I might suddenly vanish for a while

[LowPolyOWG]

Have fun!

[fragger]

Oh, I will, I will

I bought and played around with Affinity Photo last night. My conclusions: it's almost excellent. I got in at a good time actually - for a limited time, they are offering an additional swag of freebies normally valued at around $200 AUD.

It has all the functionality of Photoshop and then some, but there are one or two features of Photoshop which are lacking, and unfortunately they're major ones for me. One is this: In Photoshop, hitting the TAB key will hide the entire user interface, leaving nothing but the image showing on screen (hitting TAB again will bring the UI back, it's a toggle). This is invaluable if I'm working on a 1920x1080p image that fills the entire screen, so that I can see the whole thing unobstructed by toolbars and such. AF doesn't have this. Hitting TAB in AF will hide most of the toolbars, but leaves the main menu bar showing at the top and positioning sliders visible at the sides and bottom, even if the image isn't a full-screen one. There appears to be no way around this, and it's a common lament among Photoshop users looking to switch.

Some of the tools I use often in Photoshop are either cumbersome or lacking. Such as the grid function, which is fiddly to set in terms of grid spacing and subdivisions. It works okay in AF, it just requires additional menu-plumbing to get at. There is also no point-to-point lassoing tool*, which is another one I use a fair bit in Photoshop, only a free-hand one, which I rarely use. In Photoshop, you can elect to have tool pointers appear as tiny icons attached to the mouse pointer (with a dot showing the active point), or as crosshairs, which I prefer. In AF, I can turn tool crosshairs on or off, but I can't seem to get rid of the icons, so I end up with both, which gets in the way if I'm trying to do something precise. There may be a way to hide the icons, but if there is I'm yet to find it.

It's a superb piece of software, don't get me wrong, especially for $80 AUD. It was originally created for Mac and as I understand it, full conversion to Windows OS is still ongoing, with improvements to be issued as free future updates. Maybe the niggles mentioned above will be fixed in those updates, but until then, I'm missing some of the handy features of Photoshop. I may have to reinstall Photoshop as well, at least for the interim, which means plugging in an external drive whenever I want to use it. But I'm prepared to do that for the sake of having those useful features back. I'm certainly not prepared to pay Adobe a monthly subscription fee for their latest and greatest version. Stuff that.

On another tack, I got into some FO4 for a few hours last night, but I'll report on that in the appropriate topic

*EDIT: I did finally find a point-to-point lasso tool in AF, so that's one gripe removed...

[Art Blade]