreams. Can I ask what you think the chances of a Linux version of Affinity would be, given the end of support for Windows 10 later this year?
I'm curious, is the warping/liquify live filter tool optimized better in 2.6?
It's one of the filters I use all the time but the responsiveness is not there.
The delay between a click and dragging the pixels is very noticeable.
Working with a 3090, it always bugged me
Thanks very much James, great video; good to see you back online!
Glad you're back. Sorry about the health issues!
Nice to have you back James.
James, outstanding as always. On a MacBook Pro running OS 15.2 with an Intel chip. Selecting the Object Selection tool yields this note, "Machine Learning Models. Sorry the use of machine learning features requires an Apple Silicon Device running Mac OS Ventura or later." When Photo 2 Beta was originally introduced I was able to use the Object Selection tool on my machine without a hitch. Will the final 2.6 version allow the use of Macs running the Intel chip?
26:35 regarding the Inpainting Brush tool, did you fix the problem where using the [J] hotkey cycles through the Inpainting Brush tool and the Patch tool instead of just activating the inpainting tool? For me, when I use the [J] hotkey for the first time in a new session, it cycles through the tools under that hotkey instead of activating the currently shown one in the toolbar. This does not happen with any other tool that has multiple cycleable options such as the Brush tool, the Colour picker tool etc. That problem has already been reported in the forums. Thanks in advance!
Fantastic and very useful video. Thank you. Didn't realize you did these outside of affinty.
Where do I find the waterfall? 1:21:26 🙋♂️🤗
Sorry to hear you lost your voice and good to hear you have it back. Don’t worry, it is still beautiful, you could easily, kinda as sidekick, also start an ASMR career or reader of audio books or so.
Thank you-just to clarify, it wasn't so much losing my voice as it was my voice becoming incredibly strained and difficult to use properly, which really knocked my confidence. I would have to deliver training/demo sessions lasting over an hour and it was really difficult being able to "feel" that my voice was degrading the more I used it. The most frustrating part is that it wasn't an obvious case of an illness or condition causing me to "lose" my voice, but rather what was likely a combination of factors that had altered the way I used it. I went on vocal rest for six weeks to no avail! It's only through speech therapy that I've learned more about the mechanics of everything and how to maintain some good habits to keep me going...
@@JamesRitson Ouch, that sounds bad. Glad to have you back 🍀🙋♂️
Thanks for the video. In the interest of workflow streamlining here's a tweak I would like to see. Recently I used the Beta version to select subject on about 80 sports team portraits instead of using v2.5.7. It worked very well and saved a lot of time with the selections. Each selected image was exported as a PNG to go back to v2.5. Having recently come from a competitor software, I missed being able to save settings used in the Refine dialog. Specifically, I had to select "Output" > "New layer with mask" every time. It would be great to have the ability to save refine settings between files.
Thanks you very much and best wishes for your voice!
Cool, I could not get used to the non destructive workflow, so I kept returning going back to GIMP, thanks for this. I am very happy with this release.
Hi James - great to see you back. Love a full on live stream, though it will take me a while to catch up with it all.
I wish I understood the significance of terms like rasterize, tone stretch etc - is there a bible I can consult to get me up to speed with you professionals? I get what I have to do I just don't understand what its about.
Also pet hate - and sorry if you cover this later - why, when I export a processed image, say as a jpg, does it default to the last used folder rather than the current working folder? The number of times I've lost final images because its put them 'somewhere else'. I have to re-open Affinity and search recent images to see where it has saved it. Anyway, will catch up with the rest of the video and maybe will find some answers. I mostly do astro and have recently discovered high pass filter which is a game changer for sharpening :)
Hey Andy, rasterise is just a general term to encompass converting non-pixel content explicitly to pixel content. For example, you could have vector data that you want to convert to pixel data, so you would rasterise it. Image layers, which I covered in the video, can also be rasterised to pixel content in order to be "mutable" (the pixel content can be manipulated directly).
It can all get a bit involved, because you can use layers to alter non-pixel data non-destructively. For example, instead of rasterising an Image layer so you can delete a portion of it, you can instead use a mask layer which will temporarily "hide" the content instead (that's what my change does which I show as the first point during the live stream),
Tone stretching is mainly just applied for astrophotography. Imagine you have pixel values within the range of 0-1 (0 being full black, 1 being full white). Because of the nature of imaging deep sky objects, most of the values tend to be bunched down in a really dark range (e.g. 0.001, 0.002, 0.1 etc). The goal is to "stretch" these values further apart so you can see meaningful detail. This is why astrophotography imagery should be stacked and processed in 32-bit per channel floating point, because it offers a much greater precision. If you tried to do the same in 8-bit for example (which only offers 256 values per channel), you haven't got enough precision to stretch these values apart without significant banding.
Regarding the export, yeah, I take your point! Can't offer anything more concrete at this point, but I believe it's on a list somewhere...
High Pass: have you tried stacking multiple high pass filters (using different radius values) with a Soft Light blend mode? It's similar to the Absolute point of focus sharpening method that's become popular. You can enhance structural detail without artefacting around star detail, it's really useful. I've got a Bandpass Sharpening macro in the astrophotography macros if you wanted to see how to set it up.
Hope the above helps!
