Canva's pledge to Affinity

 

After the news was published that Canva had acquired the Affinity programs from Serif, Affinity's forum exploded and most reactions were not particularly positive. The main reason resulted from the fact that Canva is a subscription based web based tool, while the programs from the Affinity suite require a one time payment for each major version upgrade. The users' concern was justified, since by far the most had turned to Affinity after fleeing in droves from the absurdly expensive and monthly recurring fee Adobe suite. Switching platform is very time consuming and not a leisurely stroll in the park, since the file formats are proprietary for all brands, which means that either files need to be converted to the file format of the refuge application and start a new library from scratch, which will not make customers  and designers happy and therefore reduces income. Particularly modifying and updating legacy files that can not be imported into the involuntary chosen application is a horror scenario for graphic designers.

To ease the minds of the Affinity community and prevent coronary accidents, Canva issued a statement shortly after they published the new that Affinity was acquired. It contained four pledges that can be read in the image below and in the accompanying article published by Canva that you can read here. This allowed most Affinity users to decouple from the oxygen pump and helpers discontinue CPR. In theory the pledges contain a hundred percent positive message, that would put Affinity users' minds to rest and offers Serif to accelerate the programs' development, while operating in a larger chunk of the graphic design market segment. We will have to see what the lifespan of these pledges is. For now Canva should get the benefit of the doubt. It has the potential of preventing a massive parade to the exit of users of the Affinity suite as well.

Canva's pledges to Affinity

Past acquisitions for the majority haven't went well for users of the programs that were built by the company that was overtaken. But there is not a lot that users can do about it. Besides a switch that I mentioned in the previous blog post to the superb, one time payment VectorStyler drawing program, there also is the open source Inkscape that in theory has a great potential where the functional usefulness is concerned, but its UI is by far not as intuitive as Affinity's user friendly interface. VectorStyler does a better job at that, considering that the program has so many tools and functions that it even dwarfs Adobe Illustrator in the versatiliy and completeness department. But after users have become familiar with them, working with VectorStyler opens up new worlds. It however has no photo editor and desktop publishing program, which Affinity has turned into a very proficiently integrated suite of programs, that is unique in software.

VectorStyler logo

So, there is nothing else left for the Affinity community to wait what the future brings. It also is possible to continue to work with the latest version after Affinity would have turned to the subscription rip off model, should Canva dump the pledges in the bin at one point. Pixel pushers could look for possibilities to learn open source GIMP as a photo editor. What VectorStyler has done is prove that the instant of software rot still is quite a distance away. Software rot being the moment in which no further improvement to a program can be made, because it already contains all possible tools and functions imaginable. Unfortunately a desktop publishing program of the level of Affinity Publisher is one developed by Adobe and called InDesign, that is a budget unfriendly, perpetual payment rip off.

Inkscape logo

The question is, can or do graphic designers want to live with the restrictions imposed on them, accepting the fact that they will have to use programs of different brands that aren't designed to flawlessly work together or not? Globalism is a devious corporate / government / UN game in which the losers are known from the beginning as well as the winners. This doesn't exclusively apply to graphic designers; it is why the trillion dollar censorship is coerced on everyone that does not have at least a seven digit bankaccount. Any person with more than two properly functioning brain cells should be tempted to see such an iniquitous development in a broader perspective, because there is more at stake than initially meets the eye.

GIMP logo

Today the globalists' aim to separate the haves from the havenots in an illegal and unfeeling way. They have made it a societal problem that will not spontaneously go away, unless people wake up and stand for their rights, which aren't the corrupt laws that the crooked politicians and evil juridical clowns have imposed. Justice is real truth and nothing else what those without a covert, genocidal plan intuitively feel. Waking up lies poured out on us is the only way out of this callous global misery. 

Thanks for visiting and wishing you an independent future.

Affinity portrait test

After Corel PhotoPaint suddenly ceased to export png and GIMP was somewhat troublesome to use, due to the rather diverging UI, I gave Affinity Photo a try in creating portraits. Results so far is quite good, although I had a mess up with layers, that I haven't yet figured out. Usually I create a set of layers during the process, that I may explain once I've become more familiar with the program. GIMP and Affinity both produced good quality files, but I find the Affinity UI much easier to use. GIMP is a free open source program and Affinity a surprisingly low cost photo editor. I will never use Corel PhotoPaint and Photoshop again. Affinity and GIMP are more than adequate replacements that don't force artists to apply for a mortgage to purchase photo editing software.

