I used to demonstrate PS1 in my digital painting class. I would show that without a layer-based system it was still possible to create a composite using calculations feature. The process is incredibly simple… an alpha, a foreground and a background plus some addition and multiplication. Even art students understand it. I’m still blown away by how much functionality they managed to squeeze into an executable small encounter to email to someone.
FYI.., the version I used was registered to Apple. Apparently, the Knoll brothers demoed PS to apple and they promptly shared it amongst themselves and their buddies. Almost all illegitimate copies of it are derived from that pirated copy.
Fun fact… John knolls wife was the founding member of the Photoshop ‘Widows’ club… a home to people who have lost loved ones to software.
That is certainly how oil painters paint. But painting on absorbent stone is likely very different - more akin to fresco, and would probably not support a very layered approach.
I used to teach in a UK university and encountered many American students on exchange. It was almost their standard policy to claim disability when something did not go their way.
> a good understanding of color theory is also necessary.
Agreed. I would also speak out again the uninformed use of pre-configured color combinations. As someone who teaches art/design these are the bane of my life… students use them as a replacement for color theory. A designer should at least know how to parse a color into its hue, saturation and lightness components. Most everything else should follow naturally.
To these fine tips I would add: ‘test on as many devices as you are reasonably able’. Something can look fine on your laptop but lousy on the platform for which you are aiming to disseminate.
This also applies to webdev. I develop a lot with the chrome devtools but once stuff is in mobile it doesn't quite work out due to people using different browsers. The browser bar sometimes being on top or on the bottom hiding controls... I started to just center stuff in mobile ignoring like 20% of space in top and the bottom.
this is something web and mobile devs can skip a lot of times it seems these days. testing on only the best screens or most recent device simulators and they leave their work looking like a mess across screens because its optimized for something specific rather than checking or being responsive
> "[...] I would add: ‘test on as many devices as you are reasonably able’."
Testing on a reasonable amount of different screens (and software-based filters etc.) is excellent advice for too many people forget this. Of course that's also always a money, time or motivation (goal) question...
Online shopping of fashion items can never replace the experience of physical shopping, especially with friends. Geeks are no different... shopping can be a delightful experience if you are up for it. Part of which might be the thrill of discovering things you are not searching for.
I appreciate the analogy but respectfully I don't think it holds up 1:1.
Love or hate window shopping, the nature of shopping for fashion lends itself far more to in-person evaluation. Every item is slightly different, and so is every person wearing them. This is why you can try on clothes in the store!
Crate digging for vinyl is similar. There's a real joy of discovery, and turntables with headphones for auditioning purchases.
I have a hard time picturing the same dynamic with identical shrink-wrapped boxes.
For those of you puzzled as to how three separate apps (Photo, Designer and Publsher) have become one (Studio), as a long-time user it was always clear that under the hood this was always the case. Indeed such interoperability has clearly been built into the Affinity suite from the ground up.
This is 100 miles away from the interoperability of Adobe's Dynamic Link whereby apps such as Premier and After Effects are 'united' in a manner that feels clunky and forced. Almost all Adobe apps were acquisitions, and most of them are now horrendously long in the tooth. Uniting them seamlessly would be impossible.
I adore Affinity photo for its top to bottom support for high dynamic range images. Editing RAW images is a buttery smooth dream, compared to Photoshop, which feels like I am banging my head against the software.
The brushes are editable to a degree that I have not seen in other apps. For this the authors have employed a node-based system which they call 'programable'. Not sure how valid that it, but it is certainly novel.
As a traditional and digital painter, there is one unique feature that is easy to overlook: the colors are selectable as true pigments.
Painters don't categorize colors using standard terms: red, blue, green etc. Rather they categorize according to pigment. Different pigments (i.e. chemical base to the paint) have different properties.
For example, a Prussian blue appears almost black when applied thickly, but is very chromatic when applied thinly. In contrast, a cobalt blue is pretty much the same however it is applied.
ASAIK, this is the only app that supports this feature out the box.