@@JamesRitson Brilliant thanks for the info James. I'll give multiple band pass filters a go - I have the macros :)
Id love to see "path Blur" in Photo 2
Thank you. Outstanding!!
Thanks James! Couldn't make it live, sadly. They all seem like small but impactful quality of life improvements so I hope it'll come out soon.
Best of luck with your voice!
Amazing video! 😍 Thks you! 🙏
When will version 2.6 be released?
Hello James..good to hear and see you again. When 2.6 is released..will it be free for 2.5 users?
Hi, yes, it will be 👍
James starts at 4:00
It was a great session James, as usual. Thanks for the great usability enhancements in 2.6. I really like the fill/clear mask as being on a mac, I can't get the channel pannel alpha right click menu to work. I think it's a known issue, I hope it can be addressed
Hey, I can't reproduce this, is it specific to where you're clicking? E.g. try clicking on the channel thumbnail as opposed to the text, I think we had an issue related to this a while ago but I could have sworn it was fixed.
In Adobes ACR and Lightroom it has been (and probably still is) possible to draw a straight line when e.g. drawing a mask within an architectural image with a lot of straight edges. The method to draw a straight line from A to B is to position the cursor in A, then hold Shift and position the cursor in B, and when Shift is released a straight line between A and B is drawn. Why is this (still) not possible in Affinity Photo's Develop Persona, James?
Love these improvements, faced a lot of these frustrations learning affinity initially over the years. Biggest thing I still would like to see is more efficient pdf export, as affinity saves pdf files at a much larger filesize than competitors, even when the settings are similar.
Hey, regarding PDF file size, there are a couple of things I can think of:
One is simply that our JPEG compression scale maps differently to other software, so you would have to reduce it further than you might typically do so. You can get good results in the 70-75 quality range, for example.
The other might be related to PDF Passthrough, which we see a lot with architecture firms. Placed PDF content defaults to passthrough, and it *literally* passes through and doesn't do anything to bitmap content in the PDFs. So if you have imagery that is lossless or inefficiently compressed in the PDFs, that will carry through to the PDF exported from Affinity. Even though it sounds counterintuitive, I've produced smaller file sizes by setting the Rasterise option to "Everything" in these cases. Not an elegant solution, as it compromises editable text, but worth a try to see if that's the cause.
@@JamesRitson Thanks for the feedback. This is most prominent in publisher when I create a lot of 10-50kb tiff files for pages of historical book scans that I want to save into one pdf (I usually process them through a mac port of scantailor advanced first to get them that small), but I've seen the same trend frequently enough that I assumed it was a universal affinity thing. Does placed tiff content also default to passthrough? When I try rasterizing all + setting it to 75% quality, this brings what was exporting as a 22mb pdf down to 18mb, but acrobat brings the same files down to 6mb with no visual deterioration on the highest quality setting by default. This difference is significant.
Any change to get a pixel shift processing for raw files in the future?
In the Develop Persona it would be very useful and time saving to have a "use previous settings "button instead of saving and deleting presets for smaller batches .👍
Hi James, are you going to have a live stream on new Affinity Designer? A
Hey, I'm afraid not, I only do live streams on Photo! If I do step outside of Photo in a future live stream, it will likely be for a combination of Designer, Photo and Publisher, or for a very specific workflow like architecture (e.g. floor plan texturing)-so not illustration/graphic design...
Invert mask in menu ❤
I’ve added it! Won’t be in a beta build immediately but should make it in soon
You are doing great work! Sad to hear you've had health issues, that hits home pretty bad for me right now.
Thank you, and sorry to hear, hope you're doing OK.
Thanks!
Hi, didn't see it live. Any AI features added, like Photoshop?
Never got a notification for this so watching the next day. No idea why. M1 iPad Pro seems to have lost machine learning tool in latest V2.6 beta?
Hey, that was an unintended issue, I believe it's been fixed and will be corrected in a future beta build
Also, are you planning to introduce a drag and drop functionality in the Batch job window? This will be a serious time saver. I really miss being able to just quickly pull images and folders from different locations and dropping them into the window. I've been waiting for years for this feature so I would be really happy if you could implement it.
Drag-drop for dialog file inputs is on the list!
@@JamesRitson Awesome!
A quick way of applying an inverted mask came up in the chat, should've mentioned that you can do this on any adjustment easily with that adjustment selected simply by hitting Ctrl/Cmd I, as all adjustments have an inbuilt mask, that mask becomes inverted and all you do is paint the adjustment in with a white brush. All objects are smart in Affinity.
Yes, I was thinking of how else you might do this outside of Photo, as Designer doesn’t have the Layer>Invert command (to my recollection). I put the fill and clear commands in primarily for Designer which doesn’t have the Channels panel, so perhaps an Invert command on the right click menu would also be useful?
@@JamesRitson Yes please, invert mask is pretty standard in other editors.
Remembering the inpainting apply to layer and below is the single most important novelty. I can't believe it took so long
Why don't you, James Ritson, reveal the plans for how to upgrade the Develop persona to be competitive with e.g. Adobe Camera Raw? It has obviously been neglected for a long time.
Hello James
we need AIselections in affinity !!! Thats the biggest disadvantage, weak seletion, generative fill etc.
It does not run on modern OS like Linux.
Useless, Krita is better.
🙃