What I do miss is the possibility to use shortcuts for brush size, transparency, and layer switching / activation. I've peeked on forums, but the suggestions offered there weren't very helpful for these functions. Having shortcuts for these would greatly speed up the painting process. Below you see the first 9 stages of the portrait. Subject is Steven Brown, leader of a recently established local political party in Amsterdam. The party - Stem van de Straat (Voice from the Street) - states things like they are and announced to do something about misery ignored or even created by other parties. This didn't make them popular with corrupt mainstream (both media and other political parties), which caused them to be boycotted everywhere.

Changed background to black

In frame

With color overlay - I used the 'color'-filter at 91%

Finished (I think). Stage 15

Feb 02 2018 12:42 CET
Click image for larger version

Portait stages 1 - 12
Steven Brown, party leader
of Stem van de Straat,
political party Amsterdam

Please click the image to see a larger version of the png-file. These are created on Jan 31 2018. I will post updates to the portrait soon. Stay tuned.

Update Feb 01 2018

It appears to be possible after all to change brush size on-the-fly in Affinity Photo. Press Control-Alt simultaneously and press both right and left mouse buttons. Moving the mouse from left to right changes the brush size and moving it in the vertical directions changes the (edge) hardness of the brush. Quite useful.

In the brushes panel there are a ton of brushes available. Default it is set to basic, which is good for basic drawing, but there are also a number of Textured brushes and DAUB Dry media which are particularly useful when drawing portraits. Click on the top right hand corner to define the properties - including dynamics - of the brushes to easily and swiftly create textures. Leaving this dialogue open while painting speeds up the process (especially when you work with dual screens.

For making subtle changes to the portrait the Liquid Persona in the top icon bar is very handy. It allows to apply the millimetre accuracy alterations which are imperative in creating portraits to preserve the likeness of the subject.

Fiddling with GIMP, dumping Corel PhotoPaint

As I indicated in the previous blog entry I got fed up with the Corel PhotoPaint bug of crashing every time when attempting to export images as .png-files, I began practising with GIMP. The latter is an open source image editor which is completely free. Png files are important because they are lossless files, which means they do no lose quality after each time they are opened, like jpg. It is possible to define the resolution and colour profile - these are necessary functions for artists who intend to have their work printed.

I start this blog entry where I left off while creating the Mark Twain portrait project. I resized it to 40 x 40 cm and changed the resolution from 72 dpi to 300 dpi. This required some work on the details since it basically made the image 20 times bigger - 5 times because of the rescaling and 4 times because of the increased resolution. GIMP had no problem whatsoever exporting the image native format into png.

I am still getting used to the program's interface and functions, but I feel I'm getting there. The main thing I appreciate is that the program is stable and actually does the export job very well. GIMP took its time (approximately one minute) to convert the native format (xcf) to png. So far the file size is 8.74 MB. I resized the file for the blog to 888 x 888 pixels, resulting in a 547 KB file size. I work on a computer with an i7 CPU and 16 GB RAM memory. The graphic card is an NVIDIA GTX 750Ti.

I had to create custom brushes to render the skin pores texture, which works quite well once I got the hang of it. I created animated custom brushes, because emulating the skin requires an organic texture. GIMP allows to create very complex animated brushes, but I discovered that an animated brush based on three different layers will do the job. The skin pore texture is made with a transparent background and three layers with different dot patterns that rotate randomly when drawing. The spacing (space between rotations) is kept at a default setting of 20.

I placed the date and time in the captions below the images of different stages. The oldest will be at the bottom, the newest on top.

The final stage was made in Affinity Photo that I purchased a while ago after dumping Corel and Adobe - the first for being buggy, the latter for being hugely overpriced. The Affinity products, Designer for vector drawing and Photo for bitmap creation and editing, are very competent replacements for the leaders in the graphic market, available at a very low price (50 Euro each). Its functionality isn't yet on par with that of Corel and Adobe, but they are closing in rapidly and have some advantages over their competition that make them shine.

Added hair detail and colour filter layer Dec 2018

Sep 05 2017 17:25

Sep 04 2017 22:30

Digital portrait of NS Captain World

I fiddled around with Gimp recently and although I think it is a great (free!) program, it lacks the finesse of Corel PhotoPaint. That isn't surprising, since Gimp is built by volunteers who have regular day-jobs, while PhotoPaint is created by an army of professional programmers. What I miss most in Gimp are the on-canvas-controls that PhotoPaint abundantly offers. Such functionality significantly increases the working pace. Also the tools like the brushes in PhotoPaint are definable with greater accuracy, which is quite important when making portraits.

Perhaps because I'm used to working with it, I find PhotoPaint's user interface more logical while less need to dig into menus is necessary to find the desired tool. But I guess the Gimp programming team will at some time in the future catch up more or less, because there will be a decreasing amount of functions to improve in the process of taking a program to the perfect state, which allows trailing competition to catch up with the established players in the image manipulation realm.