The digital painting toolset has been pretty much in stasis for years, but this app offers node based brushes! I am very intrigued. Downloading it now.
I have had time to browse through the app. Regarding the nodes, it would be good if the node parameters had too tips, as it is they are labeled very mysteriously. The keyboard-powered brush picker is very useful. I wish Photoshop had one. The lighting feature I don't see as very useful. Its basically no more than a temperature adjust. The color picker had a few cool features, but I admit I did not explore it too deeply.
Overall I enjoyed it but nonetheless see it as being in the same family as every other painting app.
I would love to see painting apps stop trying to emulate real media and instead try to do things that are uniquely digital. My dream digi-daub app would feature...
- 16 bit as standard. Do a gradient in an 8 bit Photoshop document and you will see how limited 8 bit info is. (OUR PAINT supports this).
- A brush that can paint both behind and in front of previous strokes. Of course, this would need to be supported by a depth channel.
- Supporting this, I want an adjustment parameter that can adjust based on depth. Depth-based contrast is a uniquely powerful force in image-making.
- Also a brush that increases/decreases neighboring regional contrasts.
- Almost all digital brushes are simply repeated stamps. This is now ancient technology. I would love to see a brush that can paint entire objects or the textured components of those objects. For example, with one stroke I would love to be able to paint a tree, or hair and fur. Of course, such a tool would likely be AI.
> 16 bit as standard. Do a gradient in an 8 bit Photoshop document and you will see how limited 8 bit info is. (OUR PAINT supports this).
For interest, this seems to be an active issue for the HTML <canvas> element in browsers. There's a proposal[1] to extend the canvas data type to include both "unorm8" (the beloved default) and a new "float16" (normalised?) format - which should meet your desire?
Typically, the proposal seems to have shipped already in Chrome/Edge browsers. Documentation around what the new functionality is for and how to make best use of it is (of course!) sparse - MDN barely mentions it. As a canvas library maintainer I find this upsetting (eg: Ignore it and it might Go Away).
(I think for now my unhelpful response is: manipulate your RGB images as much as you like; just do it in the OKLAB color space.)
> (I think for now my unhelpful response is: manipulate your RGB images as much as you like; just do it in the OKLAB color space.)
Good advice. I am often introducing photographers to color editing in Lab. They are always amazed at how much more sensitive their lightness and saturation adjustments are.
> manipulate your RGB images as much as you like; just do it in the OKLAB color space
Be careful, OKLAB also isn't quite handling energy correctly (Or, the gradient of the energy slope in this color space had quite some irregularities). In most cases you can get a more "natural" transition (like blue doesn't visually shift to purple when transitioning to white), so make sure you know what you are doing.
> A brush that can paint both behind and in front of previous strokes. Of course, this would need to be supported by a depth channel.
> Also a brush that increases/decreases neighboring regional contrasts.
I believe you can just use Blender Grease Pencil for that. You can paint with depth and sculpt the opacity/contrast to your desire. (Or honestly any vector drawing program? I believe adobe illustrator does this too)
> Almost all digital brushes are simply repeated stamps. This is now ancient technology. I would love to see a brush that can paint entire objects or the textured components of those objects. For example, with one stroke I would love to be able to paint a tree, or hair and fur. Of course, such a tool would likely be AI.
> An AI powered style randomizer.
You won't want that in this context. If that being an asset production tool or a diagram tool then maybe yes, but otherwise nope. This tool is intended to create images, and human (supposedly) perceive an image with spatial arrangement of shapes and gradients, and the way artists interpret and represent shapes and edges is mainly what natural painting process is all about. So the basic structure of an artwork in this sense is just a bunch of abstract shapes arranged in a certain order, not a statistic probability of pixel values.
FYI.., the version I used was registered to Apple. Apparently, the Knoll brothers demoed PS to apple and they promptly shared it amongst themselves and their buddies. Almost all illegitimate copies of it are derived from that pirated copy.
Fun fact… John knolls wife was the founding member of the Photoshop ‘Widows’ club… a home to people who have lost loved ones to software.
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