The subject of this portrait is the captain Henk Kuipers of No Surrender MC, a motor club of a different kind in The Netherlands. Of course the mainstream media that is controlled by the ruling powers, disapproves of such clubs and does everything within its might to discredit NS, whether allegations are true or not.

The crux of the matter is that ruling class does not like opposition that is well organized and in disagreement with the policies imposed by them, like donating heaps of tax payer money to the unelected EU, destruction of health care and care for the elderly citizens, while implementing hugely burdening tax rules and constricting the educational system. Also the removal of legal restrictions for corporations and increase of limitations of citizen freedom and privacy are opposed by the new political party, named Rechtdoor, which in English translates to: Straight Ahead.

NS was even more viciously targeted by mainstream press when its captain's plan to enter the political arena were revealed. The valid, humane points in the program of newly established party would obstruct the Dutch government aim to impose austerity on its citizens while filling up the deep pockets of the already fortunate. Although the captain specifically stated that NS and his political ambitions would be kept strictly separated, the press wilfully ignored it and started its usual smearing campaign in an effort to prevent him from entering the political stage.

I haven't yet finished the Mark Twain portrait yet, but I may redo it in PhotoPaint some time in future. Like in all posts, the oldest stage is at the bottom and the most recent on top. Desktop computer users may want to click on one of the image to enter Blogger's Lightbox, which allows to swiftly scroll through the various stages in order to see the progress.

===========================

Update September 2 2017
All of a sudden Corel PhotoPaint continuously crashes when attempting to export .png-files. Regardless of the size of the file. This is a basic function of photo-editing software and therefore very annoying. It pretty much renders the program unusable. I currently am in the process of switching to GIMP which is an open source program that actually is capable of performing this job properly. It is somewhat of a learning curve since the approach of the program is different, even tough there are many similarities where functionality is concerned.

After visiting a number of forums I noticed users have encountered this problem since at least version X5 of PhotoPaint. If Corel aims to compete with industry standard programs such as Photoshop it needs to fix this basic functionality or accept that it will not catch up with them (or that it may face even worse consequences). Personally, I'm done with waiting for this fix to take place and am watching GIMP tutorials in order to make the switch to a program that actually works properly.

Update October 10 2018

Between the previous update and this one I encountered Affinity Photo - bitmap editor - and Affinity Designer - vector drawing program. These programs, created by Serif, never once crashed and were equipped with more than enough functions to create the project. I continued to work on the portrait in Affinity Photo and after that did the tattoos in Affinity Designer. So this portrait actually is a hybrid of bitmap and vector.

Meanwhile also Henk Kuipers was illegally incarcerated by the corrupt government and is jailed until this day without a single legal argument. This is how low the Dutch justice system has sunk. It means that people who haven't broken any law can be thrown in jail without a trial anyway. This is a blantant violation of the Universal UN Human Rights Declaration which makes the International Justice Court in The Hague an evil joke. Democracy in The Netherlands has been brutally assassinated by the the Dutch politicians. One time soon the people won't accept this any longer and drag crooked politicians, judges, lawyers, police officials, banksters and corporate leaders into the streets to obtain the internationally approved type of justice themselves that the utterly corrupt Dutch authorities have illegally been denying them.

An other color test

Color test

Mark Twain - digital portrait

I'm a temporary host for two cats that live in my attic, separated from my own cat who lives downstairs. One of my temporary companions lays herself down on my keyboard when I'm upstairs, making it impossible to work on my regular computer. So I am working on the machine in the livingroom that has modest specs. I downloaded the open source program Gimp that I've never used before and try to see if it's an option that works as well as Corel PhotoPaint that I use to make digital portraits.

The learning curve isn't very steep, but it takes some time to turn out a quality similar to that which is possible with PhotoPaint. The latter (2017 version) has a lot user friendly options that speed up working that aren't available in Gimp or perhaps that I just haven't yet discovered them. Besides, Gimp is free, so what the developers have achieved is more than excellent. Below you see the sequence of a portrait of Mark Twain; the oldest stage at the bottom, the newest on top. I forgot the record the first stages and started when I made some progress already.

Gimp is somewhat more coarse than Corel PhotoPaint and lacks on canvas controls (which speed up working significantly), but hey... it's free. I should have defined the resolution before starting to draw, but due to being unfamiliar with this program I forgot. The image size should have been larger as well to make sure prints would have the desired quality.

Tip for desktop users: Click on one of the images which will bring you to Blogger's Lightbox that allows you to scroll through the different stages, allowing you to see the difference between the stages faster and more clearly.